I want to receive marketing, billing, and other corporate communications via RSS instead of e-mail.

When a company sends me an e-mail message, it is subject to all of the annoyingness of e-mail: spam filtering, drowning in my inbox (unless I spend the time to filter it somewhere), etc. Plus, I either have to send my e-mail address off into the wilderness, hoping it doesn’t become spambait or go to the trouble to set up a new alias for each commercial purpose.

If, instead, I could just add a personalized feed into my feed reader, we (me and the company) would both be better off: I can trust the source of the message, so I don’t need to do any spam filtering. I can retrieve the feed over an SSL connection, so it’s a feasible way to provide sensitive data like a bank statement or monthly bill. The company I’m getting the feed from knows when my feed is retrieved so it has some rough metrics for determining that I’ve actually received the data in the feed.

A nice bonus would be if there was a way for the feed publisher to provide advisory information to my feed reader on how often to check for updates — the hypothetical feed for my monthly phone bill doesn’t need to be refreshed every few hours. Once a day is ample.

So, how about it, airlines, banks, utility companies, credit card companies, and all other corporate behemoths that are, I’m sure, exemplary custodians of my personal and financial data? Instead of (ok, in addition to, I’ll be realistic) asking for my e-mail address, give me a URL like:

https://sklar:password@feeds.example.com/monthly-bill/

to plug into my feed reader. I promise I’ll read everything you send me!

What companies are doing this already?

Related link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3701640.stm

The BBC reports that trojan-horse JPEG images files have made it into the wild. You have to use Windows Explorer to look at them, they say.

Why do we still alow our government to use this operating system?

Related link: http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=58184

The four games Infrogrames asked AtariAge to remove are clear derivatives of old Atari titles. It’s not clear that anyone would legitimately confuse them with the official Atari versions, but I can understand why a copyright or trademark holder would be leery about allowing distribution of something so close to an existing product.

Reproductions are a similar situation. If there’s code or artwork involved, Infogrames has a strong position to ask people not to distribute these products.

Finally, distributing ROM hacks — especially hacks on cartridges — which change the sprites, text, or levels of an existing ROM is hard to justify. Distributing the hacks themselves as patches is probably alright, but bundling the hack with the ROM and distributing a modified version of the original ROM seems like a clear copyright infringement.

Should Infogrames have looked the other way? Perhaps. Is the company well within its legal rights to ask that even Atari’s most devoted fans respect its copyrights and tradeworks? I think so.

Moral rights may come into play, too. In a different genre, science fiction, a similar debate has flared from time to time. Recently, the owner of Roger Zelazny’s estate commissioned three prequels to his popular Amber series. This goes against stated wishes of Zelazny himself, but the executor of his estate does have the legal right to do so.

(Reportedly, Neil Gaiman once asked Zelazny for permission to set a story in the Amber universe. Zelazny declined. I wish he’d given permission and suspect that Gaiman also does, but I respect Gaiman for both asking and honoring the decision.)

Could Infogrames try to stop all homebrew development and distribution? Possibly. Would the company have any legal standing? I can’t say for sure, but I find it unlikely.

How could this be a good thing for homebrew game development? Perhaps it will encourage developers to come up with their own ideas, instead of creating clone after clone. If that happens — if the homebrew community demonstrates that it’s willing to keep old consoles and platforms alive long past the point of mass-market commercial viability — perhaps the publishers will be willing to make their development kits, hardware documentation, and even some source code public more often.

At least, homebrew communities that show more respect for copyrights and trademarks will have a better moral ground from which to make that case.

Now where’s my PSOne dev kit?

I just got back from Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was amazed to find the Wordsworth bookstore almost bankrupt. I used to go to this store regularly, because they had a top-notch collection of books in every category–and at a discount. They had a sign up saying they were desperately seeking investors, and blamed their problems reasonably enough on online booksellers. (Tim O’Reilly has touched on this in his article
Buy Where You Shop.)

Being in the store today itself was so depressing, I don’t want to go back. They used to have two floors teeming with books; now they have one floor and much of the space on each shelf is taken up by a single face-out book. One rack contains little except O’Reilly catalogs.

In the 1970s, my father retired from his retail business (which included books), complaining that an independent seller couldn’t make it anymore. Some new chains had recently entered the book market, disrupting the business by offering a 15% discount on bestsellers.

Then Wordsworth opened in Harvard Square, shocking everybody by offering a discount on every book in the store. Their selection was also comparable to other stores.

Over the next decade, the book business in Harvard Square shriveled up, just like everywhere else. A lot of delightful stores with specialized selections disappeared. Wordsworth is one of three remaining bookstores in the area. But I was at Wordsworth fairly recently and it looked as if it was thriving.

As the ancient rabbi Hillel said, upon seeing a skull in the river, “You drowned others, so now you are drowned.”

Who will drown the online booksellers?

My new Washington Mutual online banking account doesn’t work with FireFox. It works fine with Safari, fortunately, or I might have had to close the account. There is no way I’m using Internet Explorer.

But, I never even thought to ask this. My accounts at Citibank and First Internet Bank of Indiana work just fine with Firefox.

Is there any chart of which browsers work with which banks? Or, more importantly, which ones don’t work?

A few weeks back while watching TV, I was rather unceremoniously interrupted every fifteen minutes by a series of advert breaks. In the UK, some channels have a wide variety of adverts for things such as toilet rolls, cheese, toys and other random cruft, but on some other channels, the advert breaks take a slightly different tack and instead carry a number of similar attempts to wrestle money from your guarded wallet. On this particular occasion, the theme was quite distinctive - personal injury and loans adverts. Like many people, when these adverts come on, I mentally switch off and disappear into a daydream while I am bombarded with great offers, tacky actors and products I have no interest in. This normally happens 99% of the time, but a few weeks ago, I actually sat there and thought about how these adverts work.

Aside from thinking of the general inaccuracy of how adverts are randomly pumped out to people (as a guy, why would I have an interest in sanitary towels when watching TV - surely there is a better way to direct adverts at the public?), I noticed just how increasingly dumbed down these adverts seem to be getting. On one particular break when I was watching Will & Grace on Living TV, I saw a loans advert with a huge cartoon talking phone that looks like a foot (!) and another advert selling a loan with a blue cartoon phone talking to some unwitting actors. Another advert included what looked like 80’s footage of an orangutan trying to persuade someone to take our another loan.

The issue I find slightly concerning about these adverts is that they are advertising serious, life changing products. If I was to trust the blue cartoon phone and take out a loan, but I don’t pay it back, they could come around to my house and take away my belongings or even the house itself. The annoying blue phone is not selling some kind of game, food, drink or other convenience item, but advertising a product that could cause untold hell in the hands of those who do not understand the repercussions of taking out the loan and keeping up the repayments. We are all well aware of just how many stupid people there are in the world, and should these people really be attracted to a huge loan advertised with a talking blue phone used to attract their attention?

I would love to talk to the firm who produced these adverts to try to understand the rationale behind why some form of cartoon character was needed to sell serious services such as loans. My gut instinct says that the use of these kinds of characters is trying to make loans appeal to a wider audience that would be put off by a more formal advert sporting a chap in a sensible jumper. The cynic could also conclude that the use of cartoon characters is lowering the bar with regards to who can actually get a loan - this kind of approach could be perceived as trying to sell loans to people who don’t really understand them fully. This is made worse by the fact that many of these adverts actively blurt out that any kind of bad credit history really doesn’t matter and they will give you a loan anyway. Isn’t this like selling matches to an arsonist?

A license to use a service

The crux of this issue seems to be that some services require a level of responsibility, and that responsibility should not be simply thrown out to anyone, and particularly not by using a cartoon phone to attract the responsible party. It is clear that the kinds of services advertised by these adverts bind you into some form of agreement, and all agreements involve a responsibility on both sides of the fence. In cases such as a loan, the responsibility is actually far more in the hands of the customer - if they fail to pay, life can get rather hairy.

This brings forward another issue - how do we determine how this responsibility should be managed? If I want to drive a car, it requires me to have a driving license that is earned by me demonstrating that I am a responsible and knowledgeable driver. This is probably because a car is something that could be pretty dangerous in the hands of an incapable driver. If I want to fire a gun, I also need a license. This is again because a gun can be dangerous in the hands of the irresponsible. So, we have some evidence that if you are going to use something that could be physically dangerous, you need to be vetted and approved by someone. Fair enough.

Where it gets interesting is when the powers that be try to protect ourselves from ourselves. When we are looking at areas such as financial agreements or other areas where we need to engage in responsibility, instead of needing some form of explicit license or clear authority that you are suitable for the service, the risks are instead made available in minuscule text at the bottom of your already fuzzy TV screen - text that those with vision problems may not see. It seems that if there is no physical danger to taking out a loan, we can get away with tiny text outlining the risks and instead concentrate on getting some patronising cartoon freak telling me how I can go on holiday and buy a new car with the £20,000 that will be stuffed into my bank account.

A license to use computers

OK, lets face it, we are all computer bods, and I can see how you are wondering how this is connected to computers and potentially Open Source (sheesh, I rarely write about Open Source ;) ). Well, think about this for a second. If we are experiencing a dumbing down in the full-on responsible areas of life, how does this apply to computers and usability?

Many of us, particularly those who are privy to a certain OS from Redmond, are familiar with some rather annoying cartoon creatures who look over your shoulder and try to help you when writing something as simple as a letter. For some users, they are helpful, but for many of us, we crave some form of button on the toolbar that provides a blunt instrument that can be used to shut that damn paperclip up. These Office Assistants have been written about and parodied in many a book and blog, but they are another example of how the everyday things we do need to be dumbed down and made that little bit more fuzzy and friendly to the user. As with any usability, the proof is in how the ‘usability improvement’ is taken by users - Office Assistants seem to have not been taken particularly well.

When I first got into Linux, I used to hang around in IRC channels and talk to the old faithful about the different facets of the OS. Back in 1998, Linux was not as developed and enterprise savvy as it is now, and many of the people who resided in these channels were full-on FSF zealots who could not see anything beyond the glory of GPLed software. Many of these often frustrated individuals spent their lives dealing with clueless users who were confused with Windows 95, and this developed a common motto that ‘users are stupid’ in many of these IRC hang-outs. I feel rather shameful to admit it, but I actually went through a phase at this time when I believed that users were stupid too, and Linux was simply for the more intellectually adept. For about a month back in 1998 I was of the opinion that if you need to learn to drive to drive a car, why shouldn’t users learn to use their computers properly?

Although the mind of the logical could see this as a sensible view, the fact is that users don’t learn how to use their computers. No one reads a manual on using their computer usually because many computers don’t actually come with a manual, or the manual is a 1000-page tome filled with jargon and gobbledygook. This is the reason why we need to concentrate on usability so much, and this is the reason why we have stupid paperclips that peer over your shoulder and try to help you with your work. Usability guru’s have stepped forward to try to make computers as easy to use as possible by lowering the bar as far as possible so that those with even a minutia of computer skills can use it - “look Joe, if you can use one Windows program, you can use any Windows program, they all work the same”.

Finding a balance

The challenge we face is in determining what is a reasonable level of knowledge for using computers and the desktop and how we can lower the bar as low as possible without patronising users. The problem here is that the use of IT is so diverse that it is a nigh on impossible task to lump all users or customers into the same box. It is in this area that I am not entirely convinced by some of the psychological usability theories - OK, I am male, 25, I like computers and metal, I play in a band and I had a good upbringing…ahhh…I suppose I would naturally click on that button as opposed to this one. I don’t think so.

I think the problem here is that IT is as serious as the loans example I used earlier. Sure, if you screw up in OpenOffice.org, you are not going to have your house repossessed, but if you screw up in Gnumeric, you might get your business accounts all wrong and alert the interests of the tax authority. If you screw up with your firewall you may end up becoming an open relay for a spammer. If you screw up with your OS, you may get hacked or catch a virus or worm. If you screw up with your email program, you may lose all of your important business contacts. Our computers are very important, and if they fail through user error, the results can be dramatic, whether you are losing your homework or a multi-billion dollar business deal.

We have a difficult balance to strike between dumbing down technology, making it usable, making it stable, making it secure and ensuring that huge variety of users with different needs all find it satisfying and simple to use. On on hand, we can approach the challenge by throwing more usability experts at the problem and trying to come up with increasingly stupid ideas to make our programs easier and more accessible, but on the other hand we could invest the experts in educating people in better ways. Many firms will throw millions of dollars at their software to improve its usability, but the documentation and learning materials are often woefully supported. People learn by doing, and if there is a simple and truly usable means to learn how the program works, it will reap a far more practical benefit. I would far rather see that George W. Bush learns how to press the big red button by reading the official White House ‘How do learn to be a president in 21 days’ rather than having a huge purple dinosaur say “It looks like you want to wipe out a country. Can I help?”.

Education is the key to many of these problems. Sure, no one reads the manual, but this is the challenge of usability - just apply the challenge to education instead of the software.

What do you think? Are these observations true, and are there any other approaches we could take to make things better?

There’s been some debate recently on the license-discuss list hosted by the OSI on how to release code as open source while still requiring that it be compatible with a test suite that must be distributed as part of the code.

The initial discussion was kicked off by Bob Scheifler of Sun Microsystems. Bob’s original post was:

For my personal edification, and hoping this is an acceptable inquiry, I’d like to understand if and specifically how the following informal license sketch conflicts with the OSD. Any and all comments appreciated.

Any such distribution must include the unmodified test suite and test suite documentation.

The idea would be to somehow require that derivative versions of the code would pass the test suite distributed with the code. As long as the derivative work passed the test suite you could distributed the code under any license you wanted — but if your derivative work did not pass the test suite, you’d be required to distrbute it with the test suite included under the above sketch license.

One use for this type of license would be to release code that implements some sort of API under an open source license, while ensuring that no one can change the API itself. For example, if Sun were to want to release Java under an open source license, this may be the type of license it would choose.

By requiring that any derivative works pass the test suite, Sun could ensure that no one could publish derivative versions of Java that were incompatible with their version. The open source community (and other companies) could freely publish implementations of the code that passed the test suite, but Sun (or at least the JCP) would remain in control of Java as a standard.

Hence the phrase, Open Source/Closed Standard.

So, is this a good idea? Can something be considered to be ‘open source’ if some organization stays in control of the standards that the software implements?

Personally, I believe this should be fine. It’s to everyone’s benefit to allow open source implementations of standard API’s while preventing fragmentation of those API’s.

For a good example, just look back a few years ago at the mess caused by Microsoft delivering an incompatible version of Java. Microsoft took advantage of their Java license and created a JVM (the MSJVM) that implemented what they called ‘improvements’ to Java (can you say ‘embrace and extend’?).

This caused a huge lawsuit between Sun and Microsoft. Sun claimed it was anti-competitive behavior and that it fragmented the Java standard (and they were right on both counts). It was to no one’s advantage (except Microsoft’s) to include a version of Java in every instance of Windows that was incompatible with all the other JVM’s that were available.

(Originally published here under a creative commons license)

Related link: http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/

A couple weeks ago as I was buying some music through the iTunes Music Store, I noticed an ad for the iTunes Affiliate program. I’m not a big fan of these sorts of things because I see them more as get-rich-quick schemes. I wanted to try it out anyway. It just happened that at that moment I wanted to send a link to a audio book to a friend, so why not have a link I could put on a web page?

I signed up. The first link was through an Apple site, then, I had to go to a third party site run under the name LinkSynergy. I didn’t so much as sign-up as agree to the terms. They chose the username and password for me: both ugly looking randon strings that I have no hope of memorizing. Even if I can change the password, I still have a meaningless username. Fortunately, my browser remembers all that.

Apple told me that they would take up to three days to approve my membership. In the meantime, I could sign up for any other program LinkSynergy offered. So much for the initial excitement of something new. Smells like bait-and-switch to me. I figured the approval email would show up in an hour or so. That three day number must be a higher limit.

Two weeks later, after I had forgotten all about iTunes Affiliates, I get an email from Apple which says that my account has been approved. I wasn’t so excited about it anymore, so I waited another week to even try it again.

Well, it works, I guess. Since the actual program is not run by Apple, it’s very un-Apple like: ugly and kludgey and painful to look at. Everything takes a heck of a lot of clicking.

There are some cool things though. I can get RSS feeds of various iTunes lists (Caution: I created these with the affiliates thing, so I get some benefit if you buy something, maybe, and the links will try to launch iTunes): New releases, Featured songs, Top 10 Albums, Top 10 Songs, Top 10 Just Added. Now I don’t have to check iTunes Music Store: I just see new things in NetNewsWire like all my other news.

So, here’s the link I originally wanted to send to my friends (and this is the HTML that the program gives me. Isn’t it ugly? It doesn’t even show what the title is (America: Democracy Inaction from The Daily Show).

As they say in the book (paraphrasing): “In the past, history has been written by the winners. Here’s a history book written by a bunch of losers.”

It’s not really free wireless since I had only checked out of that hotel the same morning, but I had spent a day at a client’s site where I wasn’t allowed to use the network. No big whoop really, but I wanted to read my email before I made the three hour drive back home.

I stopped by the hotel and parked close the the building. I got signal. So far so good.

I had used their network that morning, so it had already authenticated my MAC address. Could I still get in? I think a smart admin would reset that table at noon, which is when everyone should have checked out.

No big surprise: I was able to log in.

So there I was, reading my mail and downloading a few things while sitting in my car: drive-thru internet!

Now I want a nifty key chain WiFi detector!

Related link: http://safari.oreilly.com/JVXSL.asp?x=1&view=book&xmlid=0-7357-1257-3

You know that head-spinning feeling where you’ve got a long-time steady partner/girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse, but then in one night, you meet someone new that turns your world upside-down?

Last night I tried PostgreSQL for a couple hours before bed.

I fell asleep dreaming of column constraints. I woke up thinking of foreign keys.

I’ve been married to MySQL for so long that I had no idea all of these other things were possible! What am I going to tell my wife?

Have you met her (PostgreSQL)? Isn’t she wonderful?

I’m staying at my favorite hotel chain. I got done with work today, came back to the hotel to do a little work, then went out again. I left my laptop running while I went out.

While I was gone, the hotel’s wireless system changed the authorization code, which happens every day or so. When it changes, any web access is trapped and redirected to the authorization page again. Once I re-authorize, everything is back to normal.

Except, I wasn’t around to do that. My RSS aggregator, NetNewsWire, dutifully checked all my feeds while I was out. Every feed URL told NetNewsWire it had moved to a new URL: the authorization page. NetNewWire updated all of its addresses.

Arghhh!

Well, I have the original addresses since they show up as file names in NetNewsWire’s Application Support directory. I just have to hook them up with the right record in the preferences file.

Ughhh!

I should have saved a blogroll. At least I know what I’m doing tomorrow.

Most tech types already know that a response to a spam email is just another way to tell the other side that the address works. The spam oesn’t even have to be legitimate. It could be something just to prepare another targeted list.

Some of the first messages were simple “Take me off this list”, but then, I noticed a lot of the subsequent messages were replies to those messages. Somehow this thing had turned into a mailing list, and people were sending “me too” messages.

Not only were they showing that their address worked, but most of the replies had a lengthy corporate-type sig file with addresses and phone numbers. Some even had additional email addresses listed at the end. Some had AIM handles. Some advertised things like “Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld”.

Most had job titles, which is a real bonanza: if you have something to sell, you want to talk to the guy who has the title “Purchasing Manager”.

Some guy thinks the list manager is actually paying attention or cares:

this is probably the 50 time I have asked you to take me off your
list and you keep adding me back

Um, you were probably never taken off the list, buddy.

The kicker is that it’s an ezmlm list, and unsubscribe addresses are right in the headers. I’m not unsubscribing though because I sorta like watching this parade.

Related link: http://search.creativecommons.org/

The Creative Commons is the superhero collective we really need right now. I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. And it just keeps on getting better. Now you can search across the Web resources that are licenced using a CC variant. The search is driven by Nutch, an engine of which I’d never heard, and by which I’m now impressed (avert thy eyes, Churchill). My search for fly grafitti images I could use on a Web site fell a bit flat, but I tried some more mainstream searches and found great promise.

O’Reilly Associates has developed some extremely useful tools for analyzing the current state of the technology book market using nothing but open source technologies. This morning at O’Reilly’s FOO Camp 2004, Tim spent some time going over exactly what they’ve done and how they went about it.

Their internally developed tools begin with a data warehouse based on MySQL. They’ve designed the data warehouse with a traditional star-schema to allow reporting and analysis of data across many dimensions or categories.

One of the really innovative aspects to what they’ve done is how they’ve augmented the traditional weekly sales data provided by Neilson Bookscan with other data feeds from book sales sites on the Internet.

This ability to creatively find and harvest data from other places to augment traditional book sales data allows them to find relationships between book sales and other events or trends that aren’t visible without having all the data in front of you and the right tools to analyze and display it.

One of the really interesting tools they’re using to display and analyze the data is the TreeMap Java Library available from sourceforge under the open source MIT license.

This tool is very similar to the data visualization provided by Smart Money magazine for their Map of the Market. This tool allows users of the Smart Money website to analyze stocks in different segments of the market and to understand which market segments are performing better or worse than others. It also allows people to quickly find individual stocks that are performing well above or below average.

O’Reilly, based on open source database and visualization tools, has now created a similar functionality to track the technical book market.

So what are some of the big trends in the technical book market? Here are some of the trends that Tim identified:

• About half of all books sold in America are sold through Amazon.com, B&N, Borders and B&N.com.
• .NET, PHP and C# book sales are currently growing while Java is falling off. (Although, Java is still the largest category.)
• Books on Open Source technologies (if you count books on Java and related open source Java technologies as ‘open source’) dominate the combined sales of books on all ‘proprietary’ technologies.
• Sales of books on Red Hat Linux (including Fedora) have dropped off considerably, although the overall sales of Linux books has remained pretty constant. It seems that other distro’s and general Linux tech books are growing fast enough to take up the slack.

The challenge for them now is to understand how to hack the ‘collective intelligence’ of the Internet to understand what data might be lurking out on the Internet to help them understand causes and effects better. For example, would analyzing current job postings on the “help wanted” sites of major newspapers help them understand how the technology book market is reacting?

What data do you think might help understand or forecast what’s happening in the technology book market?

What data can be collected from the Internet to help understand trends in book sales?

I wanted to review some new software, so I wrote to the company’s marketing address asking them for an evaluation license. It’s one of the perks of writing about software.

I get an email back asking for more information about me, and the marketing person wants to set up a meeting with the CEO so I can ask questions. We set up a time for today, although I have no idea what I would ask that hasn’t already been covered in all of the previous interviews and press releases. All I wanted was an evaluation license, but I figure I can listen to what they have to say.

Today, I get an “invite” from Webex.com, which I think is some sort of software that displays a remote computer screen on my screen. It needs java and Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player and Flash. Well, I’m not installing those. I’m kinda suspicious of a Mac software company that wants to use Internet Eplorer and Window Media Player to show me something. And that’s where things start to go south.

Apparently the marketing person can’t do anything else. I try to explain to her that I pretty much already know the product from reading the manual (yes, I read manuals) and using the demo version. I’m already familiar with the technologies under the interface, and I don’t think I would get much out of a live demonstration. The things get really bad. She feels insulted. I ask her if there is anything in the demo that isn’t covered in the manual or the online material. She doesn’t have an answer, and keeps insisting that I see the demo. I’ve been using the previous versions for years. I’m doing a hard-core techie’s review of the product for a hard-core techie audience, and I’ve already done my homework. She says that I could ask questions, but I point out that it’s the companies policy not to comment on future or missing features, and those are the only questions I have. I don’t need to be sold on the product, and all I’m getting is the hard sell.

Then I realize that she really knows nothing, and that she probably doesn’t even work for the company. She says “we” in an odd, insincere way. She’s an outsourced public relations person. I’ve dealt with this situation a lot. She probably runs her own boutique public relations shop, so at the same time that she’s supposed to be selling the product to me, she’s trying to retain her position of authority as the owner of a company. I try to tell her that I already know it’s cool to see HTML previews using WebKit and that I don’t need anyone to show me how to do it. She insists on showing me the demo. She wants me to find another computer. I explain I don’t allow Internet Explorer on any computer.

I think things have just gotten off to a bad start, so I apologize, and try to explain my background and the perspective of the article again. Two sentences later she’s telling me how insulted she is that I don’t want to see the live demo, but she can’t tell me what I’ll get out of it that I don’t already know. It’s an odd sort of role reversal where she acts like I’m inconviencing her and wasting her time. I remind her that she set up this meeting, and that I made my self available to her. I’m the guy who can potentially write damaging things about the product (and I’ve been less than kind in this forum when a company annoys me), and she’s berating me. I try to remember that everyone has a bad day, but that’s not helping. A good PR person would try something else: apparently the CEO is available for this live demo, but not for a phone call. Something really strange is going on. I didn’t ask to talk to the CEO in the first place, she insists that he show me a live demo, but I can’t talk to him on the phone.

Eventually I just hang up on her. For a couple minutes I ponder if I should hate this company too, and that’s not what a real public relations person wants anyone to think after a meeting.

Related link: http://www.gmailforthetroops.com/.

If you are fortunate to have a GMail account, then chances are, you have the ability to invite friends, family members, and even strangers to join GMail.

Here is a consideration: send GMail invitation(s) to our brave men and women, our armed forces overseas.

It is a way to support our troops. It is a tremendous token of support and gratitude for those sacrificing their time and lives abroad.

Technology is not only critical on the battlefield, but also critical in order to communicate with friends, family, and loved ones back home. There is hardly any technical donation or support to those serving overseas. There are two websites that allow you to send GMail invites to our troops: http://www.gmail4troops.com/ and http://www.gmailforthetroops.com/.

A service such as GMail is valuable for our troops. In fact, some men and women need GMail. Here are some reasons:

• Sure, some men and women overseas have other webmail accounts such as Yahoo! and Hotmail. However, Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts have a limited storage capacity. Chances are, some accounts are already filled with media (images and videos) from home, or even infested with spam. GMail has a storage capacity of 1 GB –that is 10-100 times more than the capacity of Yahoo! and Hotmail mail accounts.
• Soldiers have extremely limited time to be on the Internet or to communicate with loved ones back home. GMail is incredibly well-designed (and exceptionally fast), especially its user interface.
• Not only is GMail well-designed, it is also revolutionary. The key of GMail is organization. Messages and replies are organized in a conversation-like manner. GMail also introduces the idea of labeling messages (similar to color-labeling of files in the old Mac OS), which is “an increasingly important method of data management” (see Crawford’s past post on GMail). It is a different approach to e-mail management than what people are used to.
• So far, no major issues with spam in GMail. That is always a good thing.
• E-mail searching in Google. Enough said.

If you are a member of the technical community with GMail invitations available, and looking for a way to support our troops, consider sending GMail invites to them. It is not only a token of support and gratitude for our brave men and women serving overseas, but it is also a good cause for the technical community. It would be even more rewarding if you keep in touch with the soliders (the invitee’s new GMail address is automatically entered in your contact list).

Related link: http://subversion.tigris.org/

I finally decided to take a real look at
Subversion. This month’s Chicago Perl Mongers meeting is going to be using some source control set up by Ask and Robert at perl.org, and they’re using all Subversion. So I went to Borders, bought Version Control With Subversion (after reading through lots of the free online version), and I’ve been reading through it ever since.

I never realized what I was missing. Articles like Top 10 Subversion Tips For CVS Users talk about how to switch, but less about why.

So far, here’s what I’ve found in Subversion that has been crucially missing from CVS:

• Local versions of everything you do
  
  If you want to cvs diff, you have to be able to connect to your repository. No net connection, no diffing. Subversion stores local pristine copies of what you’re working on, so svn diff will work just fine. Want to start over? svn revert works unconnected, too.
  

  
  

• Symbolic names of revisions
  
  HEAD is the name of the tip of the trunk in CVS, but I’ve always wanted to be able to say “-r-1″ like I could way back when in PVCS days. With CVS, I have to do a cvs log on what I’m editing, and then subtract one. That’s no fun. With Subversion, I can say svn diff -r PREV.
  

  
  

• Real status reporting
  
  In CVS, the only way you can see if something on the server is newer is to cvs update and hope that whatever comes down doesn’t cause any conflicts. With the svn status command, I get real status, so I can see if there are conflicts BEFORE I do an update.
  

  
  

• Atomic commits
  
  If I try to commit in Subversion, but one of the files has a conflict, or is out-of-date, none of the files commits. In CVS, you’ve got a half-commited set of files that you have to fix RIGHT NOW.
  

  
  

• Helpful handling of merge conflicts
  
  In CVS, if there are conflicts, you get conflict markers in your file. In Subversion, you get conflict markers, PLUS a copy of your original, pre-conflict file, PLUS the version that came down from the server, PLUS the version that you were originally editing. Then, you must explicitly svn resolve filename.txt to tell Subversion that you’ve fixed the problem. No more accidentally commiting back into CVS with conflict markers still there.
  

The one feature that everyone loves, versioning of directories as well as files, is nice, too, but I’ve never had a real need for it. But if it makes you happy, there’s another reason, too.

Now can someone explain to me why projects at tigris.org use CVS as their version control system?

Related link: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-September/048518.html

I’ve already mentioned the Python decorators imbroglio. Well, Guido has, in typical fashion, put the matter to bed with extraordinary grace. Well, he does leave a little door open for further debate, but not in a way that is likely to change the matter in practice. Guido’s arguments are clear and well-reasoned to me. Even though I was very unsure about the proposed decorator syntax when I first saw it, I’m now comfortable with the addition. Of course experience actually using the critters may change my mind (for what that would be worth).

Does Guido’s pronouncement settle the matter for you?

One of the minor accomplishments of my marriage is making my wife a fan of the WB TV show Angel. In fact, she was more broken up than I was when the show was surprisingly cancelled last year.

A few months ago TNT began showing reruns of Angel. Which is a good thing as my wife missed the first three seasons. We’ve been dutifully recording them on our MythTV system (that’s like a Tivo for those of you who don’t know), and watching two or three a night a couple of times a week.

TNT recently began placing pop-up ads when the show cut back in from a commercial break. My understanding is that they are doing this with other shows as well. These aren’t the innocent little ads that identify the station, or maybe flash the title of the next show in the line-up. No, these ads are larger, have animation, and worst of all sound. The volume on the sound effects is higher than that of the TV show itself and often I miss pieces of the shows dialogue. The ads themselves, so far, have been for some Evel Knievel show and Nascar. I’m fuzzy on the details because I’m trying to hear the dialogue of my show, and not paying attention to the ad. I don’t know why TNT thinks viewers of Angel and X-Files (another show the pop-ups appear on) are interested in Knievel or Nascar.

Here is a typical viewing session:

>Cut in from commercial
>Angel and Wes are looking at a book with a picture of a demon
>Wes: It looks like we are dealing *Vroom *Vroom demon. We should *Screech kill it by *Vroooooommmmmmmm.
>Angel: Great work Wes. Now we *Screeeeech life *Vrooooommm.

And then the scene ends and they go kill a demon whose name I don’t know, using a weapon I’ve not heard of, to save the life of someone I’m not aware of.

Okay, my example had very strategic placement of the noises from the ad, but I’m trying to make a point. Aural spam during a TV show is a no no. Please TNT, stop.

If you agree then write to TNT or post a message on their community forums and let TNT know how you feel.

Related link: http://www.openstandardsalliance.org/

A unique opportunity will come about two weeks from now
(September 12-14, 2004) to participate in a discussion that could
unblock software development and promote both open standards and open
source software.

John Terpstra, a noted software designer, author, and consultant who
is best known as a founder of the Samba team, has organized a
conference called “Open Source, Open Standards” that will do more than
educate its audience. The audience will become the show. Audience
members will discuss deployment issues facing software developers and
users, and see their input recorded in a book to be distributed to
legislators who deal with such “intellectual property” issues as
copyright and patent law.

I have talked to John for years about Samba, publishing, and his
volunteer activities such as advisor to
Linux Professional Institute.
John has also spent years trying to get governments to understand the
important of standards and free software.

But a funny thing happens when you try to represent the public
interest to legislators and regulators. They like to dismiss the
public interest as a “special interest.” One often sees this in
environmental regulation, for instance: the government lumps together
those who want to harvest forests for profit or dump their waste in
rivers with those who try to protect those forests and rivers. They’re
all just “special interests.”

In the same way, an advocacy group such as the Free Software
Foundation gets told by the government that it’s just another special
interest group, such as the Business Software Alliance or the Motion
Picture Association of America.

By such linguistic sleight of hand, legislators and regulators excuse
themselves for pleasing the special interests that just happen to
donate hundreds of thousands of dollars.

For Terpstra, the way out of this trap is to bring together the real,
undisputed public and make its voice heard. Thus the purpose of “Open
Source, Open Standards.” Check out the
web site:
the speaker roster is very impressive if you have followed the world
of free software much. But the key is for the conference to hear from
representatives of ordinary companies that develop or bring in
software.

Each panel will consist of short speeches and moderated panel
discussion followed by at least half an hour of moderated audience
discussion. People are coming from as far as Australia to discuss the
importance of standards in government.

What barriers do companies face in spreading the use of software?
Where could more standards, or more knowledge of existing standards,
help them? What do they do in the absence of standards? What would
make free software more appealing to companies?

Results from the conference, along with essays by industry leaders,
will be published in book form and given to government
representatives, as well as to companies they employ in the areas of
copyrights and patents, in order to prove the value of open standards
as well as open source. The book will be published by Sun
Microsystems, which has generously backed Terpstra and helped fund the
conference. This doesn’t give Sun any particular weight at the
conference itself. But it should help assuage nervous free software
fans who were afraid that Sun would retreat into a proprietary
strategy following its recent settlement with Microsoft.

The conference should also move the fields of standards and open
source forward. Once the attendees identify the key things that stand
in the way of their understanding and using standards or free
software, people who produce standards and free software can address
the problems in practical ways. For instance, guidance on how to find
and use standards may become more available to companies who can’t
afford to send their top employees to years’ worth of standards
committee meetings.

Terpstra is committed to promoting open, public, royalty-free
standards. This means standards that anyone can read and implement,
and that don’t require any payments or licensing, even “reasonable”
ones. A payment or license that looks reasonable to a commercial
venture in the United States is prohibitive to many companies in the
developing world, as well as to free software developers. The

debate at the W3C over licenses
in 2001 shows how close to disaster one can come.

Terpstra told me last night that about 70 attendees had registered for
the conference so far, and that he was hoping for 125-150. Look over
the site and consider going. And then keep coming back to see what the
Open Standards Alliance is doing next.

Do standards matter?

General computer users (say 90% of all users) are not very flexible with their computing habits. General computer users often meet changes, updates, and new developments with skepticism and pessimism. That is the reality of it.

Last week, I did a rag-tag of activities. I gave a monthly technical seminar about free software and the open source movement to a group of general computer users (i.e. use word processing, spreadsheet, some database, and Internet every day). I also fixed my neighbor’s computer (Windows XP) by reformatting his hard drive and restoring his computer to the original factory settings.

The audience at my monthly technical seminar embraced the freedom to use and distribute software “openly,” and the fact that there are alternatives to popular software packages. The audience understood the benefits and drawbacks of proprietary software, and open source software. However at the end of my lecture, one woman said: Well that is great, but most of the computer users out there will probably not know how to find and use alternatives that are available. We are all so accustomed to using software such Microsoft Word and Excel every day, and I would say that most of us are afraid to use alternatives (e.g. AbiWord).

A day after my talk, I restored my neighbor’s computer to the original factory settings because it was infested with viruses, nasty spy-ware, and unnecessary programs. After the process, I installed Mozilla Firefox, ZoneAlarm firewall, AdAware, and a copy of Norton Anti-Virus that came with his computer. I urged my neighbor to use Mozilla Firefox because Microsoft Internet Explorer is riddled with security holes and prone to breaches. Two days later, I received a call from my neighbor saying that he wasn’t accustomed to his new computer settings and would like to return to using Microsoft Internet Explorer because it had the nice toolbar that had a nice button to send e-mail. I visited my neighbor several hours later to make Microsoft Internet Explorer “available” on his computer again. I also saw that several spy-ware applications were already installed on his computer.

Such stories are far too common these days, but hardly ever documented. I am sure that most of us, at one point or another, have dealt with a friend or colleague who needed desperate personal computing help.

In general, computer users have a very limited expertise on what a computer really is. I don’t blame them. People need to get their work done. They want things to be simple: word processing, work with spreadsheets, maybe some database, surf the Web, write and send e-mail, and play games. Details such as TCP/IP, the registry, APIs, libraries, etc., are unnecessary to an average human being. Unfortunately, a personal computer is not simple. A personal computer is not a television, a VCR, a telephone, or a CD player. But the general feeling is that a personal computer is to be used like a popular household electronic appliance. It is true that a personal computer is a very powerful machine, and arguably, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

After working with my neighbor, I thought of all the similar situations that I have been involved with to find some common ground. From working with people over the years on personal computing issues, one word stands out that describes people working with computer technology: fear.

Fear is very powerful to hold people from doing anything. If you put users, who are generally simple-minded people, facing a powerful and complex environment, and [users] having limited information and expertise about the environment, then sure, there is going to be plenty of fear involved. Such fear will confine users to one specific setting and one environment. Ultimately, it leads to inflexibility, lack of thinking and development, and “lock-in” to a particular environment. In the long-term, and sometimes in the short-term, it is not necessarily a good thing. What happens if your computer needs to be restored to the original factory settings (e.g. major virus) and most of the programs and files that one have used over the years are moved to a new location, or worst, no longer available? You can’t always depend on your neighbor to come over and spend several hours leading you through the rebuilding process.

Sometimes, I even tell people to get a Mac. Unfortunately, that recommendation is often with doubt. Not because a Mac is a Mac (and often people speak praise of the Mac), but because of one thing: fear. Fear that people cannot open Microsoft Office documents created on a Wintel PC. Fear that many programs are only available for Microsoft Windows. Fear that the Mac is not widely supported. All of the latter fears are popular myths.

But can you blame the mass of computer users to be generally inflexible? No, and you shouldn’t. There is an enormous gap between the technical experts and the general users, and the connection between the two parties is simply “not there.” Furthermore, the problems are only getting worse (just look at the “cost” in owning a computer, look at how much information is necessary to maintain a computer). Educating the general users is critical to dig out of the sad reality that is out there –educating people on “what is out there”, the drawbacks and precautions about personal computing, and the new developments. Sure this sounds similar to what I stressed in a previous article, but it sheds light on the bigger picture about the use of technology in our society in a context that we can all understand.

Do you agree that fear a major, if not the main contributer, to a lot of the problems with using PCs today?