In the intro I gave another brief travel update as I am leaving right after releasing this episode for Brussels to participate in the EU Hackathon. I have booked my travel to Paris for the first full week of December. Speaking of events, Cory will be in DC November 22nd and I will be interviewing him at a live book event followed by Q&A. Another event, which I won’t be attending, but looks worth checking out is the Indiana Linux Fest.

The hacker word of the week this week is fontology.

The feature this week is a rant on how copyright is becoming toxic. This is partly informed by currently events and partly by my current and recent reading.

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At first, the lack of the Android Market was my biggest complaint, followed by the crummy resistive touch screen. Over time, those two complaints have swapped places. A bit of hacking got the Market onto the device and only occasionally does it present problems, mostly around major firmware updates from Archos. The screen, however, has not worn well and continues to get worse and worse.

There is a broad strip down the righthand side of the screen that no longer reliably works. If I re-calibrate the touch screen, it will work for a few minutes before it settles into its usual semi-functional state. If it was just an inoperable chunk of the screen, rotating would mostly overcome it at the expense of some small hassle. The problem is the accuracy on the rest of the screen is absolutely abysmal. All the way over to the left, it is pretty much spot on but the further to the right you touch, the worse it gets, registering touches as offset increasingly to the left. I am convinced the non-working portion of the display is part of this mis-registration, that the offset just gets so large you’d have to tap beyond the physical boundary of the screen to register successfully.

As you might imagine, typing on the soft keyboard with this idiosyncratic touch screen is an exercise in frustration. More often than not, after the third word of a message or update, I want to hurl the accursed devices into the nearest hard surface as hard as I possibly can. I try to avoid any applications now that require any typing, resigning myself to media consumption. You’d think that would alleviate the frustration with the damn thing a bit but not hardly.

Just reliably hitting the play, pause and next buttons often is an utter crap shoot. A miss can result in sending me back to the home screen or bouncing around to another podcast episode or track. Usually I have to rotate the thing around repeatedly to get the most reliable, left most edge to line up with the buttons I need. The amount of effort involved just to keep up with my podcasts and occasionally listen to some music when I am reading on my morning train ride is tiresome to say the least.

To add insult to injury, I finally installed a firmware updated from Archos that I’ve been avoiding for weeks. I was uncertain whether it would undo my Market hack, hence my hesitation. My (undeserved) that the update might improve the screen operation finally overcame my reluctance and yesterday I installed the patch. Not only did it do absolutely nothing to alleviate my existing woes, now it has introduced a new glitch. Whenever the screen automatically shuts off to help manage battery life, media playback goes out the window. I have disabled the auto shut off just so I can continue to listen to podcasts, otherwise that app would be utterly unusable. I also realize this may be a worsening of an existing bug that was interfering with some music files that previously had been glitchy. Leaving the screen on while using the built-in music player actually seems to work better on files I thought were just mis-encoded or had some metadata that was culpable.

Heck of a workaround, risk destroying my battery life or weird series of app activations and utilization as a result of the MID floating around my pocket with its screen on or give up on the core reason I bought the stupid thing in the first place.

So what to do? The gadget is still within its warranty but I am not optimistic about the vendor’s ability to address any of my complaints. I am also loathe to give up even a brain damaged media player for the duration it would take to get it repaired or replaced. I struggle enough to keep up with podcasts as it is.

I looked around a bit online today for a possible replacement. In short, there really are none. I could get a simpler, non-Android media player. There are several that work well with Linux. Even if I set aside how deeply habituated I am to having Internet access with me constantly, I cannot imagine going back to a device that has to be routinely synchronized with a computer. Of the other Android powered devices that are not phones, the vast majority of them are full sized tablets. For reasons I may discuss in some other post, I don’t want anything larger than my shirt pocket. Besides, judging by customer reviews of at least one WiFi only version of a popular seven inch tablet, the device makers often hobble the non-cell modem equipped tablets as a subtle and irritating prod towards the more lucrative versions.

Samsung has released an interesting media player that bears some passing resemblance to its popular Galaxy line of phones. It has not reached the US though and reviews so far have been mixed. I am not convinced it would be a worthwhile purchase.

As a last resort, I’ve looked into unlocked smart phones. A could see carrying around a Nexus S or some Galaxy based phone but haven’t been able to find any discussions about how reasonable it is to leave such a device unactivated. All the posts and forum threads I’ve found assume you’ll pop a SIM in from some carrier or another and start using it as a regular phone, voice + data plan and all.

I even considered biting the bullet and getting an Android smartphone with a plan of some kind. I can’t get past the fact that any contract option still costs more each month than I am willing to pay considering how lightly I’ll use the minutes and bandwidth. See my comments on access to WiFi and my ingrained aversion to mobile telephony. There are now Android phones available with pay as you go plans which could be a reasonable upgrade to the 2G dumb phone I still carry for when I absolutely, positively have to make or receive a mobile call. Of course none of the smart phones on offer with that option are ones for which I actually would pay good money.

Am I being unreasonable? Is there an option I haven’t considered to get an Android powered, small form factor media player and Internet device? If you have an answer to the latter, I sure would like to hear about it in the comments. Or if you can clarify how well an unactivated phone might work, I’d like to hear that too.

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The hacker word of the week this week is flash crowd.

The feature this week is a rant on the barriers and friction that make up the innovation tax. The idea was really brought to the fore in my mind by a Harvard Business Review piece by James Allworth. A good example of the thought process of risk averse dominant incumbents was encapsulated in the recent interview with Francis Ford Coppola to which Cory on BoingBoing linked.

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I’ll be at Wiki X DC this Saturday (which may or may not interfere with getting a news cast out on Sunday).  If you can spare some cash, Podiobooks could really use the support to upgrade their servers right now.

Listener feedback is from Jonathan in response to my piece about being an autodidact.  He recommends a couple of videos and David Brin’s blog.

The hacker word of the week this week is fisking.

The feature this week is a somewhat rambling, speculative rant on the tragedy of the pseudocommons. This stems from a lot of recent attention on commons as economic and governance models, including the Nobel prize winning work of Elinor Ostrom and David E. Williams. The title is in fact a riff on Hardin’s original critique of the commons. In discussing the ethos animating digital commons, I suggest the Free Software Foundation exceeds the core values by insisting on stronger notions of liberty. James Boyle’s book does an excellent job describing the more obvious threat of enclosure. My pondering the pseudocommons is similar in some regards to my thoughts on the true burden of forking. Nicholas Carr pegs one extreme example of the form.

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In the intro, a quick review of “The Dervish House” by Ian McDonald.

Listener feedback this week was Wild Biker who was curious for my thoughts on Ballotpedia.

The hacker word of the week this week is fireworks mode.

The feature this week is a rant on how I think the current network neutrality debate came to be.  The Berkman Center had an excellent podcast episode recently that serves as a good backgrounder.  I mention the Carterfone case as the antecedent for open access to networks.

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Listener feedback this week is from quite a few folks. Matt wrote in about outliners, asking what I do in particular to bend vim to this task. I use a vimrc line like “autocmd BufEnter,BufNew *.notes set sw=4 ts=4 expandtab spell tw=0 foldmethod=indent smartindent”. Colin posted a comment about AAC and chapter marks. John had a much more incisive comment on my switching to an open stack segment. Ian also wrote about outliners, suggesting org-mode and in particular a couple of screencasts. And Max shared his experiences switching to Linux not once, but twice.

The hacker word of the week this week is filter.

The feature this week is a rant digging into the question of whether we’ll ever develop effective controls that match our complex expectations of privacy and digging into the source of that complexity. I mention a couple of posts by danah boyd, some criticism of the demands made of Facebook by privacy advocates, my reading of Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody“, and small world networks.

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In the intro, thanks to Josh for his donation and a call for ideas for a premium for larger donations. I’m looking for something as unique and distinctive as the merit badges that would be appropriate for $50 or more and monthly donations of $5 or more.

There is no listener feedback this week.

The hacker word of the week this week is fat-finger .

The feature this week is a rant where I try to get to exactly what it is that bugs me about NoSQL. In it, I refer to my hacking 101 piece on databases.

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In the intro, a correction on the rant (I recorded it previously) based on further explanation by Cory in the Lab Out Loud interview about price discrimination and demand elasticity. Also, Happy Ada Lovelace Day. As pledged, I’ve written a blog post for the day. I also share a badge update. And thanks go to new monthly donor, Andrew.

Listener feedback this week is from an anonymous correspondent agreeing with my thoughts on the Apple developer license. Also, David shares another vim/eclipse plugin and Jed and John share their thoughts in response to the Inner Chapter of Tools.

The hacker word of the week this week is fandango on core.

The feature this week is a rant entitled, I Am Not a Pirate. (Although big content is starting to agree though for very different reasons.) Mostly this is in response to Ars Technica’s ad blocking experiment, in particular my friend Nuri’s thoughts on that story. I mention Mike Masnick, of Techdirt, who champions a model he calls connect with fans plus reason to buy. I also mention Flattr and the recent roundtable on free content versus paying the author on The Secret Lair podcast. I also refer to ideas explained by Cory Doctorow on an episode of the Beyond the Book podcast.

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Personally, I think Stallman is bogging down too much in the particulars of where computation takes place and at whose behest. Computation is ephemeral, once complete what do you have to judge where the actual work took place? I put far more stock in the efforts of autonomo.us and even Google’s Data Liberation Front that are working to ensure the durable information that persists regardless of when and where computing takes place can be free.

I think this oversight also leads to Stallman giving collaboration focused network services too much of a free pass. The co-opting of my intensively cultivated social network shouldn’t be exempt from expectations of data and software freedom. I’ll concede that the problem begs far more difficult technical challenges, ones that simple adoption of the AGPL won’t easily solve.

I am all for free alternatives to what Stallman calls “SaaS”, a re-definion to laden the term with connotations similar to “proprietary” in his parlance. I am irked that he is doing this to a term already in use rather than suggesting a new, more evocative label. I guess I am just more moderate for thinking I shouldn’t have to work as a full blown sysadmin and run my own GPL/AGPL compatible copy of a service to exercise my freedom. I am not sure his vague thoughts on trusted operators and the implications that arise suggesting yet another web of trust make much more sense.

As long as I have the possibility of moving my data where I choose and strong expectations around trusted handling of my data, I consider that sufficiently free. Again, I am not suggesting that these problems are any easier to solve, but I think they are where we should be focusing our efforts first and foremost.

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In the intro, a final reminder I will be at Philcon this weekend, so no news show on Sunday. There almost definitely will be a feature show next week since I should have my interview with Cory to release. Also a revelation, that “Dreams with Sharp Teeth” has convinced me I am not much of a curmudgeon.

There is no listener feedback this week.

The hacker word of the week this week is Evil Empire.

The feature this week is a rant, though more of an emotional than a surly one, entitled nowhere to go.

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In the intro, I mention two upcoming events you might like to check out. The first is OggCamp and the second is the Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference.

Listener feedback this week is from Kaity and from Erwin.

The hacker word of the week this week is epsilon .

The feature this week is a rant trying to explain my odd, love-hate relationship with computer science.

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In the intro a quick review of the movie, District 9.

The hacker word of the week this week is engine.

The feature this week is a rant on owning innovation. In it I mention VoloMedia claiming to have the patent on podcasting including their own words on the matter, Iain Bank’s publisher claiming first podcast novel, Christiana Ellis wins the preposterous claims contest that followed on Twitter, the Creative Commons and the Free Idea eXchange.

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In the intro just sharing the news that my podiobook has been released. You can visit the new page for The Inner Chapters for details on how you can help promote it.

The hacker word of the week this week is email.

The feature this week is a rant on software frameworks.

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In the case of Eucalyptus, Apple apparently thought better of their rejection.  Judging by this ridiculous story from the EFF, they are still rejecting applications for the most tenuous connection to objectionable content.  The EFF conditioned its approvale of the use of its mark such that the application’s creator had to make it clear the application didn’t originate from the EFF.  I think that is pretty standard practice when a trademark owner grants such usage.  Isn’t that enough to break any tenuous chain of liability that might even remotely affect Apple?

The EFF post points out the real tragedy stories like these are bring to light:

iPhone owners who don’t want Apple playing the role of language police for their software should have the freedom to go elsewhere. This is precisely why EFF has asked the Copyright Office to grant an exemption to the DMCA for jailbreaking iPhones.

There were a rash of stories recently related to this very issue.  Application developers have started using easter eggs in their software to route around this censorship by Apple.  It isn’t even the consumer right that the EFF is speaking to but also the desire of the publishers using the channel.  Something has to give and let’s hope it gives soon while the problem is relatively more manageable.

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If you’re looking to polish your programming chops, what could possibly be better, more job-worthy experience than immersing yourself in a real live open source software project? There are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, and a few of them have arguably changed the world.

He then shares details from a personal correspondence, a developer recently undertaking a job search expressing extreme frustration at his open source experience not apparently helping persuade any perspective employers.  He culminates with the thought that Jeff uses as his bait-y head line.

One of the reasons I worked so hard on open source projects was to make job interviews easier. By providing prospective employers with large samples of publically available working code, I thought I would give them something more useful to think about than my performance on a particular coding test or whether the acronyms in the job skills matched my “years spent”. I am very aware of the hype behind open source. I’ve heard it, lived it and even spun some of it myself. But sometimes it’s good to take a sobering reality check — is open-source experience overrated?

Jeff certainly didn’t share the entirety of this person’s message but in the parts he does share with us, I fail to see the candidate doing much to actively answer the most important questions a prospective employer should be asking.

In principle, it’s simple. You’re looking for people who are

1. Smart, and
2. Get things done.

The irony that this advice comes from Joel Spolsky, Atwood’s partner in crime at Stack Overflow should not be lost on you.

As someone who has sat at least as many times on the hiring side of the table as the candidate’s, I have to say that being presented with a large blob of code by a prospect is less than helpful.  If I develop specific questions about coding style and competency then having such a work or set of works is indeed quite invaluable.  Its mere presence isn’t enough to persuade me of much of anything.

Don’t get me wrong, when I am sitting on the other side of the table, I include a small set of active open source projects as part of my arsenal.  But I don’t rely on their existence and availabilty alone.  I prepare for any given phone screen or interview by considering how my open source projects, as well as the rest of my skills and experience, are relevant for the position I am pursuing.

I see it as my job as a candidate to be my own best advocate.  I have to share truthful, accurate stories about how I am 1. smart and 2. get things done.  Open source or proprietary doesn’t really matter.  You have to get your foot in the door, spark enough interest until your interlocutor is prepared to look at some bit of specific work that you’ve done.  Merely presenting a portfolio of code doesn’t do much in the way to answer either question on its own without the narrative you provide to engage the interviewers interest and convince them your assets are not only applicable but valuable to the specific job requirements.

If you want to include your open source work as enticement, which parts of what you have done demonstrate your smarts?  Did you learn something during the development of the code that you did not know before?  Have you released multiple versions where you can speak to clear improvements made?  Is there a particularly clever or efficient bit you are justifiably proud of?

On the getting things done side, how many people are using your code?  How did you handle the inevitable bug reports?  Did you yourself use your tool or library on a larger project where it made a decisive difference in that other projects outcome?

These questions aren’t unique to open source experience.  They and many more focused questions like them are the sort of mental framing a candidate should prepare for all of their experience.  Tools, experiences, open source projects–they are all fodder for your advocacy efforts.

I am also stunned at Jeff’s lack of insight on the typical success ratio of a job seeker, even in a good economy.  To be fair, maybe he reserved any more constructive thoughts for a private correspondence.  But practically speaking, a candidate has to be prepared to continue applying for positions and advocating themselves until they have offers in hand.  Yes, multiple offers.  Not to play any games of leverage which I think are foolish and ill advised but to prevent you as a candidate from merely leaping at the first job that comes along.  Having more than one offer encourages you to consider each opportunity as a whole.

From snippets Jeff shared, it sounds like there may have been some cultural fit issues that this candidate ran into. I have run afoul of more than one organization that puts too much stock in coding tests or, worse, brain teasers.

One company seemed impressed with my enthusiasm for the job but it was part of their policy to provide coding tests. This seemed perfectly reasonable and I did it by using the first solution I thought about. When I got to the phone interview, the guy spent about five minutes telling me how inefficient my coding solution was and that they were not very impressed.

Did the candidate ask questions up front, such as whether the efficiency of the solution was a concern?  Really, though, I am more concerned at the prospective employer’s response.  It seems to me to be more of an excuse than a reason.  If they genuinely felt that efficiency was the problem, an excellent follow up question would have been to ask the candidate to characterize the solution in terms of big O notation or efficiency in general.  If that went well, then an exercise in re-factoring could provide further insight into how a candidate approaches improving their own code.  This is how an interviewer gets good information on the candidate’s intelligence and effectiveness.

In my experience, the urge to pontificate is a siren call when on the hiring side of the table.  It is heady to show off when you know more than a candidate but that’s missing the point.  If this interviewer felt this strongly, this negatively, then it would have only been worth the time to share an in-depth code review if they felt the candidate might have some potential worth mentoring.  And only then after exhausting the follow ups I recommended.  My advice to the candidate here is that this interviewer isn’t worth the time, not that it is a poor reflection on the candidate’s actual skills and experience.

Better yet, to keep this in the frame of using open source as fuel for self advocacy, did the candidate point out a specific example in his open source work that shows where he was able to address issues of efficiency?  Again, asking the interviewer to just review the totality of an open code base doesn’t demonstrate any particular grasp of the issues or questions the interviewer is pursuing.

Open source is no magic bullet.  Not a novel idea though in this case perhaps a novel application.  Just like a business cannot magically make its business model solvent by adopting open source, a developer isn’t guaranteed an edge by contributing to or starting open source projects.

I remain convinced by Jeff’s original stance, though my conviction long predates any expression of it on his blog.  Open source software can provide the benefits he lists.  But in any given situation, it is up to the developer to figure out how best to leverage that experience, whether it is with more straightforward tool support or code sharing directly enabled by the open licensing of a project or as in this case indirectly by way of the skills and experience acquired from being able to take the initiative to work in an open collaboration rather than waiting for the right opportunity, and abit of luck, to acquire those through traditional professional development.

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More recently, Mike Masnick over at Techdirt suggested that Zittrain was underestimating the benefit of open systems and overestimating the risk of closed systems. Timothy B. Lee expanded on this idea on Freedom to Tinker, pointing out he has been making that very point for some time as part of a larger trend.

From my reading of the book, and with the benefit of Zittrain’s remarks at the New America event, I believe very much that Thierer, Masnick and Lee are missing the point. Zittrain speaks glowingly in all cases about the benefits of open systems, from TCP/IP to Wikipedia. I don’t see his discussion of closed systems as a direct threat to open systems. He concedes in the book that we have had closed systems from the beginning. In fact, he makes the point that open systems triumph over closed ones by their very nature of being open. Others have made very similar and I believe accurate points about walled gardens.

I felt the point of the book was to try to understand the best means to foster that very valuable quality of open-ness. His choice of Wikipedia is very informative as that project went through a couple of large changes in direction early on before it found a model that worked, its familiar totally open model where as the early iterations were less open. It could be argued that the final model was almost entirely accidental, with the necessary precedents set by chance as editor and bounty driven variations were explored and discarded. News that Google’s Knol project hasn’t followed the same trajectory as Wikipedia is then hardly surprising, highlighting the difficulty in finding and building on the right principles to drive open-ness.

In Zittrain’s remarks at the New America talk, he focused on civic mindedness, framing open-ness much more in terms of a network ethos. In trying to understand Wikipedia’s success in the book, he looks closely at its underlying network ethos too. I don’t think it is an accident that Lee includes Lessig’s “Code” in his criticism of seeming network Cassandras. Lessig offers what I find to be a very compelling model, based on four dimensions–law, architecture, markets and norms. The first three are very well understood by scholars of all stripes. The translation of them into a network society can at times be difficult to understand but I don’t think they present anywhere near the challenge that understanding how network norms, or ethos, differ from traditional norms and ethos.

I see network freedom and open-ness as deriving wholly from the core norms or ethos of communities. Nowhere is that correlation more evident than when we examine open source and free software projects. It is much easier to gauge the degree of open-ness or freedom when it comes to software. The effect of public licenses has been studied by legal scholars and advocates, like the Free Software Foundation, intensively since their inception. We’ve had some key case law crafted and critical tests that allow us to understand the effect of the open network ethos on software pretty well even though there are still questions and ambiguities yet to explore.

Wikipedia in many ways represents the most notable, if not necessarily the first, attempt to translate that ethos to a project other than software. What Zittrain seems to be suggesting to me is that we need to understand how that translation works in order to continue that trend of fostering open-ness in all sorts of network spaces and activities. Part of what Wikipedia teaches us is that a very small but active minority that adheres closely to this ethos can generate immense benefit for a larger networked community that may be largely ignorant of the project’s key principles.

The threat, then, is more of the ignorance that closed and stagnate systems may foster that obscures how we nurture and encourage that sort of open-ness, the principle I see as key to Zittrain’s very well defined notion of generativity. Zittrain favors the term generativity over open-ness in the book seeing it as a proper superset. He even spends a good amount of the book providing fairly objective criteria for measuring generativity in systems, laying it out as a continuum not a singular goal. I don’t necessarily disagree and having a yard stick to help make better decisions is intensely useful. I think the key problem we need to understand and solve is fostering the network ethic that yields the most generativity. I think that ethos is rooted in open-ness–transparency, sharing, collaboration, the zero friction spread of ideas.

I think even if we set aside the closed and tethered examples upon which Zittrain’s critics mostly fixate, we still have a considerable challenge in understanding how open-ness arises in networked spaces and activities and how it leads to the sorts of better solutions that Zittrain suggests are worth preserving. Open-ness is not a genie that springs forth whole cloth from some bottle or magic pixie dust that can merely be sprinkled on projects and technologies to transform them in an eye blink. It is an ideal or set of ideals that needs to be continually re-examined and understand to be best applied for the most good.

In my reading, that is the challenge Zittrain has laid before us, a worthy one to which I am happy to lend thought.

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In the intro, a quick wrap up on the Creative Commons 6th birthday part hosted by Public Knowledge and the DC CopyNight crew. The first set of pictures are already up. The other pictures don’t appear to be up yet, I’ll post separately with the link once I have it. I could not find the band the SoundSprout guys brought, if anyone else remembers and sends it to me, I’ll also post that link.

Listener feedback this week is from Jed who had some thoughts on the recent discussion of MVC, unity and PHP.

The hacker word of the week this week is dot file.

The feature this week is a rant inspired by this article about Dell’s race to the bottom.

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I have downloaded and experimented with just about every version since the first public testing release. I like the ability to play media embedded in pages and the browsing metaphor makes sense for discovery of new media. I haven’t focused as much on the library management but it seems pretty typical of these sorts of applications, like Amarok, Exaile and, of course, iTunes. That is not too surprising as they all seem to have ripped popular features off from each other.

Since I am not shopping for a jukebox replacement myself, I have been most curious about Songbird’s potential as a cross platform podcatcher. I was even pleased to notice it has bundled Ogg Vorbis playback in the just now available 1.0 release candidate.

Since they added the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds, however, I have not been able to figure out how to make that feature work. Am I missing something?! I see the subscription in my library but no media attached or available for download. I right-click and hit update…nothing. I am sure I am doing something wrong.

I’d love to be able to recommend Songbird so I don’t have to start off new podcast listeners with the question of what OS they use. Plus, you know, it is open source and like Firefox has a robust extension mechanism. Those qualities together give it great potential to shoot past the other offerings but I cannot in good conscience recommend it for a podcatcher if I cannot figure out how to make that feature even work.

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In the intro, a quick review of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem.

Listener feedback this week is from Alex and Paul Fischer. The RADIUS server that Paul mentioned is StellarRADIUS.

The hacker word of the week this week is display hack.

The feature this week is a rant on the phenomenon of information overload.

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I understand that this is not the same as BlueTooth or WiFi and even in the abstract at Slashdot they mention the focus of the group on trying to better address the user experience around just sending bulk data between devices within proximity of each other.

Is this a problem that really needs to be solved? If so, why not solve it in software, like zeroconf, regardless of the presence or absence of a cable? I’d love to just plug in my mass storage, quad interface drive and have it smart out which files I want to go where, let alone having that all happen without the drudgery of mating interfaces with appropriate, and sometimes costly, wires.

I think I can see the appeal of the idea but I question the need. When PDAs were more popular, they all had the ability to transfer virtual cards wirelessly though not all of them interoperated equally well. Some could even share other data and applications over the same infrared protocol with a minimum of fuss. In my experience the novelty soon wore off and the advantages of traditional network transfers and portable media as well as the physicality of printed business cards long outlasted the draw of transfer over infrared.

I get that TransferJet is essentially wireless USB with some zeroconf like magic thrown in for good measure. It is not entirely a fair comparison to the decrepit infrared transfer technology of yore. It isn’t the technology I am trying to compare but rather the lack of a real problem or need.

Even with the rise of home media systems, is the task of running appropriate cable so arduous that people will line up for effective wireless replacements? With drop in docks for most portable media players, even there the appeal of high speed, short range wireless seems limited. TransferJet seems to be promising low power consumption but it isn’t going to be free, it will be a cumulative cost on top of the power requirements for video playback on my PMP. If you dock your player to give it power, then will you even notice the addition of a permanent data cable from your dock into your stack?

Also, given the range of the spec, you are talking about dropping your PMP right on your existing media stack. That beautiful touch interface is now no longer in reach. You are going to need to add a remote control of some sort to boot which seems like a hefty offset to the ease and convenience of all that high speed, wireless data transfer.

I am far from convinced that this technology will be any more secure than its predecessors. Statements like the range is too short for feasible data theft make me bristle. Are these companies not familiar with what hackers have done with off the shelf components to snarf all forms of wireless already in use? You really think that close proximity nonsense is going to stand up against the same sort of determined hack?

I won’t even get into the problems of specifications designed by committee. All this money, effort and such high profile companies and you’d think they’d solve a problem I really have as a consumer rather than introducing yet another standard that will no doubt have, or already has, competitors that just confuse and cost the consumer more.

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The hacker word of the week this week is demon.

The feature this week is a rant on my sole complaint with the genre of steam punk.

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The hacker word of the week this week is deep space.

The feature is a mild rant about what I am calling the Three Year Itch, a phenomenon I have observed in my professional life related to the typical duration of each of my successive jobs and how it seems to be biasing me towards voluntarily splitting my career up on that particular interval.

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The hacker word of the week this week is crawling horror.

The feature this week is a rant on my concerns about the acceptance of technological illiteracy amongst our leaders. While the problem is not new, my thoughts were spurred by this Washington Post op-ed.

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I now have a promo! Thanks SusanZ and Biscuit of the Kulture Kast. I have a script for another one in the works, too. You can grab either a raw audio (AIF) version or a high quality (256Kbps) MP3 version. Neither version has the bed music I use in the show to make them easier to remix. If you want a version with bed music, let me know and I’ll happily post one.

The hacker word of the week this week is content-free.

The feature this week is a rant on the “impending bandwidth crunch”.

• TechDirt discussion on bandwidth crunch
• Wikipedia on dark fiber
• David Weinberger on delaminating the telcos

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The hacker word of the week this week is computron.

The feature this week is a rant where I consider the question of whether fair use is a right.

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The DC area CopyNight was last night. Dennis McDonald has an excellent write up. He, of course, did not mention the iPhone inspired goatse. Trust me, do not ask.

I received some more listener feedback, again from Paul Fischer. This time he called in about the rant on social networks.

The hacker word of the week this week is coefficient of X

The feature this week is a new rant on the working of miracles. The circumstances that inspired this rant have also been encouraging my unusual uptick in beer consumption lately. Thankfully, this situation has settled out.

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He quickly gets hung up on the number of manual steps involved in installing an application bundle and wonders why the convention on the Mac is not to use an installer. Sure, going be number of steps, the Mac is longer. I don’t think that makes it more complex or harder. And it completely misses a critical difference between an application bundle (which is not unique to the Mac by the way) and a typical Windows application.

The point of an application bundle is that it is self contained. No external pieces that must be set up just so in order for the application to run. Delete the bundle and the application is gone. No linger registry entries. Yeah, there may be some preference files but they are on the file system, in a standard location, where they can easily be found, identified and discarded if desired. And safely, too.

Application bundles are also usually agnostic of where they are installed. You can put them on your desktop, in your own folder or wherever you find them easiest to use. Granted, this seems to be something even seasoned Mac users miss. A very common issue I have seen with newer Mac users is they leave the applications in the disc image file, even if they keep it in their dock. Launching such an application bundle from the dock still just works, though, opening and mounting the disc image to get at the bundle. I’ll admit that I did this once or twice when I got my very first Mac.

Sure, Mac developers could use the very robust installer that is bundled with the OS X. Some kinds of software, like low level libraries and kernel extensions, do indeed use the installer to make sure all the pieces parts end up just so. The uninstaller could use some work, but the tools are there to build it out. From the command line, you can easily audit where all the parts of a .PKG file went. And as with application bundles, usually, it is safe to just go ahead and manually delete those files.

The installer, though, adds a speed bump to that assumption that the bundles and files are safely user modifiable. The choice to distribute Mac applications as bundles in disc images re-inforces the feeling that these are meant to be safely handle by the user at the expense of a few more steps.

Speaking of those steps for a moment what irks me is that the example Atwood references is not even typical. Most developers do not compress their disc images, so the silliness about digging out the image file is rarely an issue. More and more developers are also adding symbolic links in the disc image with a nice background to the folder that simplifies the process even further without preventing more advanced users for dragging the bundle off to a different, preferred location.

How many horror stories have you heard over the years of a Windows user trying to move or remove an application and disastrously harming their PC? There is no real reason this must be so other than convention and inertia. The Windows installer may be one click, but it is also a black box that band aids a process and end product that most Windows developers do not want the user touching.

Application bundles may seem “harder” to install to the uninitiated but re-inforces that the bundle is merely another kind of file that the user may safe move, remove or copy just like any other kind of file without worry.

And if you want to play a numbers game, how long does a typical setup.exe take to run compared to copying a bundle? All you have to do with the bundle is copy it. You get the same progress meter as any other kind of file copy. With an installer, other steps may be performed and you are limited to the feedback the developer chose to give. Is it copying files? Which ones and where? What does it mean when it says it is configuring?

Mac is only one example of different ways to get new software onto a system. Taking the installer forward to a more logical conclusion you arrive at the package management systems available as an integral part of Linux distributions. Wonder why Jeff didn’t take a swipe at say Ubuntu’s typical software installation? Nice golden hammer you have there.

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However, this post irked me within the very first paragraph.

The vulnerability he’s reporting on came out of the Month of Kernel Bugs project:

At the beginning of the month, a security researcher known only as LMH started the project to highlight unpatched flaws that are so severe that malicious attackers could use them to completely subvert the security of vulnerable computers.

After reading the project’s web site and the interview with LMH, I am not sure how Krebs arrived at this characterization. Quoting from the interview:

LMH: The Month of Kernel Bugs aims to demonstrate the current state of kernel code in the different operating systems available today, from a security/quality perspective.

Yes, they are researching security issues, among other things, but these guys are kernel hackers, not attackers. A milder rebuke may be warranted, around the ethical issues of how their research may be used by others, but to immediately jump to the conclusion that LMH and his collaborators are trying to “completely subvert the security of vulnerable computers” is soft thinking, at best, and fear mongering, at worst.

The crux of what I object to in Krebs’ write up, though, is this particular logical contortion:

I used Safari to click on the file indicated that the exploit had indeed resulted in a “kernel panic,” which in most cases means that if someone wanted to use the exploit to install malicious code, they could do so regardless of the security settings or precautions already present on the machine.

Yes, a kernel panel could be the result of a flaw that leads to code execution. In this particular case, the flaw does indeed appear exploitable in this manner. But Krebs’ wording makes it seem like any and every time you see the restart message indicating a kernel panic, hordes of ninja hackers are running all sorts of vile code on your box when this is not necessarily the case.

He also sets the problem up as if the corrupted DMG that LMH provides as a demonstration results in code execution, in other words that there is a real and manifest exploit loose in the wild. I don’t see anything in the bug posting to indicate this is the case. Yes, memory corruption is a known venue for arbitrary code execution, but demonstrating the memory corruption is not the same as having a full blown exploit that users need to take direct action to prevent.

I also think it is irresponsible of him not to at least attempt to suggest a workaround or remedy, especially when the bug report itself does so–disable the option in Safari’s preferences that automatically opens files. About the only issue he gets right, and he’s quoting someone else, is that the fact that file system mounting is normally a privileged operation means any flaws in this code can take advantage of privilege escalation to which other purely user space applications do not ordinarily have access.

Look, I understand that many feel stirring the pot, a la Dvorak, is a sure fire recipe for page hits, but in the case of security reporting, I strongly feel accuracy of reporting is more important than anything else.

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Bruce, as always, explores the issue much more deeply. This is another case that reinforces the discussion around DRM being purely about protecting existing business models, versus serving consumer need. The comparison between the sub-optimal release schedule of legitimate security fixes, a definite consumer focused activity, and making sure Microsoft doesn’t offend any of its heavy DRM licensees really drives the point home quite clearly.

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Coming fully into her geekhood so late in life has offered both of us some valuable insights. When Jackson’s LotR movies first came out, she was as psyched as anyone to see them. After three hours of Fellowship, she really had had enough. I immediately dug out my copy of the novels and started re-devouring them. She admitted that the movies were pretty, despite our local theater getting one of the bad copies of the first one, but just didn’t get their appeal as a geek standard.

This experience has been repeated to varying degrees with a lot of other works that would be considered geek icons. And, yet, her geek nature remains undiminished. She worked at the local renaissance festival for years, and through her self adoption of podcasting, has even re-connected with the music a little after many years absence. She totally geeks out on historical fiction, whether in book or movie form. When we were both avidly into historical re-enacting, she kept us garbed in style that would put some movie production companies to shame.

I tend to fit the more classical geek mold, I suppose, so before meeting and becoming involved with my wife, had never really questioned whether it was the outward expression or a purely inner quality that made one a geek. However, even before I met her, I had some experiences that gave me an unconscious appreciation for the plurality of geekdom.

My older brother and I are separated by a space of five years. As a pre-teen, teenager and young adult, I loved fantasy novels. Terry Brooks, Robert Jordan, Piers Anthony, Katherine Kurtz, Jennifer Roberson, Robert Asprin–these and more were my staples. My brother was into science fiction, both hard SF and military SF. Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Frederik Pohl, Poul Anderson; I’m sure I am forgetting some.

At the time, I couldn’t understand why he enjoyed such a different set of authors and genres from me. Yet he was my big brother, and I clearly identified with him as a fellow geek. I never questioned his geek nature, based on our difference in tastes. It was clear that we both sprang from the same geek source, my mother, also an avid reader of SF and fantasy.

What I have to come to realize and hope to share with Mur through these anecdotes is that Geek is not measured by some external yardstick. So what if all her friends are fans of Roger Zelazny. It doesn’t matter if she could care less for the man’s works. Just because all of the geeks around her seem to share the same likes and dislikes doesn’t make her any less of a geek if she happens to be locally unique.

Mur, revel in and relish the exploration of your own, unique geek nature. Don’t let anyone or anything make you feel like it is diminished or inadequate. If they are your friends, they will respect a difference of tastes or opinions. Don’t stop sharing, though, as in my experience, one of the marks of a true geek is the open-ness to, and even passion for, entirely new things over which to to geek out. I hope you get to enjoy the experience of converting one of your friends to one of your unique geek passions. If you have already, I encourage you to reflect on that some more. I think that would go a long way towards offsetting that occasional urge to lie about common interests and give you a much more healthy way to share your beloved geek nature with those geographically close around you.

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