- Here’s more evidence that you should never, but never use Adobe Reader, especially on Linux. I haven’t used it for a couple of years, and if a machine comes into my care with that bugfarm on it I uninstall it immediately. I tried the free version of Tracker Software’s PDF XChange, then bought the pro version, and I’ve been using it ever since. Highly recommended.
- No matter what PDF reader you use, make very sure that you disable Javascript in the reader. JS is probably the second most dangerous thing in the software world right now, after unbounded string functions. Fortunately, you can turn JS off a lot easier than you can spot software that still uses unbounded string functions.
- Having hand-made countless hookup wire jumpers for breadboard work in my life (or at least since 1975, when I first got a push-down breadboard together) I was pleased to see a brilliant hack in Make: soak the glue off a block of ordinary desk stapler staples with acetone, and they make perfect (if short) jumpers.
- From the same trip through the Make Blog comes a goofy and rather literal “third hand” for inspection, soldering, etc. If one of those came to, um, hand, I might even try it, though I think I’d stop short of the nail polish.
- I’ve seen a fair number of Wi-Fi ad hoc networks come and go since I got into Wi-Fi in 1999, and all of them were far more trouble than they were worth. Byzantium looks better on a number of counts, and I wonder if any readers have tried it.
- I used to burn these in my wood stove, and now we’re told that the entire global economy rests on them. It probably does. Alas, they’re mostly not made of wood anymore.
- Also from Slate: Kids who passed the marshmallow test not only did better in nearly all aspects of life, but they weigh less at age 45. Their super-power may be simple impulse control, or it may be more than that: I’ve long suspected that some people are simply addicted to wanting. If it isn’t the marshmallows it’ll be something else.
- From Tom Roderick comes word that we’ve finally gotten a maser to work at room temperature.
- There is a new PDF-based magazine devoted to the Raspberry Pi board. Considering that it’s ad-free and they’re not charging for it, I think it’s pretty well done.
software
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- Don’t forget the annular solar eclipse that will touch the Southwestern US this Sunday, May 20.
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: Ignorosphere, the region from about 120,000 feet altitude to the lowest stable orbit. (It’s a flip term for the mesosphere.) It’s too high for winged aircraft or balloons, and not empty enough for orbiting spacecraft. Sampling it is difficult (one-shot sounding rockets are all we have in terms of tools) and we know less about it than any other region of near space.
- After a long conversation on the subject with mobile developer David Beers the other day, I stumbled on an article that drives home the problematic nature of Android app development: There are actually four thousand different Androids. (Maybe more.)
- I’m seeing more and more videos in, um, bad taste being posted to my friends’ Facebook feeds by something called Socialcam. The suggestion is that those who post have actually viewed the videos, but that’s not true. Socialcam reserves the right to post stuff to your Facebook feed that you have not viewed and have no knowledge of. Tear that damned thing out by the roots.
- This certainly makes me wish that I liked corn more than I do.
- An interesting study here adds fuel to the fire over suggestions that keeping a consistent sleep schedule helps you lose weight. I.e., don’t try to “make up” lost sleep on the weekends. Doesn’t work. I’ve been saying this for years, based on a lecture series I took at the Mayo Clinic: Getting five hours of sleep a night will make you fat and kill you before your time. People get angry at me for suggesting that they be in bed, lights-out, between 9:30 and 10 PM if they have to get up at six to get to school or work, but that’s probably what it takes. A handful of people may be able to get by on five or six hours a night. The usual human-traits bell curve suggests that you are almost certainly not one of them.
- If you remember a speculation I made some time back about dogs and human origins, well here’s another: That dogs helped us drive the Neanderthals to extinction. I’m dubious. My sense is that their lack of dogs allowed the Neanderthals to drive themselves to extinction via dawn raids. Dogs made dawn raids difficult, and so we failed to wipe our own species out. (I haven’t seen any evidence yet that Neanderthals kept dogs, but of course I’m still looking.)
- If you don’t know what a “zoetrope” is, go look it up before you behold the pizzoetrope, which is essentially an edible animation created by spinning a pizza. Sounds loopy (as it were) but it works.
Chrysanth WebStory Is Not Free
Because as best I can tell Zoundry Raven is abandonware (it hasn’t been updated in almost four years) I’ve been sniffing around for a client-side blog editor that’s still alive and kicking. I came across something peculiar the other day, which highlights a trend in small-scale commercial software that I find extremely annoying: Hiding your pricing structure and obfuscating your business model.
The product in question is Chrysanth WebStory. I went up to the firm’s Web site to see what it is, what it does and what it costs. Figuring out what it is was not easy. Figuring out what it does was easier, though I keep getting the creeping impression that I don’t have the whole story. Figuring out what it costs is impossible, apart from near certainty that it is not free. (More on that shortly.)
When I evaluate commercial software, I do a certain amount of research before I even download the product. I look for a company Web site. I look for buzz, in the form of online discussion and product reviews posted by individuals on their own blogs, and not sites supported by ads. I make sure I understand how the company makes money (one-time cost? subscription?) and how much money is involved. Only then do I download the software and give it a shot.
The first red flag with WebStory is that there is almost no buzz online. The free download is available all over the place, but almost no one has anything to say about it. The site itself is extremely stingy with hard information. I managed to dope out that what WebStory really is is a blogging service. There is a free client-side editor app that connects to the company servers, where blog entries are stored in a database. From the database you can feed one or more blogs hosted elsewhere, or a blog hosted on the firm’s own servers.
There are two license levels for the service, casual and professional. The casual license is limited, and to activate it you must present a certain unstated number of undefined “credits.” Here’s where it gets a little freaky: To find out more about the service’s cost you have to establish an account with WebStory, which involves handing them an email address and creating a password.
Read that again: You have to create an account before you can even find out what the service costs. Nowhere on the public portions of the site do I see any mention of what credits cost, nor what the professional license costs. It’s true that they do specify that credits can be earned by writing reviews of the product, but for people who would just prefer to pay for the service, there’s no clue at all. The service is thus “free” in the sense that you can use it without paying money for it as long as you keep reviewing it and earning credits. (Or something.) In my view, it doesn’t matter if you are required to pay in money or credits. Paying anything at all for the Chrysanth WebStory service means that it is not free.
The almost complete lack of discussion of the product online makes me wonder if more than a dozen people are actually using it. The online forums have 14 posts total, across all forum topics. Discussion of the product in other online venues is virtually absent. Of the handful I found, this one was not reassuring.
I do not object to paying for software or online services. I do it all the time. I have a lot of sympathy for developers who want to explore new business models and ways to make money. I can also understand that linking a piece of client-side software to a server-side system is one way to eliminate software piracy as an issue. None of that bothers me in the slightest. What I object to is the secrecy. Tell me up front and in big type: What does your product/service cost?
And how in any weird dimension of the multiverse can it help sales to keep the price a secret?
Odd Lots
- One of the best parts of Wired‘s site is their volcano blog, run by geologist Erik Klemetti. He currently has a delicious demolishment of all the panic over this weekend’s perigee moon up over there, and the only sad part is that the people who need to read it the most won’t read it at all.
- I am pondering a trip to Lake McConaughy in western Nebraska on or about my 60th birthday on June 29th. I’m going to park on the beach, throw an antenna into a tree and crank up the Icom, run the dogs around, look at the stars, and roast marshmallows over a fire. The schedule isn’t clear yet, but I would be most honored to have any of you join me. More here as I know it.
- The more choices purchasers have, the harder it is for any individual seller to get a product noticed. Here are some hard facts about iOS apps and their very unevenly distributed success. I intuit that an identical model already holds sway in ebooks, or will very soon.
- Listen to yourself…then check to see if what you’re saying is described on this poster. What they call “Tu quoque” is what I call “the Fifth-Grade Defense;” i.e. “Your guy is a crook!” answered instantly by “Your guy is a crook too!” Wonderful summary that should be on everyone’s wall. (Thanks to Michael Covington for the link.)
- From Bruce Baker comes a link to a decent piece in Scientific American on the notion that dogs take humans into account within their problem-solving minds, and their doing so might be considered “tool use”…with us as the tools. Recall how Dash brought me his empty food bowl for a refill.
- A new twins study suggests that sleeping for less than seven hours a night activates a gene that causes weight gain. I first heard this at a Mayo Clinic lecture twelve years ago, and it’s nice to see it finally elbowing its way into conventional wisdom.
- Here’s yet another very good piece on the 1859 Carrington Event, which was the strongest solar storm in recorded history.
- Somebody did some analysis on 37,000 Billboard chart song titles since (egad) 1890, and learned that those song titles had a vocabulary of only 9,000 words. Here’s a cloud chart of the most common song title words. Betcha can’t guess the #1 word. Actually, betcha can. Try before you click to the chart.
- Evidently identity theft is still a problem even after you’re dead.
- Speaking of dead…here’s an interesting story on the near-death experience, which is interesting as much for the type of surgery they describe (basically, kill the patient, fix the artery, and then bring her back to life) as what the patient experienced while she was “dead.” (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- I like the dog…but I don’t get the joke.
Odd Lots
- The Big Honking Sliding Puzzle Project continues, and today Carol and I are mostly stuffing boxes downstairs. Mover guys coming Tuesday. The carpeting is coming out on Wednesday, and the plastic tarps will go up. Thursday they drill holes in the slab and start pumping gooey stuff underneath to stabilize the soil and raise the slab to where it originally was. We are shopping for new carpeting, and will begin choosing new paint colors tomorrow morning. The lower level will not be back in livable shape until mid-January, but when it is it will be much improved.
- I do not do walled gardens. I absolutely do not do walled gardens. This gentleman from Harvard Law School has done a good job capturing my unease with vendor-controlled hardware and especially software.
- Reader Nick DeSmith sends a pointer to a wonderful site on numeric-readout vacuum tubes of various species, from humdrum nixies to one I had never heard of before: A Compactron-based micro-CRT with ten guns. I consider Nixies at least to be steampunk-possible, since there’s no physics involved that wasn’t understood in 1900. Not sure they’ve been used in the steampunk canon so far; if they have, let me know.
- There were giant beavers during the Pleistocene. There have been talking beavers on TV in the past, though they weren’t all that huge. Now there’s an angry giant beaver. Don’t piss one off unless you’re wearing the right overalls.
- I’ll meet your giant, jeans-eating beaver and raise you a giant cricket so big it eats carrots! (Thanks to Esther Schindler for the link.)
- If giant beavers or giant crickets aren’t your passion, how about miniature forests of old-growth moss that may be thousands of years old? Such are found in Antactica, and by spotting nuclear test fallout debris along the length of their stalks, we can see how slowly they grow. Think, slow. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- I keep tools and even a wi-fi bridge node in ammo cans. Why not wine?
- The many faces of Superman. (Thanks once again to Frank Glover for the link.)
- This has some steampunk resonance, but (oldster that I am; how old were you in 1966?) I keep hearing an endless loop in the back of my head: “Batfan! Batfan! Batfan, Batfan, Batfan. Na na na na na na na na na na Batfan!”
Odd Lots
- Pete Albrecht sent a YouTube pointer to some riot footage in Warsaw taken by an RC helicopter. If we can’t have flying cars here in the 21st century, well, this is better than nothing.
- Linux Mint 11 does not handle the integrated graphics on the Dell Optiplex SX270. Even the liveCD version doesn’t detect video correctly and is basically unusable. Kubuntu 11.10, by contrast, works correctly on this admittedly creaky machine. (Xubuntu is up next.) What is Mint doing wrong on the video side?
- Cyanogen will have an Ice Cream Sandwich version of their bootable Android distro in January.
- Back when I built telescopes, I used black spray paint for the inside of the tube. NASA now has something maybe a little bit better. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- I have been unable to figure out what the active devices are on this audio power amp, but they’d better be good ones: It’ll cost you $650,000. (Thanks to Eric Bowersox for the link.)
- Nothing makes you feel old better than recalling that when the world’s first commercial microprocessor was released 40 years ago, I was already a sophomore in college. Hey you kids! Get off my accumulator!
- I inherited about a microgram of St. Francis of Assisi from my godmother, all mounted in a cool little monstrance. Alas, under the microscope it looks like dirt. If you want a bigger (and more self-evidential) piece of a saint, you can have St. Vitalis’ skull for as little as 800 euros. (Then again, considering his specialty, they probably got more for his pelvis.)
- Yes, death is nearly always fatal, poor guy.
- And if he was taking Avandia, he should call his lawyer, (very) long distance.
Minty Failness
I gave it a good shot and I tried, honestly I did. But Canonical’s Unity UI simply doesn’t work for me. It’s obvious that Canonical is trying to create a single UI that will serve end-user computing from top to bottom. It’s just as obvious to me (now that I’ve had six weeks or so to play around with a Droid X2) that there is no single “end-user computing” anymore. Desktops are fundamentally different from smartphones, or anything else (tablets, possibly; we’ll see) that is primarily tap-and-consume. I’m having no trouble working the Android UI on my phone, and Android habits don’t intrude on my desktop synapses. I’m not confused or in any way slowed down by the differences between the two, no more than I’m confused about the differences between a shovel and a rake.
So if Unity is all I get under Ubuntu, Ubuntu has to go. Others seem to agree with me, and at times the discussion gets disturbingly violent. Online I’m seeing that huge numbers of people are fleeing Ubuntu for Linux Mint, which I’d barely heard of a year ago. I have to smile a little bit, because Linux Mint is Ubuntu, basically pulled back to a variation on the GNOME 2.3 interface. The upcoming release (Mint 12) will move to GNOME 3, which worries me a little (I like GNOME 2) but I’ve seen word that Mint 12 will allow users to have something very like the old UI–which is precisely what Canonical did not do with Ubuntu and Unity. It was Unity or the highway, and boy, it’s bumper-to-bumper out there.
There’s an enormous issue of why we’re suddenly tossing older and much-loved UIs away without nary a glance over our shoulders, when there’s no compelling reason to adopt one of the new models. Programmers like to create Shiny New Stuff, fersure. I in turn don’t like to change the way I interact with the machine I use, unless such changes make me a lot more effective. So far, the costs in relearning ordinary tasks far outweigh the fairly paltry benefits for me.
I’ll take up that issue eventually. In the meantime, I’ve hit the highway, and installed Linux Mint 11 Katya in its own partition here on the quad core. The OS looks great and works the way I’m used to working. I have some minor quibbles, like the failure of the Software Manager to tell me when it’s done installing something. Ubuntu does this well, but Mint installs and gives no sign. This was critical when I installed WINE, since (because WINE is not an app, strictly speaking) it’s tricky to determine if WINE was fully and correctly installed. Because running Software Manager again and selecting WINE still indicates “not installed,” I think there’s something wrong.
Small stuff. The big deal is that Mint doesn’t work well with the integrated graphics on my EVGA NForce e-7150/630i Core 2 Quad motherboard. The default graphics drivers worked, but looked clunky and don’t support effects. Installing the recommended proprietary NVIDIA drivers produced weird graphics failures, including windows refusing to render once they’re over a certain size. (Some windows would not render at all, and simply remained blank and white even when first instantiated.) Using the supposedly experimental NVIDIA 173 drivers worked better, but still fails on certain apps, especially Stellarium, which worked exactly once and then comes up with a blank, black window every time. I’m not willing to give up Stellarium, so at this point Linux Mint is on hold while I wait for Mint 12 Lisa.
Linux Mint has supposedly become the 4th most popular OS on the planet. It’ll be interesting to see if that continues to be the case once they cut in the mandatory GNOME 3 upgrade. I’ll give GNOME 3 the same consideration I gave Unity, but I’m also looking closely at the Xfce UI and Xubuntu. It’s going to be an interesting year in the Linux world. I’m keeping all my old Linux installer .iso files, trust me.
Odd Lots
- ESR on Canonical’s Unity interface. What He Said. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- Interfaces, yeah. Here’s a thoughtful take on touchscreen interfaces that’s worth hearing. I have a (now ancient) iPod and consider the clickwheel brilliant. I didn’t know it was becoming extinct.
- Last night Eric Bowersox showed me how he took a stock Nook Color and rebooted it from a MicroSD card into stock Android Gingerbread packaged by Cyanogen. Eric downloaded the OS and installed it on a card himself (he’s a hardware guy par excellance), but you can actually buy a MicroSD card with alternate Android distros like Cynamogen preinstalled. Just pop the card into the corner pocket of your Nook Colo and reboot. These include N2A and RootMyNookColor. I’d sure like a Xoom 2, but when we’re going to see it in the US is unclear.
- If the upcoming dual-core Nook Tablet’s screen is big enough to render technical PDFs well, I’d be sorely tempted–especially if Cyanogen and the like will boot it into stock Android. (I would like an 8″ display, though.)
- Many have sent me the link to Things That Turbo Pascal 3.0 Is Smaller Than. It’s actually a lot simpler than that: Turbo Pascal 3.0 is smaller than just about any executable file that does anything useful on a modern OS. How small? Under 40K. K, not M. You know, that letter we almost never use anymore.
- Steve Ballmer evidently didn’t blow Microsoft’s chances to compete in the tablet marketplace all by himself. Oh, no. He Had Help.
- Here’s a list of failed DRM schemes. Every one of them helped turn paying users into pirates, and accomplished nothing useful beyond stroking content industry gigaegos. DRM stinks.
- To an extent, I agree with this article: Cheap wine is not necessarily better than more expensive wine. That said, the very cheapest wines are not as good as wines in the $6-$10 range. Gallo in particular has disappointed me.
- There are USB air fresheners. I’m not kidding. If DRM stinks, is this the answer?
- FUNEX? S,VFX. FUNEM? S,VFM. OK. LFMNX.
Odd Lots
- Maybe it’s some of the recent solar storms (the sunspots were not spectacularly high) but I heard both Guyana and the Cayman Islands on 17m the other day–the first time I’ve seen any significant life on that band in several years.
- I have yet to find an Android ebook reader app that will open and render an MS .lit file, of which I have several. No surprise: Having blown an early and promising start in ebook reader software, MS has recently announced that it is withdrawing the app. Reader is actually a nice piece of work, and the first ebook reader program I used regularly. DRMed .lit books are now just noise, and the rest of them will have to be translated by something like Calibre. DRM, especially when it’s abandoned, trains people to locate cracks and become pirates. Way to go, guys.
- SanDisk just announced a thumb drive about the size of its own USB connector cap. 4, 8, or 16GB. I’ve now broken two thumb drives by leaving them plugged into the rear edge of a laptop and then tipping the laptop back. If that’s a common problem, this is definitely the solution.
- What do you do with the Moon once you rope it down? (Watering it would be interesting, though Mars needs it more.)
- This guy thinks like I do. Just ask Carol. (Thanks to Michael Covington for the link.)
- I recently found a PDF describing the first computer I ever programmed for money. It was a…1 MHz…8080. It cost a boggling number of 1979 dollars, so Xerox ended up using most of the initial production run in-house. The 3200 cast a long shadow: I got so used to sitting in front of it that when I built a computer table later that year for my S100 CP/M system, I made it just high enough that the keyboard was precisely as far off the floor as the 3200’s, a height that I use in computer tables to this day.
- How long did it take you to figure out what this really was? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Russian President Medvedev has taken a liking to ReactOS, a long-running and mostly ignored attempt to create a driver-compatible, win32-friendly (via WINE) open source Windows clone. He’s suggesting that the Russian government fund it. Now if Medvedev can convince Putin, we could have quite a project on our hands.
- I’d never thought much about how you recycle a dead refrigerator. Now I know.
- Begorrah! Zombies are not a new problem. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- And if that machine gun in your hollow leg won’t slow them down, send them into sugar crash.
Goggling Google Goggles
As at least ten people by now have written to tell me (though Eric the Fruit Bat gets credit for being the first) Google has a project targeted at recognizing things in the physical world and looking them up online, as I wistfully wished for in my September 17, 2011 entry: Google Goggles. I vaguely recall hearing of the product on its first release, which (because it was for Android) was not something I could fool with on Windows.
There’s even a word for the general concept, though it’s not one I would use: augmented reality. I’m not looking for things to augment reality so much as simply document it–but in this age of exaggeration, I guess that’s pretty much the same thing.
Google Googles is a mobile app currently available for Android and iPhone. You aim your smartphone (assuming it has a camera, as virtually all do) at something, and tap a button. The phone takes a photo, and then (I assume) there’s a conversation with the Google mothership to see if the photo resembles anything already in the recognition database. The app is free, at least for Android, and I’ve been having some good fun with it trying to see what its limits are. Here’s my report:
Google Goggles recognized the following things:
- A bottle of Coke Zero.
- A conventional painting of Jesus Christ.
- A conventional painting of St. Francis of Assisi.
- Two different contemporary paintings of Ben Franklin.
- A bottle of Campus Oaks Old Vine Zinfandel.
- The Colonel Sanders portion of the KFC logo. (Without “KFC”.)
- The Virginia Cavaliers alternate logo.
- The iconic Rolling Stones tongue logo.
- The Insane Clown Posse logo.
- The Dave Matthews Band logo.
- The Hieroglyphics band logo.
It did not recognize the following things:
- Me. No clue about my standard publicity photo, as seen in my blog header, even though it’s logged in Google Images.
- A headshot of Isaac Asimov, also found on Google Images. I guess I don’t feel so bad.
- QBit. (It states clearly that animals generally aren’t recognized.) It did say that he resembles a poodle, a kitten, and two bunnies. Goggles isn’t the first entity that thought QBit was a poodle, though I won’t mention the kitten part to him.
- My Celtic peat cross. It said the cross resembled several tall, skinny women dressed in black. I can almost see that.
- The Nike swoosh. Failed four times. Now that surprised me.
- A tape measure.
- A fork. It thought the fork resembled the Statue of Liberty.
- A knife. It thought the knife resembled a white bunny.
- A 430-ohm, 2-watt carbon resistor. It thought it resembled the Canadian flag.
- A cordless telephone handset.
- My Weber gas grill.
- A pair of headphones. It said my headphones resembled a wristwatch.
- A screwdriver, though it did say my screwdriver resembled photos of other screwdrivers.
I’m reasonably happy with this record, considering that Goggles is more a proof-of-concept than anything close to what I want to document (ok, awright already, augment) reality. It does seem to prefer things that are enormously popular. My first suspicion was that Goggles would not recognize anything that did not include OCR-able text, but most of the logos tested have no text, nor did the paintings of Jesus, St. Francis, and Franklin. Goggles had an impression that QBit was a small white animal, and there were flickers of recognition of a screwdriver. So far, so good. Cripes, it’s only 2011.
So. Share your success stories, if you have any. I’m modestly impressed.
