A carnival of technology

I changed my mind on denying that past journals exist. I can’t hide from myself forever! Mainly I wanted to mess around with the nanoblogger entry categories, and having a “Greatest Hits” category seemed like as good an idea as any. I’ve started things off with that tirade from the previous site (with it’s no longer accurate statement that I will HTTP no more forever), but, since a “hit” is usually defined by the audience, I suppose I should probably ask y’all what you think. What would you suggest adding? I’ll even consider entries from the old-old site, provided they’re not too emo.

Leave a comment! It won’t bite. I think. You have to register for a name to show up, so I’d recommend doing that too. Also, since your password is just being stored in a mysql database, I’d also suggest not using one you care about.

Further Reading:
[1] gopher site
[2] Old web page, now mostly inscrutable

Well, I went and blogged myself up a blog. You can see it http://gophernet.org/blog/. Let’s see how this things work out this time.

Huh. Blogs.

I think I’ll kick off this entry with a couple of format-change traditions that I just made up: link forward but never back, and turn the first entry into a tirade on the society of the World Wide Web.

I suppose that the world “blog” has been around since 1999 or so, around the time that blogger.com came to be. Wikipedia (caution, unauthoritative) lists a couple people as claiming to have coined the term, but I don’t really care what some bullshit web consultant or a Joyce fanatic have to say on the topic. The point is that someone made up the word around 1999, but no one cared until about 2001. 2001 saw the creation of Movable Type, making this new-fangled blog thing available to anyone able to install mysql. Not much has changed since then, except that every single person on the face of the planet keeps a blog now, and blogs have been hitched to the Web 2.0 wagon.

What is Web 2.0, you might ask? It’s nothing, is what it is. It’s a tool invented by the starry-eyed dreamers of the www-dawn, now jaded from losing all their money in 2000, as a vehicle to further their flimflammery. They’ve learned their lesson—this time the web won’t be about Razor scooters and Aeron chairs and fußball in the break room—no, this time around the web will be about conferences and design and a mountain of incoherent essays so deep that no one will ever figure that they’re continuing to deliver no product that enhances the value of the human experience. Paul Graham made an attempt to sum up the Web 2.0 experience [1], but even he was pulled in a little by the hype. His article could be summarized to say that Web 2.0 didn’t mean a damn thing at first, but now it means doing whatever Google’s doing.

Somethingawful, a site I respect for being able to convince a special sort of person that it’s worthwhile to pay for what everyone else on the web gets for free, had their own, more cynical take [2] on what Web 2.0 means. The most depressing aspect of that article for me was that it finally distilled into its most nonsensical base just what Tim O’Reilly wrote in that manifesto [3] that I was too impatient to read on my own. I’m not ashamed to admit that I own a few O’Reilly books ranging from the pretty alright (that XSLT book, the Perl book) to the nearly useless (Lex and Yacc), but I find it unnerving that the man who may be able to exert final editorial control over these volumes is able to utter a phrase like “Data is the next Intel Inside.”

That’s why I don’t like the idea of using a blog.

Concerning this blog, I’m using nanoblogger with nbcom shoehorned in. I think I was supposed to create another database user, so nbcom thought that everyone was an admin. Solution: remove the admin link. There also seems to be a bit of a disagreement among the nanoblogger files on whether “$permalink_file” should actually resolve to anything. Solution: use the entry ID to index comments and remove the now-broken link from the comments back to the entry. It’s a big pile of crap, but that’s how the web runs, and it’s probably good enough. In case I do become motivated to care more than I already have about this thing, here’s a TODO list that I’ll never get to:

1) Replace the local authentication with Typekey (I have some code to authenticate TypeKey logins, but I don’t feel like trying to get that into the nbcom code).

2) Replace mysql usage in nbcom with PEAR’s (mostly) generic db functions. Or at least postgres functions so I can remove mysql.

3) Figure out the nbcom plugin system so I can generate HTML from text files instead of having to write it on my own (this is probably the only one likely to get done)

4) Replace that favicon file.

5) Make nbcom PHP code suck less. (heh)

So there you have it: a blog. Comments might work. You can signup for an account or, I think, post anonymously. Have at it.

References:
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html
[2] http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=3594
[3] http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228

I’ve been publishing my crap on the Internet for a while now. The earliest gopher entry was on May 21st, 2004, a furious screed attacking the institutions and habits of the web, and what was at the time called by some the angriest six paragraphs they’d ever seen me write. Before that, I posted my thoughts to the front page of http://gophernet.org/, sorting things into an unnavigable sequence of days and archiving by quarter approximately whenever I felt like it. Sometimes I didn’t feel like it for six months at a time, so size of the front page was inconsistent. The earliest such writing I can find is from December 28th, 2000, a few months after I registered gophernet.org and settled in to life in the Smith building dorm. Before that, I had been using a dyndns domain for a few years, and I almost certainly had a “News” section on whatever page I used to fill that void. I honestly can’t remember what I did with that site, and the files themselves are certainly long lost. I think they lived on one of those huge (volume and mass, not capacity) hard drives I got off of one of those Egghead auctions [1]. Before that, I have vague memories of FTP clients and Geocities pages. I certainly hope that anything I did before 1997 has since been destroyed, but who knows; I might still have an active account or two out there somewhere. The thought of anything uploaded from an AOL account returning to haunt me doesn’t keep me up at night, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t deny my involvement if it were to happen.

Anyhow, my point in all this is what my point has always been with blogs: there is no new thing under the sun. I moved to gopher as a sort of escape, staking my claim in the forgotten backwaters of the Internet as a retreat and a solace from the ridiculous claims and breathless exaggerations of Web innovation. I still stand by the points in my May 21st manifesto—the Web is not the Internet, a turn-based protocol is not suitable for real-time applications, and Tim Berners-Lee is an asshole—, but I’ve thought about moving to what has become a more traditional form of a blog. I don’t want to become the next Cory Doctorwho or anything like that, and I pray that I’m never compared to him, but it might be time to face the realities of this place: I have readers, and a protocol that was dead by 1995 is not convenient for readers. In spite of itself, HTTP has managed to extend in some useful ways: recent years have seen a greater interest in foreign-people languages, which I take advantage of to type words like “coördinate” or “?????” (hint: this file is in utf-8. gopher doesn’t really have a means of conveying that information.) so I can be more pretentious; HTTP over SSL and various newer authentication methods make private content, though not necessarily easy, at least feasible, and MIME information can express file types in a way far more extensible than gopher’s single character in the URL. This doesn’t mean that I don’t still think that whatever google’s up to today is dumb, but it does mean that I think properly used HTTP transfers are pretty alright.

My plan so far is to install and use Nanoblogger, a blog engine that I discovered through clumens’s use of it and which I like for the fact that the interface is a shell script, and it doesn’t look like ass by default. There’s a bundle of of PHP scripts out there to add comment support [2]—a feature that’s been requested a couple of times—and, though the author writing nbcom “with famous KISS rule in mind” (rock and roll all night, party every day) seems like a handy idea, I’d like to make a couple of changes. I don’t feel like installing mysql, so I’d like either to replace the half-dozen or so calls to “mysql_hejaz” with “pg_hejaz” (easy) or figure out how those PEAR database abstraction classes are supposed to work (maybe not so easy). I’d also like to replace the authentication code with Typekey’s so that I can make user accounts someone else’s problem.

So, what do you, the reader, think? Consider this article a request for comments. I haven’t firmly decided on anything yet, but I figure that since I’ve been using gopher for over a year and a half, maybe it’s time for another format change.

References:
[1] http://gophernet.org/images/sd.jpg
[2] http://nhw.pl/blg/articles/nbcom/

Hey, mom? I disabled your account. It got hacked. I hope you don’t mind.

I’m really more intrigued than shaken by this. I happened to find out when I noticed that my networks were lagging a bit, so I thought I’d check if there was a lot of web traffic. Instead I found that “crond” was connecting to some IRC servers. As clever as the use of “crond” for the IRC bot was, the rootkit I found wasn’t really all that creative. I doubt that anything more than my mom’s account was hacked (I think the password was “mom,” though I don’t know how they found this username. Maybe mom accounts are common in Romania?). The rootkit was installed in a globally writable area, and the script that was used to compile the source (wasn’t just an i386 executable! Maybe you shouldn’t have left the source around, though, chief), though not autoconf, was uncreatively name “configure.” Interestingly, it’s GPL. Here’s the whole header comment:

# !/bin/sh
#
#   EnergyMech, IRC Bot software
#   Copyright (c) 1997-2001 proton, 2002-2003 emech-dev
#
#   This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
#   it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
#   the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
#   (at your option) any later version.
#
#   This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
#   but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
#   MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
#   GNU General Public License for more details.
#
#   You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
#   along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
#   Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
#

I just feel so giddy about this whole thing. I’ve never had a rootkit installed on me before.

I do some weird stuff sometimes. As some of you may be aware, I have an odd habit of seeking out the castoff books of yesteryear, a sort of odd neo-antiquarianism. I suppose it all started with that book of suicide notes, …Or Not to Be, compiled my Mark Etkind. For whatever reason, I found the idea of the suicide note as literature fascinating, and I paid like eight bucks for the book on half.com. It seems to still be quite firmly out of print, and the lowest used price on amazon.com is $42, so I suppose I did alright if I treated this as an investment. The point for me isn’t the return, though; it’s the preservation of something that society would rather forget. My most prized book thus far is still the Dune Encyclopedia. It was a collection of essays on the Dune universe written from the point of view of historians about 5000 years after Leto II’s death. Though Frank Herbert reserved the right to contradict the history that it presented, he found it ultimately a source of amusement and enlightenment, and he authorized the printing. He died soon after the 1984 printing, though, and, since his son Brian Herbert is intent on milking the potential Dune history through a new series of novels, it won’t be printed again during the lifetime of the Dune copyright. I think this is highly unfortunate and a great loss of insight into a fascinating world.

Today my collection has moved into the political realm with the arrival Lynne Cheney’s Sisters. It’s a historical fiction about the subjugation of women in the frontier American West and the lesbian relationships that provided their escape. I can’t yet speak about it’s quality, but the attraction it held for me was the fact that it will never be printed again not due to market forces, but rather because it’s become undesirable to the author. Maybe it’s because the wife of a Republican vice president doesn’t want to be associated with homosexual romance, or maybe it’s because it raises questions about the influences on her daughter’s choices in life, but whatever the cause, it’s a suppressed piece of recent literature, and that’s what, to me, makes it interesting. It’s also probably the most I’ve ever paid for a single book—I can’t remember how much that doorstop of a theory textbook cost, which might be the winner,—and it’s certainly the most I’ve ever forked over for a trade paperback. This book better be good.

In other news, I think I’ve figured what it is that bugs me about driving on SR 400. Suburb people are dumb. For some background, I first brought a car to Atlanta while at Tech, so I cut my Atlanta driving teeth on the downtown connector and surrounding ground roads. I learned pretty quickly which times were bad to drive, traffic-wise, but even with heavy traffic, certain behaviors make the trip more pleasant for everyone. I noticed this especially on the last time I drove to the airport during rush hour: rather than rushing up to the bumper of the person in front of them, everyone tried to maintain a steady speed, and traffic moved along at a constant 25mph or so. It would have made an industrial engineer weep for joy. Now, I’m not saying that city people are free from their own stupidities—I think that about half the times I’ve been on the controlled-access portion of SB SR 13, I’ve seen someone try to exit onto I-85 from the left lane—but in general people just expect there to be traffic at certain times, and they can deal with it gracefully. 400, on the other hand, chokes in traffic, whatever the anomaly. Today I saw on one of the DOT signs the following message: “ACCIDENT ON SR 400 SOUTH, 2 MILES INSIDE 285. 4 LEFT LANES BLOCKED.” Now, there are actually only three lanes at that point, so I read that to mean that whatever disaster occurred was also blocking the ramp for the poor suckers trying to get on at Glenridge. My reaction, of course, was to get the hell off 400, and I halfway expected to end up in a wreck, or at least a near miss, in a panicked rush for everyone to get off at Abernathy. I was the only one to get off. While making a nice, untrafficed right turn towards the other southbound roads of Sandy Springs, I could clearly see a growing jam of unmoving cars starting just beyond the on-ramp. What the hell, people?

GPLv3 is dumb.

I never liked the Free Software Foundation much to begin with. I have no beef with Stallman or the other GNU project members as programmers—gcc sure is nice, and a system without GNU fileutils is a frustrating one indeed—but as lawyers and activists the organization is just plain annoying. For whatever reason their latest version of the GNU General Public License has made it onto my radar, so I thought I’d take a closer look at the thing. It stinks. The second version of this license wasn’t too terrible; it contained some statements on the intent of the license, a list of freedoms and restrictions that contained enough big words to seem legally sound and a section explaining how to use the license. It was about as straightforward as such things can be and short enough that it could be read on the john. This third version seems to have been transformed into a breathless screed against the perceived injustices of society and the legal system. I guess it’s about the same length as its previous incarnation, but this version of the license contains a lot of language that is either meaningless fluff or just strikes me as very unprofessional.

The most noticed section, of course, is that on Digital Restrictions [sic] Management. Though I think that the free dissemination of creative works is important to the health of a society, I often find myself closer to the Jack Valenti end of this spectrum than to Cory Doctorow. I suppose that by the GNU definitions, I’m a “copyright apologist.” I think that people should be compensated for their creative efforts and have a means of limiting how their works are used and modified. DRM is annoying and unfortunate in that it restricts legitimate usages of a copyrighted work, but, on the other hand, people are assholes. In the context of the GPL, I consider Section 3 harmful in that it places a specific ban on what software may be licensed under the GPL and how licensed software may be used, an action that seems to run counter of the FSF philosophy that free software entails “The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs [sic].” Section 3 of GPLv3 is interesting when compared to other GNU legal documents in that, though this is in the meat of the license, it contains only one sentence expounding upon the limitations and freedoms provided by the license, and half of it is just instruction not to violate criminal law. The rest is an exposition of philosophy and a plea to interpret the remainder of the document not necessarily as it is written, but instead through the lens of specific opinion. Here is that one relevant sentence in its entirety: “Regardless of any other provision of this License, no permission is given to distribute covered works that illegally invade users’ privacy, nor for modes of distribution that deny users that run covered works the full exercise of the legal rights granted by this License.” I certainly hope that obstacles to this full exercise can still be built through the means of unusable interfaces, since otherwise transcode might be in trouble.

There’s a part in section 1, the description of what constitutes source code, that tries to further limit the abilities of potential digital restricters by requiring any encryption keys and passwords needed to “install and/or execute the source code of the work…in the recommended or principal context of use.” This is most notable for convincing Linus Torvalds that this could require him to give up his signing PGP key. I can’t recall how integrated signatures are to the Linux source code, but it’s possible that the rest of the paragraph, despite the FSF’s claims to the contrary, could be demanding just that.

There was another part of section 1 that I found interesting. As some of you may be aware, dcantrell had a run-in with Richard M. Stallman a while back concerning the enforcement of the GPL for gcc on IRIX. I won’t try to tell his story for him, but the synopsis was that David argued that, since gcc didn’t build on IRIX as distributed, SGI was required to distribute their modified Makefiles per the demand for “the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.” Stallman’s response was that he didn’t mean Makefiles, or maybe just that he didn’t want to go after SGI. I can’t remember; maybe it was both. Anyhow, GPLv3 includes the following exception for such scripts: “Code need not include a particular subunit if…the subunit serves only to enable use of the work with [a major essential component of the operating system on which the executable runs].” Hmm!

In other news, Sandy Springs has a new radio station, AM 1620. I’ve been listening for a little bit, and the music they played over the weekend sounded like about the same sort of thing I’d do if I had a radio station: just a bunch of random crap. At one point I remember it fading from some blues song to some techno song that sounded like it came off a car commercial. It was like listening to WREK except in mono and, since this station is actually an unlicensed network of 100mW transmitters, with horrible clarity. I just recently learned that it’s unlicensed while trying to find out why I’d never heard their call letters, and this truth isn’t very far from my assumption that it was some guy broadcasting from a van in the North Springs MARTA parking lot. Despite their claim of covering all of Sandy Springs, I’m unable to pick the station up on my drive home—90% of which is through the city of Sandy Springs—until I’m well south of Northridge, and I lose it again once I get to Glenridge. According to the amazingly hard to read schedule on their web site, I’m missing out on the Sandy Springs Health Hour in the morning and some undetermined scheduling abyss in the evening. I think that’s when they let winamp be the DJ.

In more other news, the Movie Trading Company has closed its Georgia locations. This is a sad day, indeed, as I no longer know where to take my bad movies to die. Used music stores often take DVDs, but I don’t think it’s a practice that they encourage, and they certainly carry far less potential for finding crappy movies on the cheap. I visited the dying husk of the store on Roswell Rd this weekend in search of half-off bounty, but I quickly found that every item still in the store was there for a good reason. This didn’t stop me, of course, and I ended up walking out with The Sixth Day, Last Action Hero, one of those Tears for Fears albums that the one guy made after the other guy left, and a copy of Queen’s Flash Gordon soundtrack that I found in a bin on the way out. It was cheap, sure, but now my options are more limited for places where I can sell it all back.

I remember an article in The Onion a couple years back, after the Schick Quattro came out. The razor itself was a pretty obvious attempt to do one better than the Gillette Mach 3, and the Onion article was written from the viewpoint of an angry Gillette CEO eager now to make a five-bladed razor. “…stick two more blades in there. I don’t care how. Make the blades so thin they’re invisible. Put some on the handle. I don’t care if they have to cram the fifth blade in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!”

Since that article was written, Gillette’s biggest innovation in terms of telling Schick to eat it was to make their razors vibrate, which I still think is a very bad idea. I have enough trouble minimizing my blood loss in the morning without having to worry about a moving target. Does it vibrate from side to side? I still don’t get that thing. Anyhow, you’re probably aware that Gillette did recently fire the definitive next volley in this ridiculous game: a razor with five blades, plus a bonus blade going in the other direction. Maybe it’s time to just get a straight razor. Sure, I’ll slice my face off if I’m not careful, but it still seems a bit less ominous than the way of the future, the six whirring blades of doom.