splintax

More anti-corporation ranting. Bring down the machine!

2006-11-16T17:11:00.000+08:00

I've just spent the last few hours on and off the phone to Telstra Bigpond, another company I'd recommend never doing business with if it's at all possible.

Bigpond usually supplies its customers with Alcatel "SpeedTouch" ADSL modems. I've no idea why they do this, as the SpeedTouch series are anything but speedy; they're crappy even for ADSL modems (ie. not ADSL2 or 2+). Alcatel also managed to write their web management system software (where you log into the modem over Ethernet via http://10.1.1.1 or similar) so inefficient that you frequently have to wait more than a few seconds for it to load over a 100 Mbps connection.

However, recently, a SpeedTouch modem died inexplicably; no matter what was done, we couldn't get the red light to go green (which meant it wouldn't even allocate addresses via DHCP, let alone connect to the Internet). Bigpond's advice was to re-sign with them on another 6-month contract. However, after I left (this occurred at a place of work), they called back saying they offer no such contract, and instead advised us to "just go out and buy a new ADSL modem".

Which we did. However, the modem recommended to us was an ADSL2/2+ modem. It wasn't able to connect to Bigpond despite the fact that the hardware's meant to be backwards-compatible. Bigpond is the only ISP in Australia, to my knowledge, using PPPoA instead of PPPoE. I have no idea what the advantages of PPPoA are, but it sure is a hassle when configuring modems.

Anyway, so we returned the Belkin one, and went out and got a new modem supporting PPPoE. Unfortunately, connection failed yet again, despite the fact that we had all the settings correctly set. The reason? The password given to us earlier that day was incorrect. (We had to get the password reset, as we weren't sure that we had the correct one.) This, of course, was discovered after I suggested it multiple times. The 'technician' on the phone at Bigpond seemed convinced that we needed to get a wireless router so that we could plug the modem in right at the wall socket. Apparently, ADSL has "no chance of working if the telephone cable is longer than 3 metres". I appreciate that this is a potential problem, but the service was working fine for over 2 years before the SpeedTouch modem died.

I won't even mention the other peculiarities of the Bigpond system, like the fact that you need to be an "authorized representative" on the account in order to do anything with their tech support team. I've been listed down as an authorized representative on this particular account probably five or six times, but each time, they say they have no record of me and require to speak to the account holder. I suppose that's fine. But the real pain is that they won't even check the password for me unless I'm the account holder. ("Hi, I suspect that I have an incorrect password and I have no internet access, could you please check to see whether this is the correct password for me?") The only possible reason I can imagine for doing this is that they want to prevent someone from "brute-forcing" a password by repeatedly asking the technician to check it. Surely if you wanted to do so, you'd check it by using your own internet account (since you're trying to steal someone's details), and logging into the "toolbox"?

Also, usernames have random suffices depending on the type of account you have. Dial-up accounts are username@bigpond.com.au (I think). "Broadband" accounts are username@bigpond.net.au, or sometimes, username@bigpond.com.au. But.. "Broadband BYO modem" accounts are username@bigpond. (But when you sign into their online toolbox, you have to use username@bigpond.net.au.) Can't they just stick with 'username', like every other ISP? This also presents a problem: "So, if this originally was a Broadband package, but now I'm using my own non-Telstra modem, do I use @bigpond or @bigpond.net.au?" "I don't know." (Turns out I have to use @bigpond, even though we didn't change our account details after the SpeedTouch broke.)

Argh. If you need an ISP in Australia (particularly in Western Australia), my recommendation is that you go with iiNet. My experience with them has been great, and they have the widest ADSL2+ coverage available. I've also heard even better things about Internode, although they don't have nearly as much ADSL2+ coverage, so I'm stuck with iiNet until Internode expands their coverage.

Ubuntu Linux v6.10: Edgy Eft - first impressions

2006-11-15T19:02:00.000+08:00

I've been using Ubuntu Linux for a little over a week now, and here are my first impressions.

First of all, although I haven't had a chance to use KDE yet (it comes with a separate version of Ubuntu called Kubuntu), I'm really liking GNOME. It's similar enough to Windows to make it easy to use, but it has heaps of features that are the sort of thing that you always wanted in Windows but never had. Things like being able to drag and drop icons anywhere instead of just in the "Quick Launch" section.

I've also come to enjoy having access to a decent text-based shell. apt-get and the Synaptic Package Manager are an interesting way of dealing with software; it seems to work well with the software that is available for Ubuntu but I can't imagine it'd work that well on a system like Windows with so much software available for it. It's also nice to have a shell that's so much more versatile than what Microsoft offers (which doesn't even really have a name). Pretty much any task that you would want to automate can be automated in Linux via bash scripting.

However, I think it's somewhat short-sighted of the developers to cripple access to "non-free" software, or software that isn't correctly licensed to be distributed in the Ubuntu package. You have to go out of your way to enable access to the repositories that store any non-GPL code (at least I think that's what you have to do, you definitely have to specifically enable a repository to access proprietary code like nVidia's drivers, or Opera). There is a lot of software that should be included with the OS but can't for legal reasons (or maybe philosophical ones); my opinion is that a program like Automatix should come pre-installed, inform the user of the difference between the different repositories and get them to pick the ones they want, then offer to install some important software that isn't pre-installed. For example, graphics drivers for nVidia/ATI cards, VLC (the "Totem Movie Player" that comes pre-installed is useless, as it relies on the GStreamer framework to play media, and out-of-the-box can pretty much only play Ogg-based formats), and maybe even Opera.

One thing that does suck a bit about X-based Linuxes is the amount of time you spend editing xorg.conf. To be honest, I shouldn't even have to touch this file. In order to change to 1440x900 screen resolution (for a commonly-available 19" widescreen monitor), I had to edit xorg.conf. This required me using the terminal (as superuser!) to backup the configuration file and then edit it manually, which I think is too much to ask of your average user considering that screwing up this configuration file drops you back to a terminal. If you don't know bash and you don't have an alternate PC to troubleshoot from, you're SOL and need to reformat.

I'm also struggling to edit xorg.conf at the moment in order to fully set up my Logitech G7 (I'm following this tutorial on the Ubuntu forums). It's a great mouse, by the way.. the only wireless mouse I'd ever consider, since you don't have to continually replace batteries, nor do you have to leave it to charge overnight (leaving you without a mouse until it recharges if you ever do run out of batteries). It comes with two 'hot-swappable' Li-ion batteries that can be swapped within a matter of seconds when you do run out of power. Unfortunately, this happens pretty frequently - the battery life is only 5 hours or so - but I suppose that's what you get considering the size of the battery and the fact that it's a high-res laser mouse. There's a battery indicator on the side of the mouse, but it would be nice to set up some sort of battery monitor within Linux. The crappy Windows software has such a feature, but it's a bit of a RAM hog considering the tiny amount of work it has to do. The Windows software is also required to use the side-scroll, which is what I'm trying to set up at the moment. I've run into a dead end though, with X claiming it can't find the "evdev" protocol or something. The mouse did work just fine as a regular three-button mouse with scroll straight out of the box, though.

Opera (my preferred browser) just isn't the same on Linux. Things like middle-click act differently, and to be honest, I like using it better in Windows. It looks a lot better, too. Opera doesn't integrate so well with GNOME.

I haven't yet attempted to share or print over the network. We'll see how it goes. Something that did disappoint me was how difficult it is to print to PDF. I would have thought Ubuntu would have a menu option integrated into the default print dialog.

One strong advantage of Ubuntu is that you can just put in the LiveCD and boot off it (not unusual for a Linux distro). However, you can actually install the full OS onto your hard disk using the LiveCD. It even includes a great GUI partition editor, so that you can dual-boot Windows, and preinstalls GRUB for you. The only complaint I had with the install was that it installed GRUB onto my IDE hard disk, which I don't boot from. This was because the default option was to "Install GRUB onto (hd0)". I could have changed the option, but at the time I didn't know what hd0 even was, let alone know enough to manually type in sda instead (this is my SATA boot disk, but there was no drop-down menu).

I'm also considering removing AdSense from this blog. Really, it's not like it brings in any sort of significant income (I'm yet to receive my first cheque; I think you need to make $100 first) and I'm not sure whether the potential of maybe some day getting a $100 cheque from Google is worth the ugly ads. This blog is more-or-less a place for me to rant, anyway.

New Blogger themes, DreamHost

2006-11-14T16:17:00.000+08:00

So for some reason I was inspired to get back into this whole 'blogging' thing. I don't think it will last long though.

In any case, Blogger seems to have added some new themes. This one's quite nice. They also added support for AdSense since I last checked, as well as allowing you to change the colours in your theme more easily.

The best thing about this theme is that it takes up more than half the screen at a widescreen resolution!

Anyway, since I haven't got anything else to write about at the moment.. I thought I'd just put out yet another recommendation for DreamHost. They're definitely one of the best shared hosting providers out there, IMO. I've been with them for my personal site (splintax.com, which doesn't really have anything on it - it's more of a file storage thing) for just under a year now - I signed up when they had the Crazy Domain Insane package going for $10 for one year with a special coupon. That's a ridiculously good deal but even without their coupons their hosting packages are still good value for money.

I'd renew for a year, but I managed to get a Code Monster account through work that I don't have to pay for. (I signed us up with DreamHost to transfer out of NetRegistry - an Australian ISP that I'd advise against doing business with after the trouble we've had with them.) DH allow you to host unlimited domains on their system (obviously you still have to pay domain registration) but because Code Monster gives you some ridiculous amount of bandwidth and disk - 4TB/400GB IIRC (details here), I'm just paying the $10 per year for splintax.com registration and pointing it onto my work account for hosting.

DreamHost are also cool with reselling, so I'm considering reselling the work account to some other businesses for a reasonable fee (since the services provided by DH are way better than what's expected from an Australian ISP, and cheaper too). Of course, I'll be splitting the money with my boss, who actually pays for the DH account ;-)

The only problem with DH is that phone support is a pain in the ass for someone outside the US. However, their email support is excellent (they usually get back to you within hours) so that makes up for it IMO (since that way you get everything on record).

edit: Still having some problems with Blogger's 'compose' (ie. rich text editor) in Firefox under Ubuntu Linux. It didn't put in any <p>s for me, so I had to add them manually..

Another hilarious tale of Indian tech support

2006-09-07T16:37:00.000+08:00

Just had (yet another experience) with an Indian tech support house.

I decided to get the AppleCare Protection Plan for my iPod nano, since I've had to return my old iPod mini once (disk died), return my nano once (screen died), and return my in-ear headphones twice (just died). Also I was getting a little paranoid, since my screen seemed to have a funny tinge to it the other day. I really don't want to risk losing my nano it was a real pain last time I got it replaced, but at least I didn't have to pay for it.

So yeah, despite their nice design, Apple products really are quite fragile in my opinion. Either way, I paid up $100 for what essentially amounts to an extended warranty, which is probably a bit of a ripoff, but hey. I like my iPod.

So today I get one of those 'you missed a delivery' courier cards saying that I missed a delivery from "Apple Computors". I'm kinda used to this procedure, since my parents are both nearly always out of the home, and my sister and I are at school, from 9 - 5 most days. Usually, whenever I order something online, I have to call the courier to reschedule delivery for the next day (leaving a card with my signature on it to 'authorize them to leave the package'). A bit of a pain but I can deal with it.

However, I don't remember ordering anything that comes in "1 carton" from Apple recently. Anyway, in the hopes that I'd accidentally received a MacBook or something, I called up the courier to reschedule delivery.

"Yes, we can redeliver tomorrow between 9am and 5pm, but there will need to be someone there to accept the package." They don't do the 'authorized-to-leave' thing. Okay.. that kinda sucks, but my mum says I can have it delivered to her workplace. No can do. "You'll have to call Apple."

So I do, and after waiting ten minutes or so (there's actually no appropriate option on the menu for 'Delivery Fuck-ups', so I chose the 'AppleCare' one), I get through to a friendly Indian woman. Well, not so friendly. She basically asks me what I ordered ("I don't know, I just ordered the extended warranty, why are you sending me a carton of shit?") and I discover that apparently (this was not explained to me when I ordered), Apple's sent me an 'enrolment form' for AppleCare. You see, you can't just order the 'protection plan' and be done with it; Apple needs to send you an enrolment form, which you then fill out or something (not exactly sure), and then send back to them so that they can enroll you in AppleCare. Hurray! Surely this could come through the mail though? Not to mention the fact that it took 10 minutes to get the information out of the woman because I had to quote a "web-order number", which was in one of the PDFs Apple sent me to confirm my 'order'. Just one of them though. They sent me about five. Good thing I keep my mail on Gmail I suppose.

Anyway, I explain that I need to reschedule the delivery, since the courier company sucks. "Sorry, delivery department's closed, please call back between 9 and 5pm tomorrow." "It is 5pm. You mean Sydney time?" "Yes." "Well I can't do that, I will be busy during the day. Why can't you reschedule it?"

After about 5 minutes of complaining (you know, "ARE YOU EVEN IN AUSTRALIA?", that sort of thing that makes you feel good about yourself) she finally agreed to send it to another address. WELL THANKS, WHY COULDN'T YOU HAVE DONE THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE? I then proceeded to tell the woman the address (again, another 5 minute process).. apparently, she wasn't familiar with the use of a person's name as the name of a company.. ie. "John Brown Real Estate" "OK so you want me to send it to John Brown, on Real Estate Street".. what the fuck.

So hopefully I'll be getting my enrolment form tomorrow. Fuck yeah!

I never had these problems when receiving other deliveries from Apple (new iPod, fixed iPod). Why is it that it's so hard to send me an 'enrolment form'? And why do you have to send it to me in a carton?

If only there were other mp3 players that didn't suck - or better yet, another company made the iPod. Or maybe I just shouldn't deal with the 'AppleCare division'. Sort your shit out, and get a courier company that doesn't suck balls (ie. pretty much every other courier company I've ever dealt with).

Blogger Beta, SLI setup, PSP

2006-09-02T14:13:00.000+08:00

Just opened up the new version of Blogger Beta, and I'm having a muck around with it now. The login interface wasn't very counterintuitive - it took me a while to work out how to convert my old blog to the new format. :-/ Also, I still don't know how to get AdSense to come up on the new layout. Guess I'll have to edit the template manually or something. :-( The WYSIWYG editor seems to have improved (although maybe that's just me). I think I'll stick with it for the time being, editing raw HTML gets annoying after a while (and I think the markup produced by this editor is relatively clean). I don't have time to muck around with the code to the template and stuff like that anymore, anyway - so I'll just stick with the automatic configuration options. I recently bought 2 XFX 7600GTs, with 256MB of RAM, via Nindeals. Basically, they're a subsidiary of Nintek - which, by the way is an excellent computer parts distributor if you're living in Perth (I've ordered heaps from them lately). Nindeals is basically a forum where Nintek buyers group together and agree to buy things in bulk (to put it simply). I ended up getting the cards for A$200 each which was quite a good deal at the time. :D (By the way, this new photo upload tool is pretty nice.) The cards run surprisingly cool (around 50°C) considering that there's two of them right next to each other. Since I got the cards I've been running some benchmarks and stuff to increase my e-peen (and Ben has been trying to sell shit so that he can get an X1800XT or something, possibly spiralling into even more debt with his mum over e-penis enlargement). I think I got around 5800 in 3dMark06, 8500 in 3dMark05, and 20000 in 3dMark03. Didn't save the reports or anything though. Here are some sexy pics. I think I need to clean my case. Hurrah. I also got a PSP recently. It's the white version. Nice toy and all - here's my initial impression. Good things

The firmware updating and all that is really slick. Overall the OS is really nice (as I'm sure millions of people have already expressed). The photo viewing, music-listening and video-watching controls and features are great.. once you actually get the media on to the PSP.
Built-in WiFi and a web-browser is a great idea. Though I'll have more to say about this.
Support for RSS is also really cool.
The screen is dead sexy. It's almost the perfect thing to watch movies on, much better than any other dedicated portable movie player IMO (and definitely a cut above the video iPod).
The 'analog nub' is a great way of dealing with the problem of analog control on a portable device. It's not anywhere near as difficult to use as you'd expect.

Bad things

Why the fuck is Sony so insistent on keeping this machine locked down? There are so many features that are available through homebrew software that I'd really like to use - for example, the IR remote. That's just a fun gimmick, why can't I use it? :-(
On that point, I think that 'support' for emulation software could only improve the popularity of the PSP. If it were easier to install an emulator (ie. not impossible once you've upgraded past 2.0 firmware, or whatever it was), then Sony could just turn a blind eye to the fact that heaps of people are buying their console to play illegal Nintendo 64 ROMs and such.
..But the reason they're doing this is probably to protect their 'interests'.. ie. UMD. I have no idea why they decided to go for a disc format. It's slow(ish) and so everything takes ages to load. Apparently it's what kills the battery life on the console. UMD movies are frankly, a stupid idea. If I wanted to buy movies and watch them, I'd buy a (cheaper) portable DVD player and buy (far more ubiquitous) DVDs to watch on it. Video on PSP is better suited to things like video podcasts and TV shows, in my opinion.
For some reason, the WiFi is incredibly slow (much slower than you'd expect from "11 Mbps". It took around 2 hours to download a 50MB podcast. I think that's on par with dialup speed internet. Not to mention the fact that browsing the internet seems significantly slower than doing so on dialup. My PC is browsing fine all through this.
Uploading movies, music and photos is still not very reliable. Apparently, you initially couldn't load movies on unless you put them in a certain directory with a certain naming scheme. Now you can just dump any old thing in the VIDEO folder in the PSP's root - but for some reason, photos have to go in \PSP\PHOTO, while music can go in \MUSIC..
Is AVI support that difficult? Re-encoding everything is something of a pain in the ass.
The "LocationFree Player" could be developed into an awesome feature. Imagine if you could just have some sort of HTTP streaming on your computer (provided by VLC, or a tool provided by Sony or something), which the PSP could then tune into via LocationFree - or the ability to act as a remote control for the PC via WiFi. Unfortunately it just seems to be an interface to some device that Sony sells in some parts of the world. And you can't even remove the option, which is useless until you buy a "LocationFree Player", from the menu.

That's about it. I'm hoping that something will come of the current 2.0 - 2.8 firmware exploit which is currently just a "Hello World" proof-of-concept; it does run on my PSP, but unfortunately, I think you'll lose the photo-viewing feature of the PSP if you install it once it's able to do.. useful stuff. I'll probably post another update later, trying to get back into it now that I don't have to bother with the whole "redesigning the CSS" thing.

Ugly blog theme

2006-04-30T12:51:00.000+08:00

Yes, I am aware that right now, my blog looks like a piece of shit. I started rewriting the CSS, and stopped half-way through. I'll finish it off some time. :/

edit: gave up and replaced the theme with "k2-black" from this blogger templates site. It's a nice theme, I modified it a bit (I'm not a fan of sidebars). Now I've just gotta fix that bugginess down at the bottom of the page..

MSN Messenger personal messages reverting

2006-04-30T12:45:00.000+08:00

Several people I know have complained about the fact that MSN Messenger personal messages seem to "revert" back to what they used to be after a while.

From what I've observed, the personal messages are saved on the computer, NOT on the MSN content servers (like your MSN name and contact list are). I occasionally sign on to MSN using other computers and whenever I do so, I sign on with the MSN personal message I had last time I used them.

Furthermore, the personal message is only actually "saved" when you exit MSN manually. (Again, this is just from what I've observed.) If you shut down the computer, leaving MSN open, MSN usually does not save the PM. Try right-clicking the taskbar icon, then hitting Exit - it should save then. This has worked for me every time I've tried.

Not that I care all that much about MSN PMs, or anything.

MyDeathSpace.com

2006-04-26T12:46:00.000+08:00

MyDeathSpace.com tracks people with MySpace.com accounts as they die, usually through the news (so a lot of people have died of violent causes).

It's really quite disturbing: you get a picture of the person, a copy of the news article describing their death, and a link to their MySpace profile. The profiles are littered with comments lamenting their death but I don't think they'll ever be deleted.

Certainly a disturbing concept - what happens to all the records of you after you're gone? What about those people who have lots of 'friends' (whether or not you consider this a legitimate friendship is up for debate) who you never meet in real life - will they miss you when you're gone?

Video game piracy

2006-04-16T20:06:00.000+08:00

I'm going to act like I'm a shitload more insightful than everyone else in the video games industry, and tell you why I think it is completely screwed up. You would think that the people who make the decisions would be better informed than me, and be able to work things out themselves, but apparently this is not the case.

First of all, the average video game player is between 14 and 25 years old, at least in my experience (though it's always the fucking annoying, whiny 12 year olds with alternate caps names that piss you off the most). A significant portion of that group is below 18, and an even more significant portion of that group is comprised of lazy fucks.
Basically, what this means is that people (a) can't buy stuff using a credit card (under 18) and (b) cannot be fucked going out to a shop to buy stuff. (Let's leave aside the issue that many of these people are also stingy fucks.)

So overall, this puts us in a fairly difficult situation if we want to sell people video games. What makes it worse is that these people also tend to be very computer savvy, and know just where to get a pirated copy of that video game from.

The current situation is (or so I've heard ;p) such that if you have a relatively fast internet connection, you can find pretty much any reasonably popular game you want within 10 minutes, and download it for free over the next 24 hours (of course, breaking the law in the process, but the internet grants anonymity and we all know how that makes people less likely to consider something as morally wrong, not to mention the fact that it's unlikely that you'll get caught). Typically, once you've downloaded the game, you can burn an exact copy of the original game disc, mount it as a virtual CD, or use a no-CD crack - basically, this means you can play the game the way you want. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the legal course of action involves you going to a store, paying AU$60 or more, going back home, spending half an hour installing the game (from a relatively slow DVD drive), and when the game has copied all the necessary files to your HDD, you still need to insert the disc to get it to run. If you lose the disc, you can't play.

Having to swap discs in and out of the drive all the time is a total pain in the ass. However, there's one situation where the pirated alternative pales in comparison to the legal avenue: you are usually not able to play the game online, since game servers feature some sort of check to ensure that you're using a legitimate copy of the game or legitimate CD-key, et cetera. However, you end up being able to play the entire single-player campaign, if there is one, for free, and you can still play LAN games. (Go to a LAN and tell me how many people you see swapping CDs in and out of their computer so that they can get past all the CD checks.)

The best way to go about things currently (of course, ignoring all legal/moral matters) is to pirate the game, and then if you enjoyed the single-player campaign and LAN gaming (try Hamachi if you want to play "LAN" games over the internet), buy a CD-key off eBay or similar for ~$15 (which was probably obtained by a disgruntled store clerk who looked inside the game boxes after closing time, and fucks up someone else's multiplayer experience when they get kicked for shared CD-key after buying a legal copy of the game). That way, you don't waste any money on a shitty game (*cough* EA's James Bond games) and in the end, you spend a lot less anyway.

And the only legal option that comes close? Anything that runs on Valve's Steam platform. As much as I fucking despise Steam, what Valve has done is really forward-thinking, in my opinion. You download the Steam client (free) and register an account, then "activate" games on it with your credit card (a flaw in the system that still needs to be addressed, there should be another way to pay). Once you've done that, you can download them from Valve's own servers at decent speeds. No bullshitting around with stores and installing crap off CDs, and you have the added "advantage" of Steam keeping all the games it manages up-to-date.

Unfortunately, this model doesn't work for anything other than multiplayer games. The problem (or to some, best part) with Steam is that if one of your friends owns a copy of, say, Half-Life 2 (single-player only) you can simply log onto their account, download it from Valve's own servers (a really convenient way to pirate games) and play it. In fact, your friend won't even notice the difference unless you try to play the same game as them online at the same time (eg. Counter-Strike: Source). However, the single-player game still works fine. Or if you're such a cheap bastard that you can't even afford to split the cost of the game across however many people will share the Steam account, there are a multitude of cracks that (to varying degrees of success) allow you to do the same thing.

Basically, if you want to sell a single-player game, you're pretty fucked. I'll post back here when I magically solve the problem. Unfortunately, single-player games can't rely on external servers most of the time, so in the end, anti-piracy measures can just be hacked out. The only solution seems to be something in the realm of loading a small amount of data externally - without which the game is almost unplayable - for example, in a GTA-style game, an external server could randomly tell you which cars will spawn (eg. 55 means "spawn a Banshee"). The amount of data used should be minimal - such that the company can afford to run the game without regular fees - but you wouldn't be able to patch out the "phoning home" part of the game (during which your CD-key would be checked). Unfortunately, there is no way to do this without alienating the offline community, and I suppose it would just drive people to play console games instead. (Console games! Nintendo's disc format for the GameCube seemed to have worked really well in preventing piracy. I wonder if there's a way to transfer this to the PC - probably not, since you have so much more control over a PC than a console..)

Where am I going with this? Well, I forgot. The point is that at the moment, downloading shit is just way more convenient than going out to the store, buying it, and then having to contend with all the stupid anti-piracy bullshit. (Now that I think of it, it is interesting to note that the only way to get rid of said anti-piracy bullshit is to use a pirated version.)

New version of Google Talk: avatars, themes

2006-04-07T15:56:00.000+08:00

The new version of Google Talk has support for avatars and themes, and perhaps more interestingly, support for BlackBerry devices.

Unfortunately, we don't have BlackBerries here in Australia, so that really doesn't interest me all that much. However, it does seem like an interesting idea - particularly if it's free or very cheap to use.

The avatars are fairly basic. A small 32x32 preview shows up in the contact list, and if you mouseover the person's name a small popup appears, similar to the contact cards in MSN Messenger, which contains a larger version of the avatar.

A whole bunch of (mostly crappy) avatars are available for use by default, but you can specify your own from most image types. Fairly standard.

I like the new theming feature - something that I haven't seen in any other IM client. I think it's a good way to make the interface a little more pretty while keeping it simple and utalitarian - and this is exactly why I prefer Google Talk to MSN (though it doesn't have anywhere near the userbase). You can pick from 9 default themes, some incorporating the avatar into the chat screen, and there's a preview image for each one. My favourite is the ping-pong theme:

I think they're done using some type of CSS. I'll see if I can work out how the themes work and report back here.

This news article has been submitted to digg.
Digg it now!

Finally: got the new Gmail improvements to show up

2006-03-30T18:14:00.000+08:00

For those of you that don't know, recently Google introduced a whole bunch of improvements to its Gmail service, including "chat" integration (providing part of the functionality of Google Talk) and searchable chat logs right inside your Gmail window, with all sorts of AJAXy crap in there.

However, all of my contacts seemed to have got these upgrades, while I've been stuck with the older version of Gmail. I could select to have my chats saved in Gmail from Google Talk, but I couldn't actually access them!

I finally found out what the problem is. For some reason, the Chat functionality (and Web Clips, and Quick Contacts) are only activated if you have the language set to US English. So, if you had similar problems, I strongly suggest setting the language back to US (I had mine set to UK).

I'll be leaving mine on US to make sure I get any future upgrades straight away!

Update: It is now possible to use Gmail with Chat in Opera - simply mask as Mozilla using one of the latest betas under site-specific preferences, and all should work fine.

Aur-Phala forums

2006-03-11T17:07:00.002+08:00

Someone pointed me in the direction of the Aur-Phala forums earlier on today, and what I saw there has shocked and appalled me.

Seems like a curious teenager, right? Wrong.
A 41-year-old guy. Great.

Sigh..

Google's CL2: calendar app, with screenshots

2006-03-11T11:44:00.000+08:00

James Duncan has a mirror of the leaked screenshots of Google's CL2. (They were originally leaked by TechCrunch.)

Looks really nice, and I can't wait to get an invite - but apparently, at the moment there are only 200 users with no invite system whatsoever. :-( Two of the nicer looking screenshots:

I'm really looking forward to trying out this automatic parsing of sentences in the above screenshot - if that is what it does. From what I can tell, you would type in " Dinner with Michael at 7pm tomorrow" and Google would give you an appointment titled "Dinner with Michael" at 7pm on the next day. (Just thought that needed some explanation :P) This would be a really great feature to see implemented into any other calendar app, but I still like the idea of having calendar integrated into Gmail. Synchronization with PDAs and smartphones would be cool too (or even iPods?). At the moment, I'm using Mozilla Sunbird.

Blog spammers

2006-03-02T20:07:00.000+08:00

Bastards. I keep getting people adding spam comments to sites like the following:
http://www.imcmake-money-fast-online.com
(no link provided to avoid increasing their PageRank)
Unfortunately, I guess a lot of people don't check out the comments on their blogs. They seem to be in the same general format - "Hey blogger, your site is really informative! I'll check back later. Regards, make money online." The bolded text is always a link to their site with some sort of keyword that they presumably want to come up high in the search engine rankings.

The other sad thing is that apparently it works, or else these guys wouldn't be able to afford hosting fees. People actually search for "make money fast" and such and end up getting redirected to these sites, and apparently pay for whatever the hell they are selling. It's sad to think that people really believe this kind of crap:

Oh well. Looks like I'll have to keep deleting the comments, since I'm not turning on comment moderation. I don't even know why people keep doing this since rel=nofollow has been implemented on Blogger. :/

Preview of the Canon EOS-30D

2006-02-21T21:46:00.000+08:00

(via Engadget) A preview of the new Canon SLR, the EOS-30D, has been released by Engadget.

It's pretty much just a "refined 20D", as they put it - not like the 5D, which offers almost all the features of a 20D at a lower price point, but is still a separate line. The 30D will probably replace the 20D.

The most welcome feature - which really should be on all Canon's cameras - is that you can now see the ISO speed in the viewfinder. All I have to say on that is finally! This is the most friggin' annoying interface bug with Canon SLRs, and would be enough for me to run out and buy one of these if I had the cash. :P

And of course, the obligatory pic (it looks exactly like the 20D). This was stolen from Engadget:

I'm still looking forward to something that competes with the MP offerings of the 1D and its revisions, at a lower price. (The 20D current retails for around $3000 in Australia, from memory - or around $2000 in the US.)

FirefoxMyths.com: misinformation

2006-02-15T20:32:00.000+08:00

Recently I've seen firefoxmyths.com referenced a few times, mostly on forum threads about "which browser is better".

When I first saw it, I was interested, since I had thought that someone had finally catalogued all the bullshit about Firefox going around the internet. However, this reads more like an advertisement for Avant Browser.

disclaimer: I can't stand Firefox fanboys crapping on about what they don't understand, as you might have noticed by my earlier post on some of Firefox's "innovations". Personally, I use Opera. However, this page is so horribly wrong on most counts that I'm forced to defend Firefox here. So, here follows a debunking of the debunking on that site...

Requirement Myths
The author appears to misunderstand the difference between "browser" and "operating system", and manages to contradict himself, all in the one "point". ~~First off, he claims that IE has "much" lower system requirements than Firefox, while ignoring the fact that the CPU clock speed required for IE is roughly double that of Firefox.~~ Secondly, he doesn't take into account that IE is part of the operating system, so its requirements appear to be much less than those of Firefox, particularly the "disk space" ones.
Update: I was wrong here, the requirement for IE is actually a "486 66 Mhz CPU", not a "486.66 Mhz CPU" as I had read it. I can't find a Microsoft source for my claims as to IE's integration into the OS, but they are somewhat substantiated by this quote:

Internet Explorer 6 SP1 setup installs the majority of its files on the drive where the Windows operating system is installed, regardless of the installation location you choose.

..from the source provided at firefoxmyths.com. I also forgot to admit that Firefox has some pretty bad issues with memory consumption under the default configuration, though this issue is not reproducible under all Firefox installations.

Performance Myths
Most of the information listed here is correct, simply because it's sourced from a much more reliable source. However, this..

The argument that components of Internet Explorer may load during Windows Startup is nullified by Opera's start times. Which means there is no excuse for this except poor coding on Firefox's part.

..is an interesting idea. Somehow, the author thinks that the fact that Opera has a faster "cold start" than IE means that saying "IE loads in part with Windows" is completely invalid. We call this an "fallacy of irrelevance".
Update: The author refuses to accept that Opera is irrelevant to the myth "Firefox Is Faster Than Internet Explorer". Guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.

Market Share Myths
I'd question the reliability of any stats on browser market share, since it depends on so many factors: for one, the content of the site measuring the stats.
Update: Yes, I agree with the author on this one as per his comments below, but not the site. The wording of the site implies that somehow, the lower usage statistics are "more correct", when it would be more accurate to say that the fact that there are several conflicting reports on Firefox's market share indicates that measuring market share is extremely difficult and unreliable and such statistics should be taken with a grain of salt.

Security Myths
The Secunia advisory for Firefox claims that currently, there are only three unpatched vulnerabilities, all of which have medium criticality or lower (3 / 5 bars). Opera has one unpatched vulnerability with the lowest level of criticality (a minor URL spoofing problem). IE currently has 32 unpatched vulnerabilities from Extremely Critical to Not Critical. While this does indicate that Opera is "the most secure", in my opinion it does not make Firefox "insecure"; the author claims that one vulnerability is enough to make software "insecure". Firefox's security claims are based on comparison to Internet Explorer, and are perfectly valid. While Firefox does have its share of security flaws, it has proven to have had far less serious flaws, and it has responded to them more quickly than Internet Explorer - which is the main point marketed by the Mozilla team. Additionally, the author's arguments about spyware, while logical, are simply not true: Firefox is an excellent "solution", in part, to the spyware problem - as its comparably low level of exploits and smaller and more IT-savvy user base, make it a much less attractive to spyware vendors, and as such, there is no widely spread spy/malware software that installs through Firefox (at least to my knowledge).
Update: The author continues to claim that one vulnerability nullifies any chance of describing the software as "secure", so again, we'll have to agree to disagree here. However, nowhere in the relevant paragraph on firefoxmyths.com is the notion of "Firefox as a solution to all security problems" raised. I stand by my conclusion, that Firefox, in comparison to its primary competitor, Internet Explorer, can reasonably be considered "secure" as a web browser. I also suggest that it is a good method to minimize spyware installations, though I don't suggest that it is a complete spyware solution. I also disagree with the idea that the author's guide to securing Windows XP can give any user the "same level of protection" he has, as an uninformed user tends to be able to click "Yes" enough times to install any malware program. Additionally, Avant Browser (with the same level of security as Internet Explorer) has been recommended over Firefox. It should be noted that several IE exploits have existed (and been exploited) in the past allowing the silent installation of malware without user input, while this has not yet happened with Firefox, possibly due to its smaller user base. As things stand, I would recommend Firefox over Avant for just this reason, as history tends to repeat iteself. Finally, the author continues to suggest that "Firefox is incompatible with 10 - 15% of sites", rather than "10 - 15% sites are poorly coded and implement non-standard functionality only present in Internet Explorer", which I feel reflects the situation much better.

Feature Myths
All true up until Tabbed Browsing (though the myth that IE7 "stole" Firefox's icon seems a bit ridiculous to me; I've never heard that myth, and I'd think most people who actually care about such things would know the real story). The rest of this section demands a more thorough debunking:
Tabbed Browsing: Claims that Opera only added "tabbed" browsing in 2000 per a Wikipedia article - the author clearly doesn't understand the difference between MDI and TDI. Also claims that Firefox was released in 2004 - it was released in 2002, albeit under a different name (Phoenix).
W3C Standards: Claims that Firefox has "incomplete" support for for many W3C standards, then claims that IE has "very good support (86%) for the most important web standard, HTML 4.01". Apart from the fact that this is a clear attempt to confuse a reader into thinking standards support in IE is better than in Firefox (far from it, IE doesn't even support position: fixed; in CSS..), claiming that HTML 4.01 is the "most important web standard" is laughable. It's seven years old, released in 1999, and the web has moved forward since then. While it is possible that most sites are written in HTML 4.01 (I have no statistics for this), I would say that the most important web standard is the current "version" of HTML, XHTML 1.1 (though this is a separate standard, it is very similar and is designed to replace HTML).
Update: The author claims that he does not intend to confuse readers into thinking that IE has superior standards compared to IE, therefore, I suggest the text be changed to reflect this. Despite the fact that it is "biased against IE", the original source for the information should still be linked to, and I'd suggest that it be indicated under 'notes' that Firefox has better support for all HTML-based web standards than IE. Additionally, the "source" link regarding Firefox's 'poor standards implementation' is broken.
W3C Standards define a Webpage: Here, the author just fails to understand the contextual meaning of the word "define". In this case, it means more or less that W3C standards outline the way a web page "should be", not define as in a dictionary definition.
Update: I was basing this on the Myth Heading, not the actual Myth itself, apparently. The real Myth is "A Site that doesn't conform to W3C Standards is not a Webpage". This seems more than a little obvious to me, but I'll accept that I was wrong here. Sort of.
Acid 2 Browser Test: The author claims that the Acid2 test tests "the features considered most important for the future of the web". Incorrect, the test is designed to demonstrate how the most poorly-supported features should work, not the most important ones. The most important ones are already implemented in most browsers (by and large, the only browser without support is Internet Explorer in most cases).
Update: The author claims that he is correct, but the only quote I was able to find on the Acid2 website he referred to was "It uses features that are not in common use yet, because of lack of support", which appears to support my argument.
Web Page Rendering: Claims that "Firefox is not 100% Internet Explorer and ActiveX compatible", and as a result will not render "web sites that depend on ActiveX or were only tested in Internet Explorer (which there are many)" correctly. If those sites had adhered to coding standards when they were created, they would work correctly in all major IE competitors (Opera, Firefox, Safari and others), but in many cases would have problems with IE. Most web designers know that trying to get IE to support your website can be a major hurdle after testing a design that works in all other "standards-compliant" browsers.
Update: Apparently, I'm just making excuses here, in that case, I would suggest that the text be reworded to accurately reflect the truth (as suggested previously): "10 - 15% of sites are coded poorly or using proprietary technology and as a result will only work correctly in Internet Explorer". I accept that 10 - 15% of sites "don't work" correctly in Firefox, but the problem is not with Firefox, it is with the sites.
Web Page Rendering Differences: Claims that "Firefox does not wait for the whole page to be rendered like IE" is a myth. Based on the other information quoted and linked, I'll assume the author means "Firefox progressively renders pages, unlike IE" or "Firefox does not wait for all markup to be downloaded before rendering, unlike IE", since what he's saying doesn't make sense (why exactly would the browser "wait" until it has finished rendering a page?). Here he says that IE offers support for progressive rendering in tables. Since any modern website design uses divs, not tables (tables-based layouts are an old hack left over from pre-CSS days), IE's progressive rendering is next to useless. (I'm not even sure if Firefox uses progressive rendering, to be honest, but in any case, it's a lot more noticeable in Opera than any other browser.)
Update: I concede defeat here too, in actuality, IE supports progressive rendering except with tables-based layouts (where there is only partial support). The confusing wording of the summary got me, and had I read the source more thoroughly, I would have understood what really happens. Anyway, I suggest that the summary be changed to what I said ("IE supports progressive rendering except with tables-based layouts (where there is only partial support)."), to make it more clear to the reader.

The author ends his article with a challenge:

Do you think there is a single argument that refutes a single fact on this page? Think again. The sources speak for themselves and the facts are irrefutable.

He also claims that Firefox fanboys have "blindly react[ed] rather than calmly [thought]" when presented with said facts. I'm not a Firefox fanboy, as I said, I'm far from it, but I've tried to present a calmly thought-out response to this article, which is not only poorly researched in parts, but appears to be intentionally misleading in others. I'm tempted to suggest that the entire site is an ad for Avant Browser, which he recommends at the end since it includes IE's rendering engine for "99.99% website compatibility" and "all the newest features of other browsers" (such as "100% security", according to the Avant website). He also suggests that readers read his other "guides", like "XP Games" (where every game is "100% Freeware", it reads like a malware site) and "XP Media" (which ironically implores the reader to "Get Firefox with Google Toolbar for better browsing"). Ordinarily, I would have expected this kind of writing to be ignored, but since it seems to be getting a fair amount of attention, I've taken the time to debunk it and forward my response onto the author. Hopefully I'll be able to post back here confirming that he's seen the light and decided to correct all the misinformation on his website. To the author: I challenge you to come up with a reasonable rebuttal of the facts I've presented here, or otherwise modify your website to be a little less misleading about things.

Update: I've added Updates to most parts of this entry according to the comments below by Andrew K. - the author of the page. There are a few more things I'd like to respond to:

I never suggested that the page wasn't researched or thought out correctly - however, I do feel that in many cases the writing is constructed in quite a misleading way which makes it feel very biased when read by someone who knows the subject matter reasonably well.
I simply said that the "100% Freeware" comment on every game on the XP Games page makes the site read as if it's a malware site. "100% Legal", "100% Free" and such are all terms that I see on such sites all the time, and especially when things look like they have been copy-pasted all over the page, it loses the page a lot of credibility. I'd suggest that the repetition and "100%" be removed - there's no such thing as "90%" freeware, and it just makes the whole thing look a lot less suspect.

My experience with Digg

2006-02-13T16:48:00.000+08:00

My recent post on µTorrent's WebUI was quite popular after I submitted it to Digg - it's currently sitting on 1061 diggs.

Submitting it taught me a couple of things about Digg that I'll keep in mind for future reference.

The URLs generated by Digg suck. The URL for my submission was http://digg.com/software/Preview_of_µTorrent_s_web-based_interface_(with_screens) (I submitted it under the title "Preview of µTorrent's web-based interface (with screens). For some reason, Digg cuts out punctuation like ', but doesn't get rid of the two brackets and for that reason it was a total pain in the ass to post the link places. MSN Messenger for example won't auto-link the last bracket (not all that obvious from a glance), and the person you sent it to usually won't notice (just getting the "dead link" message). This problem occurs with Wikipedia too, since that's the way they name different topics with the same name (eg. Placebo (band) and Placebo (album)). Additionally, the µ broke many forums when I tried to use the [url] tag. I ended up having to hexify the URL like so: http://digg.com/software/Preview_of_%C2%B5Torrent_s_web-based_interface_%28with_screens%29.
Digg people suck when it comes to AdSense. There's some sort of restriction on the information I can divulge about my AdSense "earnings", but suffice to say I made less on the day my story hit the front page (probably giving me about 50 times the daily traffic I usually get) than I do in a normal day. It actually makes me feel kinda guilty - since Digg is a technology site, I'm presuming most of the visitors ignore ads like "Bit Torrent Here" etc. that Google inserts (as would I, since I don't trust many of the p2p-related sites in AdSense).
Given that, the average intelligence of a Digger seems to be quite low. :P There wasn't much of this related to my submission (in fact there wasn't any), but if you check out the other submissions on Digg, particularly the ones that are more or less "check out this cool link", you'll find a massive number of stupid comments like "lol google hax", "microsoft is gay" and other such crap. I admit that a lot of smart people use Digg - since I know a lot of Digg users from other places - but it just seems that the vast majority of commenters are not those people.
Though this doesn't really relate to Digg, my blog is ugly and I seriously need to work harder on creating my own theme (these mods to Minima Black just don't cut it, I'm afraid). The main problem with it is that it adheres horribly closely to the blog stereotype of having long rants in thin columns, meaning you have to scroll heaps. And you know how I feel about scrolling.

µTorrent's WebUI: monitor your downloads remotely

2006-02-11T12:18:00.000+08:00

Update: Some people were questioning how I got access to these files. While µTorrent itself is developed by ludde, with access to the source and the original creator, there is a µT development "team". We work on stuff like the website, managing the forums and that sort of thing, and get previews of this alpha stuff for that reason. ;)

Lately, the µTorrent development team have been working on a WebUI (web-based user interface) to allow users to remotely manage their BitTorrent downloads. (Don't know what µTorrent and BitTorrent are? Check out my earlier review of µTorrent.)

As the WebUI is still undergoing alpha testing, it is currently inaccessible to the public (when the UI goes final, you'll need to install a bunch of extra "add-on" files to make it work, as the WebUI currently takes up about 110 KiB of disk space after compression - almost as large as µT itself).

However, here's a little intro to the WebUI and how it works. Click the screenshots to enlarge them.

The WebUI runs through your web browser, and is accessible via HTTP through the port you use for BitTorrent. Of course, I'm running on port 31337. Basically what this means is that you can access the WebUI, once installed, by going to http://localhost:port/gui/index.html in your web browser. localhost basically is a shortcut to "this computer" - so obviously, this will only work if you're accessing the WebUI from the same computer as µTorrent is running on.

It's probably more useful to access the WebUI via your IP address (perhaps using dynamic DNS ). So, if your IP address is 64.233.167.99, and you run µTorrent on port 666, you could access the WebUI at http://64.233.167.99:666/gui/index.html from any PC, assuming you've done all the necessary port-forwarding to allow µT to serve the UI.

Of course, you wouldn't want just anyone to access your UI, so it's locked with a password configurable from µTorrent's Advanced Options menu. Here's the GUI operating on my computer under Opera:

You can get these torrents from legaltorrents.com.

The buttons below the address bar are all part of the WebUI, but I've included the Opera toolbar too just so you can see how the URL works. From left to right, the buttons are basically the same as those in the regular desktop version of µTorrent: add, delete, start, pause, stop, and move a torrent up or down. There's also a fully functional search bar at the right-hand side of the window. Clicking the search icon will open up a menu allowing you to pick a search engine, and entering a query into the box then hitting Enter will pop up with the results in that engine. (Unfortunately, at this stage, the WebUI uses an internal list of search engines - although it can be edited, this may not be the case with the final version. Perhaps it will be able to take the list from µTorrent's Search Engines setting.)

Clicking the plus button (add torrent) spawns a little dialog allowing you to upload a torrent from the current hard disk. This way, you can visit your favourite torrent site, download a .torrent file, and add it to µTorrent, so it's downloading while you're away and ready for you when you get back.

The DHTML columns are fully resizable and sortable, just like in µTorrent (though there is no "secondary sorting" feature). However, sorting the columns is done using JavaScript with no communication with µTorrent, so sorting won't be reflected in µTorrent.

Double-clicking a torrent brings up the Torrent Properties dialog, which you can't move, but it does display most of the info in µTorrent's General tab. You can access the Files tab, too:

You can also right-click on torrents in the main window or in the Files tab, but not all of the options from desktop µTorrent are available:

As for browser support, the WebUI is currently fully functional in Firefox 1.5.0.1, partially functional in Opera 9.0 TP2 (no right-clicks work, even when JavaScript is permitted to control right-clicks), and partially functional in IE (no right-click in the Files tab, occasional graphics glitches and crashes).

Like I said earlier, the WebUI is still under construction and will be released to the public when a more stable version is available. A 'lite' version using less DHTML will be available eventually, too. This is essentially just a preview to see what's coming up in µTorrent development.

If you want remote access to your BitTorrent client now, there are several BT clients offering some sort of WebUI: Azureus (via the Swing Web Interface plugin), ABC and G3Torrent, though apparently the functionality is quite limited and some of the clients are no longer under active development (I haven't tried them out myself). You could also try using a VNC system (like TightVNC), which is what I would recommend, though it's a bit more bandwidth-intensive than a real WebUI - so you can keep using µTorrent.

This article has been submitted to digg.
Digg it now!

Opera Labs and Opera 9 TP2

2006-02-07T21:50:00.000+08:00

Opera has just opened the doors to Opera Labs, somewhat reminiscent of Google Labs, as well as releasing Opera 9.0 Technical Preview 2 (TP2).

One of the major features in TP2 is the official alliance with BitTorrent Inc., the company behind BitTorrent owned by Bram Cohen. Whereas earlier previews of Opera 8 featured basic BitTorrent functionality built into the browser, this was based on the open specification for BitTorrent. Now, Opera has a commercial alliance with the company itself which they are using to license the BitTorrent logo and integrate the official BitTorrent Search into the browser.

Additionally, and possibly more significantly, Opera 9 TP2 (which can be downloaded from Opera Labs) contains widget support, as reported by InformationWeek. Here's a screenshot of the widget configuration dialog (of course, you can completely disable widgets if you so desire):

And here's some screenshots of the Slashdot widget, which folds out to display the latest Slashdot articles:

Very nice. Widget support does seem to be a bit bloaty, but Opera is still significantly slimmer than Firefox in executable size, install size and resource usage, so I'll stick with it. Also, widgets are something I'd like to get into, but when I've tried it in the past it's been a pain in the ass to keep another program running in the background to control them. Since Opera is always running on my PC, the job suits it nicely.

This all comes in addition to the recent release of the second beta of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7. Looks like things are pointing towards another instalment of the Browser Wars..

MSN Messenger's personal messages and more

2006-02-05T12:33:00.000+08:00

I had naïvely thought that with the introduction of MSN's "personal messages", people would use them instead of having essay-length quips in their name.

However, it seems that people now have shit in their name AND in the personal message. Personal messages were created for a reason - you put your exciting news summary (you know, like "@ city bying stuf", "PUT A (F) IN UR NAME TO RAISE AWARENESS OF 9/11", "omfg mi dad is so meen" and "(8)u dnt no wot itz lyk wlcum 2 mi lyf(8)" - usually all strung together separated by broken heart emoticons) into one and save everybody else the annoyance of having to read it EVERY TIME YOU SEND A MESSAGE.

Like I said, people have just taken the personal message to mean that now you can have TWICE the shit appearing on your contacts' desktops.

Here's a demonstration of how annoying these long names could be if you're not the sort of person who keeps one program open, maximized at all times (ie. someone who uses the computer for reasons other than "ch@in 2 m8s on msn"). Just imagine how bad it would be if you had multiple people in the same conversation.

A typical conversation with MSN names of reasonable length. Note that the entire conversation fits in the window with no need for scrolling.

Once people have long names, you must scroll down! Fuck no!

Now I really didn't have that much of a problem with it when there was no alternative, since having info like this is occasionally useful and I don't have a huge thing against people who like advertising their inside jokes. However, since we've got personal messages, PUT SHIT IN THERE INSTEAD, PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST. I have to admit though, Microsoft fucked up pretty bad when they made it so that personal messages "basically don't work properly yet", that is, they don't always "save" unless you close MSN Messenger properly, and they're not portable (if you sign in on one MSN client and change your PM, that won't be reflected on another client, unlike your MSN name and contact list).

Moving on, something else that really shits me about MSN: those people that add you to their list that you don't really give a shit about (so you don't immediately start talking to them), then 20 minutes later open a conversation with you asking "hu iz dis?". Why the fuck did you add me in the first place asshole? Now if these people were spammers or mail order brides trying to find a "business partner" than I wouldn't have so much of a problem with it, but invariably they're the 12-year-old third cousin twice removed of someone you once talked to on MSN because they asked you the same question.

Or how about the people that change email addresses and demand that you "add their new addy"? First off, there are very few reasons to change addresses in the first place. These include:

You were using an email address given to you by your workplace, from which you have been fired for using MSN or browsing midget pornography during work time;
You discovered that Hotmail sucks ass and decided to switch to Gmail because at the time Hotmail only had 2MB of storage and you like having searchable email;
Your email account was otherwise disabled or deleted (note: this does not include getting that email account banned from signing up on your favourite teen forum);
You're changing your identity due to someone stalking you.

Other reasons frequently cited for a change of email address that are NOT reasonable include:

Your old email address was qt_chik_princess_2005@hotmail.com, but now it's 2006, and you want to be the first person to secure qt_chik_princess_2006@hotmail.com (helpful hint: don't put the year in your email address!);
Your old email address was nicole_loves_james@hotmail.com, but James dumped you for a hotter, smarter, and all-round better person;
Your old email address was dashboard_confessional_rok_6945@hotmail.com, but ever since "emo music" became uncool you decided not to like them anymore;
Your old email address was jewhater@hotmail.com because you hate Jimmy Eat World, but many people misinterpreted it;
Your old email address was cute_lil_thang@hotmail.com, but now you're fat, ugly, boring and nobody likes you;
You forgot your old email addresss;
Someone blocked you;
You "just got sick of the old one".

Furthermore, even if you do change email address, there is a MUCH easier way to get all your contacts back than simply telling people to add your new address, and it saves the potential embarassment of asking your best friend to re-add you only to discover that they don't even know who you are. Here it is, supplied to you exclusively by my blog:

Transferring contact lists from one account to another

Sign into your old account.
Click Contacts at the top of the screen (or press Alt+C if you've hidden the menu bar), then select Save Contact List.
Save your contact list to a location of your choice.
Sign into your new account.
Click Contacts at the top of the screen (or press Alt+C if you've hidden the menu bar), then select Import Contacts from a File.
Hopefully by now you haven't forgotten where you saved your contacts from before. Locate the file and double-click it.
Your contact list has been imported, celebrate by writing some poetry.

Finally, one more thing to rant about, though this applies to all the internet, not just MSN. The following phrases have been way overused and are no longer funny:

FTW
roflcopter
Chuck Norris / Vin Diesel
FPS Doug / Boom Headshot

This list of course is supplementary to all the other words that used to be cool but aren't any more (eg. LOL, pwned, hax, 1337, et cetera). Thankyou.

Yet another dodgy "pay-for-freeware" website

2006-02-04T14:31:00.000+08:00

There's a great writeup over at SiteAdvisor.com on yet another one of those sites that basically charge you for freeware.

Definitely worth a look. The only way we can get this sort of thing to stop is if people stop making the mistakes that get them caught out in the first place.

Today, they've reviewed "FreeDownloadHQ", which basically sells you a subscription for about US$35 that does absolutely nothing. They don't even host the downloads they "sell", they just redirect to download.com.

Pathetic.

Google censoring China search results

2006-02-01T22:34:00.000+08:00

Much has been made recently of Google's decision to censor China's search results as per the request of their government. Searching Google's Blog Search for 'google china censor' turns up 4 481 results as of now, which means that it's certainly made an impact on the 'blogosphere' (not that anyone gives a shit). However, it is quite interesting to take a look at the search results offered to the Chinese in comparison to the vanilla google.com results, for example:

http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen
http://www.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen

Apparently, this is the first image that comes to the mind of the Chinese government when presented with the phrase 'Tiananmen':

However, the image presented by the international version of Google looks a little more like this:

So, there's obviously a little bit of what could be called "foul play" going on.

I really don't have that strong a standpoint on this - even assuming that Google prevents access to any other version of the search results than google.cn for Chinese users, I still don't see what the big deal is. At least Google is providing a service in China - basically their only other option is to get blocked from China entirely, since it's the governments fault. However, a lot of people feel differently. You might want to have a look at the Slashdot articles on the topic, since there's a wide range of opinions presented in the comments, some of them quite insightful:

Starfish: Automatically generated abstract imagery

2006-01-26T16:38:00.000+08:00

I discovered this program a few days ago. It's really quite cool - you can select a colour palette (or create your own), select the complexity, and hit Go and you have yourself a nice desktop background image. This is the one I'm using right now (click to grab the full-size 1400x1050 image):

A couple of other cool features this little program has:

Automatically set the newest generated image as the desktop wallpaper
Saves "image history" for as many images as you like (I have it set to 500)
Allows you to generate an image of any size, with presets including your current resolution, other standard resolutions and screen fractions
Option to create an image every x minutes (and set it as your background if you so desire)
Wide selection of colour presets and you can make your own really easily
Save as BMP, JPG (high or low quality) or PNG
Choose from 0x, 2x or 4x anti-aliasing

Download Starfish here, or just grab the latest Windows installer. It's GPL software, so you should be able to find a version for your OS and if not, compile it yourself.

Here's a gallery of some of the cooler images Starfish has generated for me. You can click on the thumbnailed ones to enlarge them.

These ones were the background for some banners I was working on.

Unfounded Google speculation

2006-01-19T22:56:00.000+08:00

The other week I posted a fairly comprehensive list of all the features that Google currently offers. There's always speculation on what Google is going to do next, I'm going to write briefly about a couple of things that I would like to see Google get into. (Of course, all of this is completely unfounded and just my thoughts.)

Google Audio
Well, we already have Google Video. It doesn't sound as useful as it really is, in my opinion. First of all, Google now have a pay service similar to what's also being offered in the iTunes Music Store: selling DRM'd downloads of TV shows, etc. through the Google Video Store. There was quite a bit of controversy over their announcement to use their own brand of DRM in the videos.

However, Google Video is a great way to distribute video in a lot of cases. First off, Google hosts the files, which basically means free bandwidth. (BitTorrent limits the amount of bandwidth used by the original "server", but it's still not as good as getting Google to do it for you for free.) Second, their Flash player is mint. It has all the features you should really need for playing web videos, it loads fast and streams the content pretty much without skipping, at least for me. The main reason I use it is to get lower-quality re-encodes of some of the more popular "videocasts" on the internet, like Systm. I can stream those shows straight from Google, without having to download them and delete them when I'm done - and the total file size is significantly smaller (I'm not overly concerned about getting the best quality from most of these vidcasts).

So, what I think we need is Google Audio, and frankly, I'm surprised they didn't either release this before Google Video or integrate it with it, making Google Media or something. First off, it would be a nice way for some people to distribute podcasts (for example, if you like to listen to them on the PC rather than actually loading them onto an iPod or similar, streaming is probably a better way to go). It would also be nice to have an easy way to search for audio, and I don't mean pirated mp3s but things like free sound effects (for amateur games, video editing et cetera), quotes, and such. Finally, it would pretty much mean that there is no longer a reason to use AllTheWeb, though I don't know how significant a competitor they are. (Yes, I am aware of using filetype:mp3 et al, but a separate audio search with 10-second previews and in-browser watching like Google Video would be very nice.)

Google Wallet
I know I'm definitely not the first one to think of this, whereas I haven't really seen much interest in the Google Audio idea, I know there are a lot of people that want something from Google (or indeed, any other company would be nice too) that replaces PayPal.

There are a few reasons for this. First, PayPal sucks. PayPalSucks.com has a whole slew of reasons why, and if that's not enough to convince you, try this article on SomethingAwful on the whole PayPal fuckup they experienced while collecting donations.

Secondly, any competition in the market is good. I still would like to see some sort of functional service dealing in micropayments.

Oh well, here's hoping. Hey, all those people waiting for Google IM were shot down, but then Google brought out Google Talk...

For more unfounded Google-related speculation, check out GoogleRumors. (Here's an article on "Google Wallet".)

BitTorrent Ultra and addict3d.org

2006-01-18T11:15:00.000+08:00

I don't know much about addict3d.org, but I'm tempted to recommend that you stay the hell away from it.

They seem to be reviewing absolutely any p2p-related software without even running it, dumping the summary from the author's website and posting a screenshot. They're covered by Google News which means that in my opinion, they're getting a lot more readers than they deserve.

Take for example the Google Alert that I received this morning regarding a new BitTorrent client, BitTorrent Ultra. The name immediately set off alarm bells for me since it implies that this client shits on everything else out there (like BitLord). Of course, this usually means that it's simply a rip of another client with adware installed (like BitLord).

Here's the "review" posted on addict3d.org of BitTorrent Ultra. The "internal rating" - I guess that means what the staff have rated it as - is 4.5/5. Ha.

If you want to download movies super fast and music too then you need to download BitTorrent Ultra.

Another warning that this is probably a shitty rip of another client.

So, I headed off to their website to check out their "ultra" client. Lo and behold, the software is a rip of Bram Cohen's original BitTorrent client (the "mainline" client), as evidenced by this screenshot. Bandwidth stolen from the developers:

I'm going to ignore the point that the developers are clearly incapable of taking a screenshot (that's the highest resolution version available) and point out that not only is this a ripoff of the mainline client, it's an old, old ripoff. BitTorrent hasn't looked like that since before v4.0.0 was released, IIRC, which was in early March 2005. At least BitLord is using a relatively recent version of BitComet's source.

In summary, BitTorrent Ultra is a "new kid on the block" in the world of BitTorrent, featuring all the features of BitTorrent from a year ago, plus a mirror of BitTorrent's documentation with "Ultra" appended to every instance of the word BitTorrent. It also features a new program icon and probably a shitload of malware! Download it now. Or don't, because it's the shittiest client I've seen so far.

(If anybody wants to install this crap to find out exactly how much malware is in it, be my guest, and leave a comment here.)

DeDRM device

2006-01-17T12:48:00.000+08:00

I don't understand why nobody has developed and released such a device before (maybe it's been done, but I just haven't noticed).

The way I see it, the ideal device would be a small box with two ports in it: one standard "stereo minijack" port (3.5mm wide, the type of port found in most sound cards and audio players such as the iPod) and one USB mini type B port (found in most cameras, takes the plug pictured right depicted here). Of course, the box would have to look cool in order to sell it to existing iPod owners.

Internal hardware would transform the analog audio from the stereo jack to a WAV or some other lossless stereo format (WAV is probably the best as it would probably require the least processing power to produce) and pipe it out via the USB port (which can be connected to a PC using a standard camera cable, included of course).

The device would come with software to interface with it and capture the audio stream, transferring it to a .wav file on disk. The software could also feature optional encoding to save disk space, but more importantly, it should be open-source or at least open-protocol, so that power users can improve the software (since hardware manufacturers always seem to make it utterly crap, except Apple) or write their own to interface with the device. (Why do software makers do this anyway? What possible financial gain do they have from using proprietary software and protocols just to support their hardware? Open-source makes it easier for people to fix problems themselves, and would increase sales to the "geek community" - for example, the success of the Linksys WRT54G router, which supports firmware mods because it's open-source.)

Another more expensive and unnecessary way of doing this would be to put some sort of flash memory chip onto the device and dumping the WAVs/compressed audio onto there, but this would greatly increase the cost. However, it would allow the device to double as a USB flash drive.

The reason for this? It would be a simple solution to all the DRM problems. First off, you wouldn't have to wait for someone to crack the encryption on a given DRM system just to load it onto your unsupported music player (assuming someone does it at all). Second, it would increase the popularity of online music purchases (people who don't buy due to DRM) and allow music that is only available on "protected" CDs to be extracted. Thirdly, the only way to block its use would be to force the user to use a proprietary audio player with special headphones/speakers.

Also, making the interface application or protocol open-source, or just dumping the files in WAV format would allow people to re-encode the music however they like, FLAC, MP3, OGG, whatever, depending on what they prefer and their music player supports. It would allow Linux and Mac users to use the device once someone had written an app to support it (since I'd imagine this would be quite popular with the "geek community", that probably wouldn't take long). Using the stereo jack also allows input to be captured from radios, CD players, PCs and audio players, depending on where the original source is.

There are a couple of weaknesses to the system; one, the audio is arguably lower quality due to being converted from digital to analog and then back again (and then re-encoded). This would be something to take into consideration when ripping from CDs and other high-quality sources, but downloaded DRM'd audio is usually encoded at relatively low quality anyway (at least low enough that it would probably be more significant than any quality loss from the conversion process). It could also feature an optical port if that is something that people really wanted.

Why hasn't any company produced this yet? Probably because of lawsuit concerns. But as far as I can see, this would fall under fair use in the United States (and I imagine most other places), and would sell quite well. Maybe I'm just deluded about how much DRM really annoys people, but if I had the money I would build and sell this myself.

P2P Scams

2006-01-13T16:08:00.000+08:00

I've probably ranted about this before, but peer-to-peer scam sites piss me off.

Basically, they're sites that trick you into thinking they're legal download services - they then charge you a nominal fee (sometimes one-time, sometimes monthly) and give you a freeware p2p app and some crappy documentation.

I've found a really helpful reference site with regard to these scams: p2pscams.info. For most people with a reasonable level of Internet and p2p literacy, it won't be a problem to discern between what is and isn't a scam site (in short, there are very few legal download services, and most of them are reasonably well-known such as iTunes, Napster, Yahoo Music, etc). But this site is a helpful reference to hand out to people who aren't as computer-literate as you.

It explains exactly how the scams work (basically, they are able to stay relatively legal by just having in the fine print "you should ensure that you have permission of the copyright holder before downloading any copyrighted material over a p2p network"), and has a fairly comprehensive list of scam sites. They're arranged, basically, by what they spoof as, for example, the LimeWire section currently includes 9 different LimeWire scam sites as well as linking to the official LimeWire website.

A useful reference, especially if you don't have the heart to tell someone that they are downloading music illegally and are paying some scammer $40 a year for the privilege.

Apple MacBook Pro and new iMac: the first Intel Macs

2006-01-12T13:42:00.000+08:00

MacWorld Keynote Announces x86 iMac & Laptop, via Slashdot

As you can see, the new Apple laptop, the MacBook Pro, looks very similar to what's basically its predecessor, the PowerBook G4. It, along with the new iMac, is the first computer deployed by Apple using an Intel x86 chip.

Now that we have Apple computers using x86 chips (and OS X written to run on x86 hardware), it should be possible to use Windows and OS X on the same computer. (I believe that people have done this before, but this should make it a lot easier - ie. eventually the "average" user could do it, even.) I can't see Apple selling OS X to non-Mac hardware, but I imagine that with a bit of modifying you could install Windows onto the new x86 Macs. It's an interesting idea, and we'll have to wait and see if anyone pulls it off. If this happens, I'll certainly be a lot more interested in picking up one of these MacBooks to replace my existing laptop (when I finally get around to it). Though at this stage they look nice enough to replace it anyway, since I've given up completely on the idea of gaming on a laptop: it's too expensive, and doesn't last for long.

The other thing that interested me about the MacBook is that it's the first mainstream laptop using a dual-core processor. (I could be wrong here, but I've never heard of one before.) Apple is playing the new "Intel Core Duo" chip up a fair bit (presumably it won't be available outside a Mac for a while yet, if at ever), quoting for example a 2.2x increase in "playing speed" (I assume this means framerate) on Doom 3 compared to a 1.67Ghz PowerMac G4.

Something else that is in my opinion incredibly cool is the new "MagSafe" power connector.

Brilliant idea if you ask me. Basically, the connector is attached by a magnet (I assume they've done everything necessary to ensure that it doesn't cause any of the usual magnet + hard disk = bad problems), which means that if someone trips over it, a lot less damage occurs. I don't usually have problems with people tripping over my power cord, but I guess some people do.

Some other things that aren't unique to the MacBook but certainly good ideas for laptops are the optical sound jack built-in, and the backlit keyboard. (I assume that you can disable backlighting.) Something else interesting that I would probably want to disable - but it would certainly be good to see how well it worked - is the automatic screen brightness adjustment. The MacBook detects the amount of ambient light and adjusts the brightness accordingly, assumedly to save your eyes and battery life. The scrolling trackpad seems nice too - you get similar functionality to the trackball on a Mighty Mouse - by putting two fingers on the trackpad instead of just one, and dragging around. However, they still have one mouse button on the trackpad. Apple fans always seem to say "the default mouse has only one button, but it will work with any USB mouse" - but why bother? The "simplistic" argument is pretty much obsolete, as most people using Macs are computer-literate enough to differentiate between left and right-clicking.

Oh, and the MacBook comes with all of Apple's "media centre" stuff - Front Row, their Windows MCE equivalent (it's basically just added on to OS X), including a remote, and built in iSight (webcam) with omnidirectional microphone.

Something that I'm still looking for that none of the "build it yourself online" companies offer, at least to my knowledge: a Dvorak keyboard. I'm mainly looking at this for a laptop. The reason is that most laptop keyboards are specific to that model - often not even different similar models from the same company share keyboards. This means that a Dvorak keyboard is something best done by the manufacturers. There is certainly no difficulty in implementing this that doesn't already exist with the customer being able to choose their processor, RAM etc; it's not like the keyboard is soldered onto the motherboard. (I've replaced my laptop keyboard three times.) Probably an easier way of doing this is just for someone to develop a standard form factor for a keyboard, so I don't have to look all over eBay to find a replacement keyboard for my laptop. Dell won't give me one (or even let me buy one).

The tech specs page for the MacBook is fairly extensive, and provides a number of interesting snippets of info that aren't as obviously "promoted" as the other features. First, there's a lithium-polymer (LiPo) battery, not lithium-ion (Li-ion). Lithium-polymer (technically, lithium ion polymer) batteries are newer than regular lithium-ion batteries as they can be modelled in a much wider variety of shapes, unlike Li-ion which is generally conformed to the "brick" shape. This is one technique that it seems Apple have used to keep the MacBook thin - the battery is thin, but quite wide and square. (See this picture of it on the Apple website.) Also, the MacBook comes with a DVI to VGA adapter - there is no VGA output on the computer. It comes with built in gigabit ethernet, FireWire, Bluetooth and 802.11g WiFi. Finally, it uses a SATA hard disk which can be from 80 to 120GB.

Dammit, I want one.. unfortunately, one of the areas that Macs have traditionally suffered in is price. Apple Store Australia is currently selling the MacBook for $3200 (~US $2400) or $4000 (~US $3000), depending on which flavour you choose. The US store sells them for $2000 or $2500, which as you can see, means we don't really get the best price, and end up being out-of pocket $400 or 500 USD (AU$530 - 670). Stupid currency.

Google feature list

2006-01-08T09:45:00.000+08:00

Here's a list I've just gone through of everything I could find out that Google runs right now. That is, their additional services other than the regular search engine. It's incredible how much stuff they've actually got here.

feature	description
These features are full web applications deserving of their own website - and usually have their own (sub)domain. Despite many of them being labelled as 'beta' releases, they are widely used and generally very stable.
Google Search	It seems obvious, but I'm putting it here anyway. Google's main search engine, one of the most popular in the world, uses their PageRank technology to ensure the accuracy and integrity of search results, and the AdSense program to turn a profit from the service by allowing businesses to place "sponsored links" which appear (separate to normal results) in searches featuring given keywords. Google has also localized their search engine into a number of other languages.
Google Image Search	Google's image searching feature. This is quite an old one and known by most people, it searches both in the filename of the image and in the text surrounding the image, should it be embedded in or linked from an HTML page.
Google Video	This is relatively new. Google has written their own Flash-based video player and you can use Google Search to search the catalogue of videos, and view them right in your browser. (You used to have to download an external application to view the videos, which was based on VLC.) At the moment, the "pay to view TV episodes" aspect hasn't yet been released, but you can use it to view a number of other web videos - most of them being "funny" or "cool" videos and Internet fads. I don't know how, but Video re-encodes all the videos to a reasonable quality which makes them fast to load. Pretty much all of the videos are available in higher quality from their original source, but this is definitely a good starting point to see if you like a videocast, for example.
Google Answers	A service where Google-qualified "Researchers" - web searching experts - will answer users' questions for a fee. Also one of Google's very old services, but not very well-known. After your question has been answered, the answer is fully viewable by the public for free.
Google Book Search	This used to be called Google Print. Allows you to search the full text of books and read a limited number of sample pages, as well as providing a link to a place where the book can be purchased.
Google Labs	This is the page that most of Google's "beta" features are listed on while they are still under construction. Completed features integrated into the main search engine are listed here.
Google Web Accelerator	A plugin for Internet Explorer or Firefox that uses precaching and other techniques in order to "accelerate" browsing. It gives you an indicator of the "total time saved".
Google Suggest	Automatically suggests the search query you're typing in based on what ranks highest beginning with the letters you've typed so far using JavaScript. Has some basic censoring on it.
Google Personalized Homepage	This is sort of like a "web portal" that you can use as your homepage, where you can customize what appears on it in addition to the regular Google search. "Modules" that can be embedded include Gmail messages, news from several major outlets or an RSS feed and "quote of the day" and "word of the day".
Google Mail	Originally known as Gmail, this is Google's email service. It's an AJAX-based webmail system with 2.6GB of storage at the moment - storage is continually increasing (see the Gmail homepage). A sidenote for Gmail users: you can use this link after logging in to force the "basic HTML" view instead of the advanced AJAX version of Gmail if you wish.
Google Maps/Local	Gives you maps for all of the US and a large part of the UK, as well as satellite imagery for pretty much the whole world in decent detail. Google Local gives you directions to and from certain points, and allows you to find street addresses and phone numbers for local businessese if you're searching in a supported area.
Google Desktop	A sidebar for Windows keeping convenient information in one place. Supports a number of interesting features (including Desktop Search, another Google app) and extensions, allowing anyone to write a module for it.
Google Alerts	Emails you on a daily, weekly or realtime basis with updates to specific searches (for example, entering "George W. Bush" and selecting "News" will email you whenever a new story about GWB pops up on Google News).
Google Deskbar	A Windows toolbar that you can stick on your taskbar. Features a plugin architecture.
Google Groups	Google's version of Usenet. It doesn't carry binaries, and is oriented towards the original point of Usenet (ie. discussion). Features a number of things introduced in Gmail including "starred" topics, and tracks a list of the most recent groups used. Also has a great interface for creating your own group. I send email updates of my blog using a Google Group - users subscribe using the link on the right. I'm the only one authorized to post to this group, so I post whenever I update, and subscribers receive an email alert.
Google Toolbar	Available for IE and Firefox - and the page updates automatically with the correct version based on the browser you use to access it - this is pretty much the original Google tool. Features a search bar, PageRank info, Blogger links, find-in-page search and a whole lot more.
Google Blog Search	A search engine that indexes only blogs. However, Google's definition of a blog is somewhat inaccurate. Blogs are defined to the search engine as content syndicated using RSS or Atom.
Froogle	Google's shopping search engine. Searches online prices for any item and allows you to search them by a number of criteria. (The name is a pun on "frugal".)
Google News	Automatically creates a customizable "front page" based on the most popular stories from "over 4,000 news sources" with links to original sources. Also provides access to a fully-searchable archive of news links that goes back about 2 months.
Google Talk	A basic IM client running on the Jabber network. Its main features are the Gmail integration and voice support.
These features are complete and stable, but are merely included as "add-ons" to the main Google Search service.
Google Scholar	Searches peer-reviewed journals, et cetera.
Google Definitions	Just type "define" into your search query, and Google will return a definition of the following term as the top result for you. Usually.
Google Movies	Gives you movie showtimes in the US, and movie reviews, based on the movie name or keyword.
Google Snippets	This is just my name for a feature in Google that will cause it to return an answer at the top of the search results to certain common questions. This information is not hand-picked, and it's difficult to predict what works, but typically "how old is " and some other set phrases tend to work well.
Google Calculator	Performs calculations and conversions. For example, currency conversions such as this or this, unit conversions like this, this or this.
Language Tools	Allows you to translate a block of text or webpage between various languages, as well as perform language and country-specific searches. Similar to Babelfish. According to the Wikipedia article, Google is working on a method of machine translation to supplement this using statistical analysis using UN documents (which must be translated into a number of languages).
Google Directory	Similar to the way Yahoo works (or worked for a while), Google Directory organizes websites into categories and allows you to browse from there. Useful if you don't know where to start keyword-wise.
Special Searches	A bit of a relic really, but allows you to make a search confined toa few select categories, such as Windows, BSD, US Government or University. Not particularly useful with tools like the site: operator.
These features are likely to become fully-functional at some stage in the future, but at the moment have too little functionality, cover too little area, or are too unstable to be counted among the above features.
Google Transit	A trip planner using public transport, similar to services offered by most local public transport authorities, for example Transperth's Journey Planner. At the moment, it only has data for Portland.
Google Ride Finder	Similar to Google Transit, except watched taxis, shuttles etc. too, and they're updated in real-time. It also supports several US cities.
Google Reader	A DHTML-based RSS aggregator.
Google Personalized Search	This tracks your search history when you are logged in in order to provide you with better, "personalized" results. A bit creepy if you ask me.
Google Catalogs	A repository of scanned-in print catalog/catalogues, searchable using OCR.
Google Base	Essentially a user-created database of content that will eventually show up in regular Google searches, too (which is presumably the big attraction). However, as it is currently in beta, Base content is not dumped directly into regular Google web crawls yet. Rather than me try to explain it (since I don't use it myself), it's better to look at the Wikipedia article since that has some info on it which will hopefully expand over time.
Google Mobile	A "lite" version of Google designed for mobile phones. Following the link on a PC will take you to Google's page with info about it. It is possible to get "mobile" versions of Google in XHTML (also accessible via a regular web browser) and WML, and there is even an iMode version. These pages also allow you to search the "mobile web", a feature currently in beta that searches only pages designed for mobile devices.
Google SMS	A subset of Google Mobile that allows you to perform queries by sending an SMS to Google. Includes Google Local and phone book information as demonstrated by the main page.
Google Pack	This new "feature" bundles a bunch of web "essentials" in the one download. Currently, it only supports Windows XP. It's still in beta, and Google's accepting sugggestions for things to have added to the Pack. It's fully customizable - you can add and remove programs as you see fit. Includes the Google Updater - a brilliant tool that keeps track of all the software supported by the Pack - regardless of whether the Pack installed it - and keeps it up to date. Google claims that it neither gives nor receives money for including these packages. Interestingly, it includes a special edition of Norton Anti-Virus with a free six-month subscription.
These features are not as useful as others mentioned here, and are usually released as a joke or "proof of concept".
Google Sets	You type in a number of related items, and it creates a "set" of other items that are related. For example, typing in "Clerks" and "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" turns up other Kevin Smith films.
Google X	This feature was released by Google, then abandoned after a day, probably due to legal concerns. It's basically a ripoff of Apple's OS X "dashbar", providing access to a number of Google searches from the one place with some funky DHTML animation. The site linked above, as far as I can tell, is the same as the original Google X, though it contains a "Hosted by" advertisement. An "enhanced" version is also available from the same site.
Google Moon	A Google Maps spinoff with satellite imagery of part of the Moon. When you zoom in far enough, the image is replaced with cheese. Yes, I spoiled the joke. Sorry.
These features are or are based on software written by other companies that have since been acquired by Google.
Google Earth	Bought from Keyhole, this software provides an interactive 3D globe model, allowing you to zoom into street-level satellite imagery in many places. Features placemarking, GPS device support (in the "pro" version), overlays, and Google-supplied layers including city info like locations of schools, ATMs, hotels, et cetera, road maps for many areas, 3D models of significant buildings in some parts of the US and 3D terrain info for most of the world. Also features "fly-bys" where the software "jumps" from one place to another, which can be automated in areas that support generation of driving directions and from which movies can be generated (with the "pro" version).
Google Analytics	Based on software created by Urchin, this is a full-featured analytics program that Google was offering for free. It's similar to Web Side Story. Analytics is no longer open to the public due to high demand for the service. Luckily I was one of the ~300 000 who got in before they closed signups, however, Google has indicated that signups will eventually be reopened.
Blogger	Acquired by Google but not rebranded, this is Google's blogging service. I'm using it right now.

A similar list of Google features is available on Wikipedia, though mine is at this stage more extensive.

Got any suggestions for additions to this list, or have a problem with one of the entries? Add a comment and I'll make the changes if I agree with you.

The Anti-MySpace Manifesto

2006-01-02T22:31:00.000+08:00

Let's continue on from my previous rant on the suckiness of petition sites...

MYSPACE SUCKS - a truly revolutionary petition. Soon it will reach 1 000 000 signatures and then the creators will march on the steps of their respective federal governments to get MySpace shut down. Why, with comments like this, how can they not succeed?

"i humped a squirrel and then had sex with it in the street n a bird shit on my leg n i licked it n put it up my ass"

"Im a Fag"

"myspace sucks hairy ball sacks, so fuck all u! N STICK A DICK UP UR BUTT!"

"im so nonconformist that im not gonna conform to this petition."

"myspace sucks hairy ball sacks, so fuck all u! N STICK A DICK UP UR BUTT!"

"Ya'll nigga's is stupid. The only reason you don't like my space is cause you to dumb to know how to use it. You proberbly don't even know what it's 4."

"FUCK MYSPACE!!!! SUM1 plz hack into that shit and destroy it!"

I decided to get right onto that request, namely "SUM1 plz hack into that shit and destroy it". , and after some Googling, I discovered this article on Kuro5hin: MySpace: A Place For Dolts. Apparently, MySpace is shittier than I ever imagined.

As you probably inferred, I am guilty of participating in this never ending bandwidth party online. It's popular for the same reason AIM became popular: it's trendy, computer-illiterate people can manage to make it "go", and consequently 'everyone else is using it'.

There are artifacts of past features where they used to be, saying "This feature no longer exists here. Go here instead." I think there are three or four of these just on the post-login page alone, and though it would be justifiable for the first week after the disappearance, they DON'T GO AWAY. I'm sure I could think of more with very little effort, but I'm going to leave it at this third and final damning trace of stupidity: the Extended Network feature.

You see, when you sign up for MySpace, you instantly have your first friend. You're immediately best buddies with the most popular person on MySpace: Tom. Now, to understand the stupidity of this, you have to understand that this is a social networking mechanism; if I'm friends with John and John is friends with Sally, then Sally is syllogistically my friend, and if I visit her profile it will tell me just that: "Sally is in your extended network". But if EVERYONE is friends with Tom, then there might as well not be an extended network feature at all, and he is defeating the purpose of his time and his website. Basically what I'm saying is, Tom is a dumbshit.

This has a whole bunch of info about a particular MySpace exploit. Apparently, there have been many others, too.

I decided to move on and look for other MySpace related sites, and found The Anti-MySpace Manifesto: Why MySpace Sucks And So Do You. This should provide an entertaining read, until I come back with my next post on MySpace. I'm working on a Weekend Web-style thing for it, unoriginal bastard that I am.

Time reform

2006-01-02T16:22:00.000+08:00

What is the big appeal of the current time system? It is completely outdated, and damn confusing.

First off, I'm not about to say that the year be changed to some sort of metrically significant number of days or anything like that, because I have at least a cursory understanding of how these things work in heliocentric terms.

But come on, let's think of the things that could be changed. For one, time zones. I see absolutely no practical use in time zones, to tell you the truth. Let's go over the advantages of time zones:

When talking to someone in a different time zone, you can say "I woke up at 5am this morning", and they will understand that that is quite an early time to be waking up.
You can have a New Year's party at night.

What about the disadvantages?

Every time you cross time zones, you have to readjust your watch, computer, PSP, iPod, whatever the fuck else you are carrying around with an inbuilt clock.
Something else that has to be taught to kids.
Describing this method as "time" is technically incorrect, when the "time" is different in different parts of the world. It's just the position of the sun where you are. Time is the same everywhere in the universe.
Everybody thinks that everybody knows their time zone. I only know the ones local to me, plus GMT. Sorry, I have no idea what time zone Pacific Time, or Mountain Time, or any of the other time zones are. Just WST, EST and GMT. (That's AWST and AEST.) The fact that you probably don't know what those time zones are, if you're not Australian, indicates that timezones suck. This is easily fixed by referring to your timezone by its number, eg. +8 for AWST, but no, nobody does that.

I'm not proposing anything radical like "you live in this area, so your 9 - 5 work hours run during the night and you sleep during the day". How about we just get rid of the significance of each point in time to the Sun's position (ie. 11am is no longer just before noon) and operate on Greenwich Mean Time or something? I don't live in Greenwich, but I'm not such a patriot that I would take offense to using British time because I want to go to bed at 11 o'clock or something (but I'm sure many people would, unfortunately). Seriously, where is the problem if you now wake up at 11pm on an average day and go to bed at 3pm? Of course, this raises issues with the whole concept of the "day", as your "day" now spans two dates.

Time sucks. I can't be bothered ranting on this topic anymore, but suffice to say that there are much better ways to deal with things without getting into timezones and shit. Bleh.

DSL, ADSL, ADSL2, ADSL2+ in Australia

2006-01-01T18:29:00.000+08:00

It seems there is a bit of confusion over these four terms, which are all thrown around a lot, particularly here in Australia where DSL-based connections are generally the best and fastest options available for broadband-speed internet. They also have reasonably wide availability.

First, what is DSL? DSL stands for Digital Subscriber Line, and it's a last-mile Internet technology (ie. between the telephone exchange / central office and the home) that allows you to send digital information over the phone line at a much higher bit rate than a dial-up modem, which is the other option for transmitting data over the phone line.

DSL does this by operating at a higher frequency than regular phone signals (devices operating on the normal phone spectrum such as phones, fax machines and dial-up modems are known as "POTS" devices, for Plain Old Telephone Service). This means that with the use of filtering technology, POTS services can run uninterrupted on the same line at the same time as DSL. You can read more about how exactly DSL achieves this at the Wikipedia article on DSL.

Most Australian ISPs are marketing "broadband internet" as internet that is faster and does not "tie up your phone line" while you're using it (as opposed to dial-up). Most of the time, they are talking about ADSL. This stands for Asynchronous DSL, and it essentially means that your upload speed is not as fast as your download speed (although technically, it would be possible to have an ADSL plan with faster upload speed than download speed, this is practically useless for 95% of users).

Recently (ie. over 2005), Australian ISPs other than Telstra (the owner of all the copper wiring and telephone exchanges / central offices) have begun installing their own DSLAMs in exchanges. These have been marketed in quite a confusing way. DSLAM stands for DSL Access Multiplexer, and a DSLAM must be installed in the telephone exchange to multiplex (combine) communications between DSL users connected to that exchange, and transport them to the ISPs high-bandwidth backbone. To clarify that, it performs two major functions: it acts as a DSL modem to convert the signals received over the phone lines into data that other transmission hardware can understand, and it combines all the data being transmitted over all those lines into one big stream that can be transported over a single line (typically a high-bandwidth fiber optic line that is connected to the ISPs backbone, and from there, to the server that the user was trying to reach).

This means two things: first, that Telstra would have had to install DSLAMs into all exchanges to offer DSL in the first place - and that other ISPs, starting with iiNet, were doing nothing "original" by installing DSLAMs, and second, that people who say that DSL is better than cable because you get your own line instead of sharing bandwidth with your neighbours are wrong. While the problem is not as bad, all people hooked up to one DSLAM (typically around 50) are limited by the bandwidth of the fiber optic line connected to the backbone. However (hypothesizing here), most fiber optic lines operate at gigabit speeds and higher, so that still leaves 20 Mbps for each of the 50 users on a DSLAM, assuming full utilization (and no ISP would be able to survive if all users were maxing out their connection constantly). This is in contrast to cable, which frequently leaves users with an equivalent of less than a megabit each if link speeds are maxed out.

Anyway, the reason that ISPs began installing their own DSLAMs is because Telstra artificially limits all ADSL connections that they wholesale or retail to a maximum speed of 1500/256 - that is, 1500 Kbps download, and 256 Kbps upload. The ADSL specification allows up to 8 Mbps (8000 Kbps, more than 5 times Telstra's limit) download and 1 Mbps (roughly 4 times Telstra's limit) upload, so at first, it seems like Telstra are just screwing their customers.

However, there is a good reason for their limit, although it is a little excessive. As the length of the copper line between the home and the exchange increases, the ADSL signal is degraded significantly, such that at any distance over 5 km, ADSL is essentially useless. Telstra will provide ADSL access to any customer within roughly 4.1 km of the nearest exchange (keep in mind that this is the copper line distance, not the direct distance of a straight line between your house and the exchange). This is why most regional customers can't get ADSL. At that distance, connection speeds of approximately up to 3.5 Mbps are possible, but as a lot of the copper lines are of low quality, and most users opt to "self-install" ADSL using microfilters (aka inline filters) rather than a central splitter, line quality can be degraded significantly. Therefore, Telstra offers a maximum speed of 1.5 Mbps so that they can effectively guarantee a 1.5 Mbps sync speed to anyone within the 4.1 km limit. This is best demonstrated by a graph.

Source: Internode, created from data by Consultel with permission.

At the moment, we're looking at ADSL (blue) and Telstra (red). As you can see, they have a comfortable margin in which to operate. (I'll discuss ADSL2 and 2+ later, but just so you know, READSL stands for "Reach Extended ADSL", and its a fairly self-explanatory idea. It provides ADSL to distant customers, although it is not yet widely available.)

So that's why iiNet's 8 Mbps internet connections seemed so special at the time they were released, despite the fact that all they did was purchase essentially the same hardware as Telstra without installing limiting software on it.

As for ADSL2 and 2+, those are more powerful versions of ADSL, basically. I won't go into the specifics of how they work, but as you can see from the graph, their advantage over ADSL is really only noticeable within 2 km of the telephone exchange. Both retain the 1 Mbps upload speed from vanilla ADSL, but ADSL2 allows up to 12 Mbps downstream, and ADSL2+ 24 Mbps. To operate at those sort of speeds, in addition to living close to the exchange, you'll need to have an ADSL2/2+-compatible DSL modem. Obviously, the ISPs DSLAMs need to be compatible with 2+ as well, currently only iiNet, Adam Internet and Internode have their own DSLAMs, with iiNet having the largest number of them. Currently, all three support ADSL2+ on their networks, but Telstra's DSLAMs don't. Telstra has stated that they will support ADSL2+ in 2006, but I have my doubts as to whether this would happen; surely if they were going to offer a service that is only useful to a tiny percentage of their customer base (those using 2+ speeds and within 2km of the exchange) they would have started by uncapping the regular ADSL connections to 8 Mbps, and they announced that back in March.

Boy opens video iPod box, finds Spam

2005-12-30T09:42:00.000+08:00

Boy finds mystery meat instead of iPod, via Engadget..

At least the guy who found batteries inside a hard drive box from Staples got something useful as his mystery prize; when a 14-year-old Hawaiian boy opened up the video iPod that his mother had bought him for Christmas, he was treated not to one of Steve's little treasures but to an unopened package of "mystery" meat instead.

Oh, come on, Spam is useful. You can eat it. Some gems in the comments, too:

Had this happen at my place of employ before. A digital camera was returned with a bar of soap and a can of V8 tomato juice instead of the camera. *sniff*

I live in Hawaii, and I ate a Spam musubi (spam, rice, seaweed) for breakfast. Spam is everywhere!
One time I bought a can of Spam, and it had a fricking iPod in it! I was PISSED.

Seen it haappen where a bag of flour was found instead of a subwoofer

Years ago I bought a CD copy of Nirvana's Bleach album, and it looked like the real thing, right down to the print on the disc. But they had somehow accidentally put the contents of some really shitty disco pop music on the disc.

ROFL!, that exact same thing happened to me when i bought my Raedon 9600.

ROFL, indeed.

More on Opera's Times Square sign

2005-12-28T19:46:00.000+08:00

You might have read my previous post on Opera's marketing decision to place an Opera user's face in Times Square, New York on New Year's Eve on the ABC sign.

Well, they made a decision on who will be representing them!

Dan Alexandru (aka dantesoft) of Romania is Opera's New York - New Year's competition winner!

He had presented us with an interesting story of romance, of love and of course: Opera IRC. His story was just too good for us to pass up. We wouldn't do the story justice by telling it here - read on in Dan's blog to let him tell it properly.

Congratulations, Dan. We hope to be kept up on how this develops. (source)

"hi guys!"

"opera pwns firefox"

I'm sure he will do us proud in Times Square. Ahem. I wonder which of those pictures will actually be displayed on the massive sign?

Microsoft Paint

2005-12-22T20:01:00.000+08:00

Yes, it's everyone's favourite graphics editor, Microsoft Paint.

While looking around the internets, I discovered a number of features in Paint that a lot of people don't know about..

The tertiary colour
Most people know that you can pick a primary and secondary colour in Paint - primary is left-click, secondary is right-click. But did you know there is a tertiary colour controlled by CTRL+click?

The tertiary colour here is blue. (Red is primary, and green secondary.)

In case you didn't guess, this means that you can use the tertiary colour to paint by holding CTRL while click-dragging the cursor in whatever tool.

Fixed lines, rectangles and ellipses
This feature is fairly simple, but there are still a lot of people who don't know about it. Holding down SHIFT while using the ellipse, rectangle or line tool will result in a "regular" shape. That is SHIFT+ellipse produces a perfect circle, rectangle yields a square and line a line at exactly 0 or 45 degrees from the horizontal or vertical (ie. all the cardinal points including NW, SW, NE, SE).

Clone and trail tools
This is a less useful feature that is still quite interesting and not very well-known. Select an area with the freehand or rectangular selection tools, then hold down CTRL or SHIFT and drag the area. CTRL clones the area - a duplicate image is created, much as if you pressed CTRL+C/CTRL+V. SHIFT creates a trail of the area - as if you had continually been pasting images. It certainly could save you a lot of time if you wanted to do this in the first place, and had to do it in Paint for some bizarre reason.

Smiley Snake looks over his Smiley Spawn.

10x zoom
This is a bit glitchy. If you click a certain row of pixels just below the 8x magnification level, you can get 10x magnification.

You've gotta click where the red line is.

Apparently this is a removed feature. It's not all that useful considering how much of a pain in the ass it is to get the right pixel row, especially since it makes almost no difference whatsoever.

Made in Microsoft Paint.

Anyway, I found these "easter eggs" fairly interesting. More easter eggs can be found at eeggs.com, including the famous Word '97 pinball game. Also, a substantial amount of this article was shamelessly taken from the Wikipedia, although I did rewrite it. Wikipedia also has an article about Paint .NET, which is apparently an open-source program made under Microsoft's guidance.

64k 'net sucks. :-(

Online petitions

2005-12-22T10:54:00.000+08:00

When are people going to learn that petitions, much less online petitions, don't do shit. Fuck!

You may have heard of a site called PetitionOnline.com, which offers free online petitions. A similar service is offered by PetitionSpot. God.

Let's go through some of these petitions. For starters, the "most active" petitions on PetitionOnline include "INVESTIGATE VIETNAM FOR CONTINUED VIOLATION OF CAMBODIA’S NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY AND SURVIVAL" with 3623 signatures at the moment. It's a letter addressed to the President of the United States asking him to "investigate" relations between Vietname and Cambodia, ie. start a war as far as I can see. Assuming he is able to read the letter, I can't see Bush suddenly saying "let's go declare war on them", unless oil mysteriously appears in Vietnam or something.

So PetitionOnline is pretty worthless, but PetitionSpot is another completely different level of shite. "Ricky is NOT ugly" is currently on the front page as one of the most active petitions. Similar petitions include "we heart emo hair", "PETITION SPOT BLOWS", "Eminem Sux" ("maybe it is time he came out of his closet and let everyone no he is really gay wit dr uhh dre i think it is or wait nooo its dr gay!! now i remember"), or "Make All MMORPG's FREE". What kind of dumb fuck would think that companies like Blizzard would just give up US$100 million per month (based on US$20 per month subscription fee and 5 million active subscriptions to World of Warcraft) just because a couple of people signed a petition saying "it should be free like any other game". MMORPGs have ongoing costs (moderators, servers etc.) unlike "other games", dumbass.

While most petitions have stupid concepts behind them, KKK KILLAS not only is a ridiculous idea for a petition ("KKK SUCKS MAN. THEY SHOULD DIE! HAHAHAHHA. MUHAHHA") it has inspired hundreds of idiots from all walks of life (read: both black people and white people) to comment on either how "niggers deserve to be working on the farm" or "black people have bigger cocks than honkeys". Oh yeah and also "you rasists suk". I post as of now the newest 50 or so signatures in their full unedited (just restyled) glory.

	Name	Comments
366	shizzle	kkk sucks evry body knows eat there just white pppl that has sexs with ther hats
365	yomama	kkk suck the ponty things on there head are used to have gay ses fuck the kkk
364	KoRn	lol kkk already xist? they dont give a shit they are fucking death , whites and blacks fucking sucks
363	the man	What strikes me is the effort that you people put into this and all it really is ,is free advertising for the Klan. Thank You for all the support. 88 Long live the Klan!!!
362	MIKE	FUCK THIS SHIT FUCK THE KKK FUCKING DUMB BASTARDS I'M WHITE I I HATE RACISM ESPECIALLY WHITE PEOPLE WHO THINK THERE BETTER THAN SOMEONE ELSE JUST CAUSE THERE WHITE FUCK THE KKK!!!FUCK THE NAZIZ AND FUCK BUSH TOO!!!!
361	SCHWARTZENEGGER	HA HA HA HA. THE KKK RULES MOTHER FUCKERS. BUT SKIN HEADS ARE BETTER. ALL OF YOU WIGGER RICE BURNER DRIVING MTV FOLLOWING NIGGER LOVERS WILL ALL GO BACK TO AFRICA WITH THE NIGGERS BEANERS AND EVERYONE ELSE. ALL OF YOU GET IN LINE TO KISS MY ASS.WE WILL BE A WHITE NATION AGAIN!!!!! FUCK EACH AND EVERY ONE OIF YOU WHO SIGNED THIS PETITION!!!
360	joe	Damn straight number 342
359	Dom	These fucking pointy hat white ass wiping jerk offs are all going to burn in the gates of hell. And when you do I will laugh. Do you know how there founder died he got poked in the eye with that gay pointy hat. Have fun in hell you white ass wiping fuckers
358	Dude	They will burn in hell every one of them just like there finder
357	WWE_Angel	I support this petition.the kkk suck, there is no chance in hell that they will get what they want cuz they seriously need 2 get thei freakin facts rite, white niggas (no offense 2 anyone who is against the kkk)thats rite if they call black ppl niggas they must b white niggas, fuck them, the most racist organisation ever nd y, cuz black ppl got their freedom, how selfish can u get???
356	kassie	i just wanna remind 'THE DEMON WITHIN'(#42) that he shouldn't say that only the whites own america. first of all, america is actually originally owned by the NATIVE AMERICANS... and the whites, then.. took it away from them in 'UNCIVILIZED' ways. i have a lot of white friends and i am not hating whites at all. in fact, i hate the fact they (some of 'em..) think that they should be superior. by saying that foreigners make america dirty..is like saying that he is, as well, technically..'coz the white americans are not the original people of america. know your history, THE DEMON WITHIN', sir. as an american military..i think that you should set a good example to other countries..show them that americans are educated and respectful. thank you!
355	Bryan Millsap	I support this petition.
354	kkk fucker	KKK are just facist racist and bitch.They are against evolution and race minorities.They are only a group of son-of-a-bitch who try to look tought but they failed they are cock sucker and dog fucker.EAT THIS KKK PRICK
353	bigfknhec	The KKK stands for Korny Kracker Kunts...i remember not too long ago maybe a couple of months ago they tried marching somewhere in the south and got jumped by the "hood"...i loved seeing it too...
352	Angry Fucker	They should change to CKC: Culture Killing Cunts
351	THRASH	The kkk is the biggest group of fags I have ever seen, I'm mean they all wear a dress and look like crackheads. What do they represent.... The freak show?! My high school chess team can stand up to them.
350	taylor epley	the kkk just needs to go straight to hell
349	Cassioe	Yo nigger i think the KKK is white trash hicks that need to get over them selfs cause it aint the way of god god wants us to all be together as one io no iot may sound cheesy but its true
348	gabriel	not only fuck the kkk fuck everything that is racist!
347	madeline	not all whites are kkk we can't help being white any differently than u can help being black these days to get ahead u have to be black sooo wat u on about the kkk were bad pplz wateva their race like the suicide bombers they are claiming to be doing thid on behalf of a religion that they break the 1st rule of it by doing that !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
346	KKKkiller	FucK the KKK they suck big white cocks!!
345	jolis friend	jolis is rights just that he ment reipers isted of rapers
344	jolis friend	jolis is rights just that he ment reipers isted of rapers
343	joli	kkk are a bunch of fucking pussys rapers . KKk is full of fucking old bastards bothering others. So kkk motherfuckers we are going to kill you. Watch out idiots.
342	Jam	if u kkk fuckers dont want us in america then why tha fuck did u bringus here in tha first place,since i KNOW u dont have AN ANSWER TO THAT JUST STFU!!!

I hope that this has inspired you to never sign a fucking online petition, as it will do jack shit. For more ranting about the worthlessness of petitions, see Maddox.

Opera to Put User's Face in Times Square

2005-12-15T22:59:00.000+08:00

Opera to Put User's Face in Times Square (via Slashdot)

Regardless of whether or not this ever actually happens, they've opened up a forum where users can submit pictures of themselves along with a blurb as to why they feel they deserve to be "honoured" by the Opera sign at New Year's. Suffice to say, it's fucking hilarious.

WHY NOT? - thorgy (link)

"Them's some fine-ass bitches right there."

This guy (known only as "SerbianFighter") posted a twelve-page rant on civil unrest in Czechslovakia, or something.

Former Yugoslavia consisted of 6 states in which 6 main nations lived... all spoke basically the same language, had same roots, history... all were mixed and it couldn't break peacefully ... nationalism grew on all sides and it all was like a volcano ready to erupt... I really am not here to disscus the reasons or decisions some people that were entitled to decide in our names made... I can only say that we all together and each nation individualy didn't need those rivers of blood and years of hate..

Okay.

Times Square needs me - magnus_1986 (link)

My name is Muhammad Jamal Abid, and I am ninteen years old. I feel I should be representing Opera on Times Square because this photo gives a look that it is 'aerodynamic' and fast. Just like Opera. It is also very friendly looking as well as aggressive to malicious things, just like Opera behaves with spyware/malicious popups. I gives a fresh young look with a new outlook on life but not immature. Just like Opera.

Friendly tip: Include your "aerodynamic and fast" picture next time!

Someone made a conscious decision to upload this picture to the internet, because they would like it to be displayed on a massive electronic sign in Times Square, in front of a million other people.

Oh, now I get it! Thanks for the clarification.

That's OK Christos, I forget my name sometimes, too.

CLICK HERE FOR FREE XBOX 360! - albaby348 (link)

Haha noob! Thank you for checking out my post. Now that I have your attention I will make a claim using obscure reason why you should pick me to REP-RE-SENT Opera. You should pick me because I am not a noob, I am a 1337 h4x0r!!11! I can pwn all other noobs in NYC! In addition, my disgruntled look for prom says it all, Opera is the shizzle!

"Damn, I was fooled by albaby348! THERE IS NO XBOX 360!"

Swiss Cheese going global - Numer0bis (link)

swiss cheese going global 24/7 beating down the door fully unstoppable hardcore cubed unit bringing together my brothers and i don't take none of that ie shit for shizzle dizzle. IE SUXXX

Lin Zhizhao - I want my mother know - quasimo (link)

Hello!I want my mother know!I want my mother say Wow!And I want to share my love to the world!I'm Lin Zhizhao,Chinese.

What the hell is with Chinese people wanting to share their love to the world? I thought their goverment banned that?

current mood: thoughtful lol XD

Times Square Screen Submission - Underwater Plunge in Paradise - tomasboman (link)

Remember the song "Bakerman is baking bread"? Remember the line "Relax, take it easy"? Use the picture of me taking a plunge on Bora Bora, to remind people around the world that work is not all there is.

What the fuck are you talking about?

Get the fuck off my monitor!

My 2 greatest loves - Ana and Opera - vlad_leonte (link)

I lOve you both! HOpe we'll make it all three Of us tO NYC!

You forgot the Os in 'you' and 'both', Vlad.

"use opera or ill fuck you up wanker"

Hahaha, Opera rocks.

Gotta love forums

2005-12-10T22:57:00.000+08:00

Here we go with another rip-off of SomethingAwful's Weekend Web segment. Hey, those bastards don't ever accept any of the shit I send in for them, so I'll do it myself.

Yeah, iMDB has a pretty good 'posting community'.

It's spyware.. it's a virus.. it's SPYWARE VIRUS! (askmehelpdesk.com)

"don't be racist about negros" (gamefaqs)

Alright, GameFAQs forums are just too funny. The rest are all from GameFAQs.

"no, ur the noob"

Samus also can curl up into a ball approximately one-quarter her regular size in half a second and drop an unlimited supply of bombs while in this ball, but how the fuck can she walk around all day with a heavy cannon on her arm?

I'd hope they invited me to the wedding. Man, that would 'pwn'.

Oh, and what is the symbol for kryptonite?

"I will admit that Britney Spears is decent. I happen to prefer video game characters." "I beg to differ, sir."

Does your 'stash' contain any 'hawt' pictures of Mario? I've been looking all over.

What in the fuck does this have to do with Halo 2?

Thanks for sharing with us!

This is too much for me. I might come back later and have another crack at reading GameFAQs forums.

New AIM virus: "lol no this is not a virus"

2005-12-08T12:46:00.000+08:00

read more on..
cnet article | slashdot article | digg page

According to IMlogic, the worm, dubbed IM.Myspace04.AIM, has arrived in instant messages that state: "lol thats cool" and included a URL to a malicious file "clarissa17.pif." When unsuspecting users have responded, perhaps asking if the attachment contained a virus, the worm has replied: "lol no its not its a virus", IMlogic said.

Hahaha. Sadly, this virus will go far.

Something else mentioned on Slashdot: AOL for Dummies. Yes, they actually make such a book.

Simplified BitTorrent media distribution with µTorrent's internal tracker

2005-12-08T10:31:00.000+08:00

Some of you may have read my previous review of µTorrent, a relatively new BitTorrent client that aims to provide many of the more advanced features provided by 'full-featured' clients such as Azureus without using massive amounts of computer resources.

Today I'm going to show you how to use µTorrent's undocumented internal tracker to track torrents, and along with DHT allow for simplified media distribution. But before we get started, you may want to know a little more about how BitTorrent works. Wikipedia has a lot of information that may be useful, but I've written an intro to the anatomy of a BitTorrent session which is a must-read for the rest of this article if you don't already know all about trackers.

It's tracking that we're looking at in this guide. Of course, this client is first and foremost just that - a client, and as such can download and seed torrents too (using another tracker). But it features a tracker, which many people don't know about.

The first thing you need to do to track using µT is find something to track. You may want to start just by grabbing any old thing off the net and seeding that; for testing purposes something around 5MB is good since it's quick to download and hash, but slow enough so that you have time to check out what's going on. Epitonic (a depository of free, legal, high-quality music) would be a good place to get such a file.

Now (and this is something you should have done already), you need to get connectable. I'm not going to waste my time telling you how since there are plenty of resources available online such as portforward.com. You need to be connectable to run a tracker, and it will have significant effects on your download speed with regular BT anyway.

Next, create the .torrent by using File > Create new .torrent.

What do I have against eBaum? Refer to ebaumsworldsucks.com.

PUT.YOUR.IP.HERE:PORT needs to be changed to your external IP (get it from here if you don't know what it is) and your connectable port (the one listed in Options > Preferences > Network Options). The final result should look something like http://65.212.23.89:5412/announce, although the numbers will differ.
Piece size can be changed if you really want to and know what you're doing. You should check Private torrent if you don't want people sharing peers with DHT - ie. you don't want the files leaked outside people who have access to the .torrent file. Click Create and save as when you've entered all the relevant data.

The torrent will appear in the main µT screen and begin seeding. However, there is one thing you should do to optimize speed (this may be necessary on some internet connections) and that is change your IP to localhost. Do this by double-clicking the torrent and replacing your IP with localhost, so that the above example would become http://localhost:5412/announce. Why didn't we do that when creating the .torrent? Well, localhost means the PC that the tracker is currently running on - it only works from that PC. If you had made a .torrent with localhost as the tracker, nobody would be able to connect to it.

You can now send the .torrent on to other people, upload it to the Internet, etc. and people will be able to download its payload - as long as you don't stop seeding that file or close µTorrent.

security concerns

Did you notice that there was no setting that needed to be activated in order to set up and configure the tracker?

This means that any connectable µTorrent user can be used to track a torrent. In my opinion, this presents a minor security risk, especially since it is extremely simple to abuse this fact to track your own torrents. Tracking of torrents containing copyrighted content is a legal grey area, however, should someone release a torrent that you unknowingly tracked, which becomes very popular and contains illegal content (eg. a leaked version of a new movie) it is likely that you or your ISP would at the least receive a cease-and-desist letter. Also, a popular torrent would use up a fair bit of bandwidth / computer resources (if you're just a regular home user) and could cause problems for you that way.

Any µT user (this can be done in most other BT clients, too) can get the details necessary to do this. Simply join a large swarm and open the Peers tab - you'll need to have the IP, Port and Client columns open for this, which can be done by right-clicking on any existing open columns and checking the columns you're missing. Click the Client column to sort by client after 'harvesting' a large number of peers (staying on the torrent for a while should achieve this) and look for the µTorrent users. Any user with an entry in the Port column is connectable, because you initiated communication with them. (Users with no entry here may be connectable, too, but it's simpler just to stick with outgoing connections.) You can then use the IP and port listed for them to run a tracker on their computer without them knowing. Harvesting several IP:ports using this method and embedding them all in a multi-tracker .torrent would make this much more reliable, since if one user were to shut down their client, the torrent would still be tracked.

Worse, there is no way to block this traffic port-wise, since it is on the same port as regular µTorrent traffic.

Disclaimer: I strongly discourage tracking any content on another's computer without their permission! Not only is this unethical, it is probably illegal in most countries, although I don't know enough to provide any details.

Update: There is something you can do to fix this problem now, if it concerns you. The latest beta version of µT, v1.2.3 beta, contains some new features including Unicode support from all Windows OSs past Windows 98, and an advanced option which is off by default to enable the internal tracker. Using this version instead will disable the internal tracker for you without affecting your other downloads. However, it is still a beta version, which means it is not as stable as current final versions. Hopefully, it will be completed soon and all clients will be auto-updated.

µTorrent is a great client, and the internal tracker a great feature. It makes it heaps simpler to self-track torrents and distribute media without mucking around with complicated, highly-configurable trackers.

However, I think that the above concerns need to be addressed - the simplest way would be just to disable the tracker by default, and make it only functional if you enable it in the advanced options dialog. This feature is now present in the latest beta of µT.

Additionally, I think that the µTorrent site should provide some documentation for the internal tracker, basically what I just did, since this is definitely a useful feature and I shouldn't have had to create a new thread on the forums to work out how to use it. (µT development, I give you permission to use anything from this guide in such documentation should you wish to create it.)

Basic anatomy of a BitTorrent session

2005-12-08T02:23:00.000+08:00

This is a brief explanation of the anatomy of a BitTorrent session, without going into details on interest, choking, snubbing, et cetera. It's part of my guide to µTorrent's internal tracker, but I didn't want to include it in that article since it was getting a little long, and most readers will already know this info.

Basically, BitTorrent is a way of downloading files which is something of an alternative to HTTP (despite the fact that it uses HTTP). It saves the user a lot of bandwidth because people downloading the file are also uploading it at the same time (or at least making it available for upload).

A BitTorrent session starts on the user's end when that user downloads a .torrent metadata file. This file contains info about the file you want to download including the tracker address and checksums of each piece.

I'll explain. BitTorrent splits up the payload (the file you want to download using it) into a number of pieces and calculates the checksum of each piece. The checksum is a string of characters (in BitTorrent's case, 160 bits worth as it uses SHA-1) that can be used to verify that the part file you downloaded is exactly the same as what the original creator of the .torrent had. I won't go into the maths in this, but you can read about it here. This is necessary because when you allow users to upload your files, you want to be sure they're uploading the right thing and not something that could damage your users' computers (eg. viruses).

So that's what the checksums are for. The tracker address is the address of a server that manages a list of the people on the torrent (collectively referred to as a swarm). Typically, if you want to use BitTorrent to distribute data, you'll have to run the tracker yourself so that people can actually get the file. (Although you can use "decentralized tracking" which is a form of DHT, you should always include a tracker too, since DHT isn't supported by all clients, and is still a bit buggy, as well as slower.)

Bicycle charger for iPod

2005-12-06T21:01:00.000+08:00

Interesting project here over at geektechnique.org.

Basically this guy used an earlier project where he powered his iPod with a hand crank and adapted it to his bike. Oh, and the entry has lots of pretty pictures.

sources: found via engadget | dugg

Visual Basic 2005 Express

2005-12-06T19:38:00.000+08:00

background reading: wikipedia links
Visual Basic | C++ | C♯ | J♯

This is a newish program from Microsoft built on Microsoft Visual Studio .NET.

Basically, it's a free (for one year) version of Visual Studio, which is slightly cut-down and only supports Visual Basic. There are also several other Visual Studio Express products including Visual C#, J# and C++.

The Registration Benefits page also is very interesting.

We are offering thousands of dollars worth of resources from Microsoft and third-party partners to ensure that you have a great experience with the Express Editions.

Basically these resources include eBooks and royalty-free graphics including icons for use in your super-leet 'Hello Worldz0r' Visual Basic 'app'.

Hey, but in all seriousness, this seems pretty cool, at least for people just getting into programming and interested in Visual Basic (although whether or not that is a good place to start is debatable). And it will probably decrease the amount on piracy of Visual Studio.

Teenager Posts Suicide Note on Myspace

2005-12-05T18:01:00.000+08:00

via New America Media

"This could of ben stoped," [says a friend] via a Myspace comment page that has become Josh's memorial.

According to his words, Josh loved "girls who cry"; was married; was 8 feet, 11 inches tall and made $250,000 a year or more.

"i'm speechless," wrote Kelsey, a 17-year-old from San Juan Capistrano who enjoys "good times."

"unfortunatly we had a scary about 4 days ago he atemted suicid and failed we were all on his back ever since but this mornig right before school he posted this on a bulliton ..." she wrote me. "as soon as my friend rach saw that she told mimi and mimis mom call the police and drove up to his house (they live 1 street up from each other) she found it was to late. if i could telll josh one thing is that i love you and i wish that you could have send the people that hold you dear to"

Myspace, bringing emo kids together.

8GB temp file for MSN Messenger

2005-12-04T08:48:00.000+08:00

The other day I was defragmenting my disk and had a look at the most fragmented files on there in case I could delete them or offload them to an external disk (it speeds up the process a lot).

I noticed that right at the top of the list was a file called
C:\Documents and Settings\Scott\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\MSN Messenger\00037ffe8709ca1c\SharingMetadata\Working\SimilarityTable_2
and that it had about 500 fragments, and was 8.00GB in size. :|

Right-clicking on the image's properties, however, reveals that the file doesn't actually take up that much room on disk..

Naturally, the first thing I did was Google the files which turned up a whole bunch of dead links, as well as this Portugese forum (Google translation) and this unhelpful English forum.

Unless its giving you problems or you're runing out of HDD space-- I wouldnt worry about it. Especially since you don't really know what it's for yet.

Great. Anyway, translation of the Portugese page led me to this thread on Neowin which clarified the issue somewhat. Apparently I'm not alone in this.

Looks like the file came from the Windows Messenger Live beta. I'd advise anyone who installed it to look for this file and delete it. It's a hidden and system file, so you might have to turn a few options off in Folder Options.

"Can I ask you whether you prefer Internet Explorer or Firefox?"

2005-12-03T18:23:00.000+08:00

This is an interesting "video blog" where they go around asking random people on the street "whether they prefer Internet Explorer or Firefox".

download via
BitTorrent | HTTP
please use BitTorrent if you know how, otherwise use HTTP.

The comments are really insightful. Here's a few memorable ones.

"It seems to be faster, and for what it's worth, it seems to be more secure."

"Explorer." "Why?" "'Cos I don't know how the fuck to use Firefox right now! It seems all weird to me; Mozilla, right? It's just weird to me."

"Firefox, definitely. Isn't it like the best invention of 2005 or something?"

"[Firefox,] 'Cos it's a non-Microsoft product - it doesn't crash as much."

"[Firefox, because] Uhhh... Internet Explorer has all kinds of problems with uh, many websites that you might go to visit, you know, in Firefox maybe it has less, you know, I think perhaps it's more secure anyway."

"Firefox." *gives thumbs up and runs away*

"I use Firefox, just because my dad said I get less viruses that way."

"[Firefox,] Because it has a fox and it's on fire."

"[Firefox,] Because.. I hate Internet Explorer." "Why?" "I dunno, it's not as secure as Firefox."

"I'm not for big err.. the Microsoft is giving me trouble."

"[Firefox,] Because it blocks all my cookies."

"Why?" "I dunno, I just like Firefox."

Oh yeah, the harp music was a nice touch, too.

Go Firefox marketing! Firefox, the browser used by people because "my dad says it gives me less viruses, it blocks all my cookies, and it's a fox on fucking fire, dude!"

Windows OneCare Live: first public beta (Microsoft anti-virus)

2005-12-02T20:50:00.000+08:00

The first public beta of Windows OneCare Live is now available. This is essentially Microsoft's new anti-virus solution, which is apparently based on the software by the Romanian anti-virus company they acquired some time ago.

It seems to be tying in to Windows Live somehow, though I haven't had a chance to test it out yet. I'll post back here when I do. For now, you can get the beta from here, although you need to open this link in IE6 to actually get the file, as well as supply your email address.

More at The Register.

News: Firefox 1.5, evil 'Mosquito' device

2005-12-01T16:32:00.000+08:00

Firefox 1.5
Yes, everybody's favourite browser (except mine) has been released in version 1.5. Given that I posted a rant about Firefox users just the other day, you might wonder why I am talking about the 1.5 release.

Well, rather than answer that question, I'll give you some download links for the browser first.
The main Mozilla page which is redesigned (looks nice, I might add) and features a direct link to a download, which I assume automatically does load-balancing and gives you the fastest/closest mirror to you.
Firefox 1.5 RC3 on the iiNet FTP. This is a high-speed link, I suggest you use this instead but...

Well, "1.5 Final" is exactly the same as 1.5 RC3. That stands for release candidate 3, which means that it's the third iteration of the browser that was "ready for release" but submitted for peer review. When I say exactly, I mean exactly; even if you are the type who updates just to get rid of the RC3 notice (ie. me), I assume that there was no such notice in the first place, since the checksums of the files are exactly the same. Bleh. (Oh, and it hasn't yet been localized to en-GB - Commonwealth English - for those of you who like that version. But I personally prefer en-US since GB changes the Google search to google.co.uk, and I'm in Australia.)

Anyway, there are some fairly extensive release notes that come with this version, I'll summarize them here because a lot of it wouldn't matter to most people (ie. accessibility options for disabled people like Braille displays).

Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Finally! First, there are automatic updates that work properly (the automatic ones in 1.x were crappy), and they are actually incremental, which means that updating Firefox no longer means "downloading the entire 5MB installer and reinstalling it". This is one feature I'm sad to say Opera still doesn't have yet.
Browser navigation improvements. This marks the introduction of two new features ripped from Opera: one; 'instant' back and forward, which is almost as good as Opera's version, and definitely a cool feature. Also you can now drag and drop tabs into different orders, which is IMO another feature I like to have in Opera, but effectively useless. As far as tabbed browsing goes, I just want to see a browser that allows (not forces) you to have two rows of tabs. When you have lots of tabs open, it becomes difficult when they are too small to display window titles, and I really don't think this introduces any clutter issues since many browsers (and extensions) include toolbars below the tabs already.
Improvements to product usability. This is where they bundle a bunch onf minor updates, interesting ones are descriptive error pages (like Opera, it means that errors don't pop up in front of you and annoy you - screenshot) and a redesigned options menu (doesn't seem all that special, just like they moved the icons that are equivalent to tabs in most options dialogs to the top, where they used to be on the left).
Report a broken Web site wizard. Sounds pretty cool, although I don't know if the web designers will really give a shit.

Also, the new version is accompanied by a new domain: mozilla.com. Seems a bit weird to me but I guess some people weren't responding to the .org. Oh well.

Evil 'Mosquito' device
Some guy has decided to create a device that "he hopes will provide a solution to the eternal problem of obstreperous teenagers who hang around outside stores and cause trouble".

The device, called the Mosquito ("It's small and annoying," Stapleton said), emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that, he said, can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30. The sound is designed to so irritate young people that after several minutes, they cannot stand it and go away.

Right. This seems really stupid to me.

eDonkey / eMule sucks.

2005-11-30T16:00:00.000+08:00

I recently had to get a file from the eDonkey (eD2K) network and can honestly say that it sucks.

First, for those of you who will be confused when I start throwing around terms like eDonkey, eMule and eD2k, you may want to know the differences between them..

eDonkey / eDonkey2000: I use it to refer to network that software such as eMule uses. However, there is also a eDonkey client made by the original creators of the network called eDonkey2000. It's generally not that popular, since you either must pay for it or use an ad-supported version.
eMule: An open-source eDonkey client. The most popular client used on the eDonkey network. Download it here.
eD2k: Most people use this to mean an eD2k link, which is sort of like a .torrent file in BitTorrent terms.

Anyway, back to why eDonkey sucks donkey balls (har har). First, a disclaimer; yes, I have used it before, and have all my settings right. I used to use eDonkey on a more regular basis until I discovered BitTorrent and even then I thought it sucked. Sorry, but even Kazaa is better, IMO.

Why do I think eDonkey sucks? Well, I'll do a pros and cons chart, because it certainly has its pros as well. I'll throw in a few comparisons to BitTorrent, too, and Kazaa, although when I speak of Kazaa I'm technically referring to the FastTrack network it uses.

Pros

eD2k links, which function by embedding the hash of a file into a URL so that someone can spawn an eDonkey download with their client by clicking a link on a website. (They're typically prefixed by 'ed2k://'.) This functionality is available in BitTorrent as a .torrent file, and in Kazaa as a Sig2Dat link, although Kazaa requires an external addon to utilize these.
'Chunk distribution', which is basically a way of redistributing a download before you actually have the complete file. I'm not 100% sure how, technically, eDonkey achieves this, but it doesn't seem to work as well as the equivalent feature in BitTorrent, which is essentially the same concept but chunks are called 'pieces' instead. There's no such feature in Kazaa.
Many ways of searching. You can search via the server you're connected to, distributed search over several servers and the Kademlia decentralized network it uses, or using a number of web-based solutions like FileDonkey.

Cons

It's slow as hell. Typically it takes around an hour to get anything to even start downloading, and I'm really not sure why, although I personally attribute it to lack of policing...
...because eDonkey doesn't really have a big 'sharing community' any more, nor a way of preventing leechers. For example, private BitTorrent sites use BitTorrent's trackers to monitor the amount uploaded or downloaded by a given user and in this way prevent users from abusing the network with leecher modifications. I think there are quite a lot of people using such mods on eDonkey. For example, once I'd downloaded over 0.5% of the file I was looking for, I had already started maxing out my upload speed allocated to eDonkey (~100KiB/s). I limited this to 30KiB/s since my download speed was less than 15KiB/s. By the time I had finished downloading the file, my share ratio was over 6.5. Seriously. That's how many people were leeching the file off me, and I wasn't even leaving it open for that purpose.

So, screw eDonkey. The other thing is that the whole thing seems to be a more seedy affair than BitTorrent. For example, consider when I set eMule to automatically connect to both the Kad network and a server. (eMule supports a hybrid of P2P, similar to latest versions of BitTorrent clients with DHT - you connect to a server, similar to a tracker, which was the original method of distribution, but you can also connect to the Kademlia - or Kad - network at the same time, which is decentralized, and works basically the same as DHT in BitTorrent.)

"Sexy-sex-o-sex? Gotta get me some of that."

Yes, that is the server I was automatically connected to.

5.98 + 8.03 = 14.01. There are more than 14 thousand users on a server called 'zoo sex'. I think I'll pass.

Here's the wide selection of servers I could have picked. Go eDonkey!

Oh well, I don't have much more to complain about. Just stay away from this crap network, except as a last resort. Look for stuff on BitTorrent instead.

Firefox

2005-11-27T21:00:00.000+08:00

What is Firefox? Firefox is an open-source web browser that is making significant headway in the online world.

However, every person who uses a browser other than IE and Firefox is familiar with the rabid Firefox fanboy. The person who starts up their own page on how brilliantly awesome Firefox is because of all it's innovations, including:

Tabbed browsing! First present in Opera v1, 1994.
Popup blocking! First present in Opera v5, 2000.
More secure! The main reason Firefox is "more secure" is because it doesn't load ActiveX controls, which isn't exactly a feature. Opera has obviously had this since v1 also. However, the "Privacy" tab in the Options window features several convenient methods for deleting your "browsing tracks". This is essentially a duplicate of the "Delete private data" dialog first introduced in Opera v4 (2000).
Smart searching! This means three things: Google search integrated into the toolbar (Opera v5, 2000), "instant find in page" searching (ie. searching as you type) and "smart keywords" which allow you to type for example "wp BitTorrent" into the address bar to search for BitTorrent on Wikipedia. Both of the latter two features have been present since I started using Opera (v7, 2003) but may have been present earlier.

Just for reference, Firefox was first released as "Phoenix" in late 2002, however at this stage it was extremely immature and had very few features compared to what it has today (as well as a much smaller number of extensions and extremely unstable extension code).

These are the main advantages first preached by Firefox fans and most prominently featured on the main Firefox website. However, there are a number of others that are also Opera innovations or were already present in Opera before Firefox. I've also left out a lot of features present in extensions that are also in Opera already.

For a larger list of Opera's innovations, read Innovations by Opera on the Opera 8 Wiki. Also this blog post by haavard is an interesting writeup with a similar theme.

There is one major feature I like about Firefox though, which is why I install it whenever I can on computers I'm working on (ie. fixing - a computer that is usually not used by a "power user"). You can read more about it here, but basically, Firefox is a lot simpler and closer to IE "out of the box" than Opera is. For starters, the panels on the left are way different to IE. The tabs don't quite look right to someone used to IE in Opera. However, overall, Opera is a better browser for power users, once you get used to it.

Also, the rendering engine in Firefox (Gecko) appears to be a lot closer to that in IE than the one in Opera

What annoys me is people that really are, in my opinion, power users (or at least approaching it) who use Firefox and remain ignorant of Opera's advantages. People that say things like "Firefox is better because it's faster/simpler" or "Firefox is better because of all its extensions" when those features are already in Opera, and Opera being an integrated program is much more efficient resource-wise.

This blog is going on about how great Firefox is for BitTorrent.

If the “open with” box is greyed out for some reason, I advise to download the mimetype extension. This extension allows you to edit the way all filetypes are handled.

In other words, if Firefox screws up for some unknown reason, you need to download an extension to activate a simple feature that's already built in to Opera! The page also features a" number of comments by Firefox users on how awesome the article is.

A veggie and damn proud… there is no god.. because IE exists.. Firefox pwns" - Null

"I wish I could use FireFox. It works fine on my old computer, but for some reason on my new one it always works fine for about 10 minutes then doesn’t respond and eventually crashes." - Nereus (but he still loves Firefox!)

"Good" - Kaoiri

"thx for all those “beautiful words” related to firefox! indeed, a GREAT browser." - Adeekos

"oh hoh I LOVE FIREFOX" - IRAQMANIAC

"cool" - Alex

"fire fox is cool" - Alex

Nobody has come up with a good reason for me to switch to Firefox yet, however, every time I talk about Opera someone tries to tell me how much better Firefox is. I've yet to see someone do this without claiming something that's just not true. The only thing that tempts me (apart from the fact that Firefox is open-source, which doesn't appeal to me all that much now that Opera is free) is that Google's code (which is often a little kludgey) is as far as I can tell designed to work in Firefox and IE - if it works in other browsers that's just a bonus. Thus I can't use the full benefit of some of their applications like Reader and to an extent Blogger. However, hopefully things will become more standards-compliant in the future as the standards become more mature, and webmasters are able to achieve more without resorting to ugly hacks.

On a more positive Firefox-related note, I discovered The Firemonger Project the other day. If you do any work that might involve you promoting or installing Firefox, you may find this interesting - basically an ISO including Firefox, Thunderbird and a whole lot of documentation which could come in handy if you're teaching a newbie how to use Firefox or the internet in general.

PS: Anyone know how to stop Blogger from switching to preview mode when you press CTRL+SHIFT (when you're coding in HTML)? It's pissing me off. :-(

Canon EOS-350D (Digital Rebel XT) Digital SLR camera: first impressions

2005-11-24T13:26:00.000+08:00

Skip towards the bottom to see the photos I've taken with the camera, and ignore all the camera-speak if that's your thing.. :-)

I recently picked up a Canon EOS-350D digital SLR from Plaza Cameras in the city. So far it's looking pretty good, although I'm pretty sure my photography skills still need some work :-)

To start with, I'll run over some of the camera's basic specs. In other parts of the word (USA and Japan) it's called the "Digital Rebel XT" or "Kiss 'n' Digital" for some reason unbeknownst to me, but I'll call it by the name everyone else uses, the EOS-350D. EOS ("electro-optical system") is the prefix Canon affixes to its digital SLRs. For those of you who don't know what that is, you may want to check out the Wikipedia articles on SLR photography and digital SLRs. A full review of the EOS-350D was linked above, and is available on dpreview.com. You can see a picture of the camera here.

The camera features a 8 megapixel CMOS sensor and I purchased it with the "kit lens" which is the Canon EF-S 18-55mm lens.

I have some minor problems with the camera... but then again there are a lot of great features it has that I'm pleased with. I'll get the bad things out of the way first.. to start with, the method of downloading your photos to your PC pisses me off. Instead of using the USB mass storage device class it uses some sort of shitty other standard that I don't quite understand, and you either have to use external software or WIA (Windows Image Acquisition) to get the images. I guess I'll be picking up a card reader soon, because this kinda sucks. Also, I keep losing my USB cables so if I get a card reader that should simplify things somewhat :D

Another thing that annoys me is that in my opinion, the automatic modes (ie. where the camera decides how to take the photo for you) are too simplistic. I can understand where Canon are coming from - they assume that since this is an entry-level DSLR, you buy it to get into photography, and when you're starting off or someone who is not familiar with your camera is trying to take a photo, you don't want to be confused by additional options, when the camera should be taking care of it for you.
However, even though I'm starting to get a feel for what works well in manual mode, I still like to use the basic modes as backup - just in case I screw up the manual ones. The problem here is that the camera doesn't just set the options for you - it hides them. So I can't manually change the ISO speed for example, which even the most basic photographer could understand in a second. What really annoys me most about this though, is that you can't shoot in RAW or manually disable/enable the flash. There is a 'no-flash' mode, but if the camera deems it necessary, the flash will pop up and the camera shoots with it if you're in any other mode. And no-flash mode is the same as the full-auto mode, what if you're trying to take a portrait or landscape shot? I'd like more control over the flash, which is the main reason I started using the manual mode so quickly (ie. full control over it).

Finally, and apparently this is a gripe all 350D owners share, you don't see the ISO speed in the LCD screen or viewfinder. Let me explain. Canon have moved all the key information about your shot (shutter speed, lightmeter, shot mode, aperture etc.) on to a black-and-white LCD above the "main" LCD, although some of this info is still available when looking through the viewfinder. This LCD is backlit when you press a button, and obviously consumes a lot less power than the full colour LCD (which is only activated when looking at the advanced menu or reviewing your shots). I think this is a great idea, since it's often difficult to read a colour LCD in the sunlight. However, for some reason, they neglected to put the ISO speed on this readout. What the hell?

As for the good side, the camera performs as you would expect it to, which doesn't sound like much, but it really is. The sensor gives you excellent detail with almost no noise even at ISO 1600. If I had any complaints they would relate to the flash and lens - but I'm using the standard flash (inbuilt) and lens, so I really can't expect the absolute best quality from them compared to professional photos. Also, these problems are easily fixed by throwing money at the camera and buying a Speedlite (for fill and bounce flashing) and a good lens.

As soon as I have enough money I'll be buying myself a new lens, probably a decent telephoto lens (for those used to point-and-shoot digital cameras, a "zoom lens", although technically this refers to any lens that can zoom in and out, even if it is from wide-angle to 55mm like mine - which means the closest it can zoom is basically the same as your regular eyesight). The lens I have my eye on (haha, optics pun) is the EF 100-400mm USM IS "super-telephoto" lens, but I'm really not seriously considering it; seeing as it costs more than double the cost of the camera's body (around $2 500 AU as far as I can recall). ;-) Also this has Canon's Image Stabilizing technology as well as USM AF (ultrasonic motor auto-focus) which in a nutshell, means really clear and bright images and extremely quiet and fast focussing without a flash.

Anyway, for those of you who I'm sure would rather see some of the photos I've taken than read endless camera-speak, here are some photos I've taken. Click the thumbnails to enlarge them. The only post-processing I've done is resizing/encoding (from 3.5MB JPGs) and on a few, cropping or rotating. (I'll be updating more photos on my deviantART page as I take them..)

Damn, that took a long time. Thanks to ImageShack for the free image hosting.

Just sue a games company!

2005-11-21T16:22:00.000+08:00

Youth's Death Linked To Game (via Red Herring)

Blizzard faces a lawsuit from Chinese parents, who say World of Warcraft caused the death of their son.

This seems pretty stupid. Read the article and you'll realise just how stupid.

The parents filed a suit against Blizzard Entertainment on Wednesday, saying their son jumped to his death while reenacting a scene from the game, the report said. The parents are backed by the anti-Internet addiction advocate Zhang Chunliang.

That's right, their son was addicted to World of Warcraft, and as a result, he "jumped to his death". What the hell? How is it Blizzard's fault that some kid was stupid enough to jump out of a fifth-storey window or something and die? There's something wrong with your parenting/education if your child thinks that just because something on a computer screen can fly, so can he.

A related article from the Onion: Fun Toy Banned Because Of Three Stupid Dead Kids.

Each of the deaths was determined to be the result of gross misuse of the toy, an incredibly cool device that could shoot both plastic missiles and long jets of water, as well as maneuver over the ground on retractable wheels.

The first death occurred June 22, when 7-year-old Isaac Weiller of Grand Junction, CO, died after deliberately firing one of the spring-loaded plastic missiles into his left nostril. The missile shot into his sinuses, shattering the roof of his nasal cavity and causing a massive brain hemorrhage. Shortly before dying, Weiller told emergency medical personnel at St. Luke's Medical Center that he had shot the missile into his nose in the belief that it would travel through his body and out his belly button. "I've heard some pretty stupid shit in my time, but that has to take the cake," said Dr. Anderson Hunt, the attending physician. "Why would any kid think he could fire plastic missiles up his nose and expect them to come out his belly button? There's no point in feeling bad about this child's demise, because the deck was obviously stacked against him from the start.

Less than one month after Weiller's death, 5-year-old Danielle Krug fatally suffocated on fragments of the toy after repeatedly smashing it with a claw hammer in the garage of her parents' La Porte, IN, home. "I'm not kidding," said Dianne Ensor, an emergency-room nurse at Our Lady Of Peace Hospital in La Porte, where Krug was pronounced dead. "She thought the broken shards were candy. That's what you'd assume after breaking a plastic, inedible toy, right? Absolutely un-fucking-believable."

Yep, that site is a parody, but hey, I found it pretty funny. It is ridiculous how people will go and sue someone over anything these days. Comments on the Blizzard lawsuit at Slashdot.

Review of FrostWire

2005-11-19T13:58:00.000+08:00

Recently (or not so recently, around September) LimeWire made the decision to start to introduce forced licensing of content ("Limewire Moves to Block Unlicensed Material", Slyck). In response to this, a dev team started work on a "new" program called FrostWire ("FrostWire Prepares for Gnutella's Future", again via Slyck). (LimeWire is an open-source program, so altering it is fairly simple for anyone who knows how to code in Java.)

According to the Wikipedia article on FrostWire:

FrostWire is an open-source file-sharing program. It uses the Gnutella network and is heavily based on the more well-known LimeWire program. The project was originally started in September, 2005, after it was discovered that LimeWire's distributor was placing code in LimeWire that could eventually block LimeWire users from sharing unlicensed files. The first release was in October, 2005. LimeWire is rumored to be developing its "blocking" code in response to RIAA pressure and the threat of legal action in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in MGM Studios v. Grokster. FrostWire claims to be based outside the United States, presumably to avoid legal liability. In any case the FrostWire team has stated that no "blocking" code is placed, or will ever be placed, in FrostWire. Like LimeWire, FrostWire is written in Java and is capable of supporting multiple platforms. However, while LimeWire is available in both free and paid versions (with the paid version, LimeWire Pro, ostensibly offering better searches and connectivity), FrostWire is only being released in a free version (which its makers claim is equivalent to LimeWire's paid version). FrostWire's developers also claim that their program is completely free of any adware or spyware. As FrostWire's coding is based on LimeWire's, their user interfaces are virtually identical.

So there's your brief introduction to the program. I'll also leave you with a nice picture of its incredibly inventive logo:

It's not just an icecube.. THEY PUT SOME KIND OF WATERCOLOR FILTER ON IT! :O

Well, at least it matches the name (which is admittedly odd, but at least not as odd as "LimeWire"). Anyway, as the article mentioned, back in October the first betas of FrostWire were released (Slyck, "FrostWire Betas Released"), and FrostWire is now downloadable from here. I grabbed it a few weeks ago, and decided to try it out today. (This review is based on v4.9.37 beta.)

First impressions are overall good, despite the strange version numbering. The developers seem to be quite keen to distance themselves from LimeWire to avoid confusion and trademark issues ("Since LimeWire is a registered trademark, we cannot distribute the client under its old name") - and yet they number their first (or one of the first, I'm not sure) version as version 4 as per LimeWire's numbering. Right. However, the installer has a pretty icon, and a nice splash screen, which despite their uselessness, are appealing to a lot of people, and say a lot about the professionalism of the project. However the professional look of the splash screen is offset somewhat by the ridiculous sound that plays when it appears.

All's well and good. The installer is your typical InstallShield thing, but it does look nice. The code is also GPL'd, as the EULA states (screenshot). Additionally, the installer checks for Java, although I'm not sure what it actually does if you don't have it, since I already did (screenshot).

However, once you actually run the program, things start to go downhill a little. You are presented with this splash screen on opening the program.

Argh, my eyes.

Additionally, I soon discovered that if you happen to be using the Royale (WinXP MCE 2005) theme, the icon is practically invisible in the system tray.

Right. Well, moving right along. The user interface looks exactly the same as LimeWire, ie. not that great, and it's fairly unremarkable (screenshot). I decided that I would search for some Linux ISOs, since that's what everyone uses P2P for, right?

49 people are sharing it? It must be good!

As you can see, I promptly decided to download "linux iso.mp3", since it was clearly so popular and was less than 150KB! WOW! What a Linux distribution! FrostWire helpfully warned me that I may be breaking the law by downloading Linux, or something.

rezpeck copyrites yo

However, I was disappointed upon the completion of the download. It was just a sound file saying the following in an extremely poor impression of Bill Clinton's voice (listen here).

My fellow Americans. I would once again like to say that I did not have sexual relations with that woman. I did, however, go to eFreeClub.com, where they offer hundreds of free products: computers, notebooks and accessories; televisions, home and portable audio and video, fashion and cosmetics, housewares and much more. Visit them today at www.eFreeClub.com and do like I do - just get it free.

Right. So my first attempt to get a Linux ISO was disappointing. By the way, visit that eFreeClub site if you really want to, but I'm not linking to them as it would increase their traffic and PR, which is bad. (Companies that advertise on P2P networks suck.)

My second attempt was even more of a failure. I've heard that ISO is short for "ISO image", and I have received images in my email before as "jay-pegs", so I figured that "LINUX ISO.JPG" was exactly what I was looking for.

The download finished in a matter of seconds. Go FrostWire! However, I was to be disappointed when I opened my newly-acquired "Linux image".

WTF FFS I WANT TO BE A 1337 HAXOR ND HAV LINUCSK

Failing that, I pressed on in my noble quest to obtain 1337 hax0r open-source linux warez, and downloaded some things that looked a little more promising.

WTF if i wanted to wati in a line i would have gone 2 a museum. LOL Get it

I left these files to "download" in my system tray for around half an hour with no luck. Then I thought "maybe FrostWire isn't designed for people who like Linux ISOs?" My fears were quickly confirmed.

hootie nd da blowfist, tubgirl THE REAL THING! dam thats roxx

Finally, I decided that in lieu of being able to actually download anything legal, I would instead turn myself into an UltraPeer (ie. router for the network), sit back, relax and watch what other people were searching for on the network. (Yes, fortunately, FrostWire preserves this option.)

iv been lukin everywere and i just cant fukin find 'touch'!

The verdict: To be completely honest, this isn't that great as a client by itself. However, I would recommend it over LimeWire, because apparently, it will eventually have an advantage over it. The comments I made earlier about not being able to find anything actually relate to the Gnutella network - FrostWire searches exactly the same files as LimeWire. However, if you don't already use LimeWire, there's no great reason to start using it now just because it has a new name.

What surprised me the most about this client was the ugly theme and crappy graphics that initially came with it, when there are a whole bunch of much better logos and themes available from the FrostWire website. So, if you plan on using FrostWire, I suggest you check out those pages as soon as you finish installing it.

Sony rootkit debacle

2005-11-16T18:34:00.000+08:00

Well, I think it's about time I blogged something about this whole rootkit fiasco, since nobody else I know personally seems to be doing it.

Basically, a whole bunch of people are up in arms because Sony's DRM software which is included with certain CDs. It includes allegedly insecure code that could allow your machine to become 'compromised' - and comes with a whole bunch of other problems that people are complaining about.

I could go on about the whole fiasco, which has been happening for more than a week, but instead, check out this summary on BoingBoing. It sums up basically what's been happening, including the original rootkit discovery, the WoW anti-cheat exploit, and the accusation of the rootkit's inclusion of open-source LGPL-licensed code.

Here's a list of the Slashdot articles that have been posted covering it, in case you want to read some opinions..

You might also want to have a look at the Sony Boycott Blog.

Read this blog entry in its original format at splintax.blogspot.com.

Comprehensive review of µTorrent

2005-11-15T01:03:00.000+08:00

A short testament to how much Blogger (and Opera) kicks Spaces' (and IE's) ass: I'm using a pre-beta version of Opera to write this, which crashed in another tab - and yet I didn't lose any data from this entry. *cough* IE *cough*

Screenshot of µTorrent v1.2, click to enlarge.

I introduced µTorrent on my MSN Spaces blog. I'm going to write about some of its features here in a bid to get you to convert. ;-)

As you can see from the screenshot, µTorrent tries pretty hard to be like Azureus in a couple of ways, but in most, outshines it totally. To start with, its main feature is its incredible efficiency - almost 0% CPU usage, typically less than 10MB RAM, and to top it all off, it comes packaged as a single executable - no installation necessary - at just 105KB. (However, future versions obviously increase its size. I'm happy with it under 1MB. ;-))

First off, I'm going to admit that that screenshot isn't taken directly from the application. I installed the Junior theme by FOOOD first. Here's a couple more screens from that theme.

Mouseover the images to get a description.

Now, onto the actual features of the client. µTorrent is a full-featured client - as far as I can see, there are no mainstream features that are directly present in another client (ie. without plugins) but aren't in µTorrent.

The main screen offers you a horizontally-split dialog, with current torrents at the top, and details at the bottom. Details available include:

Download completion, showing pieces complete in a graph, and availability
Time elapsed, ETA, downloaded/uploaded bytes, download/upload speed, share ratio, hash fails, number of seeds and peers - all the usual stuff
Tracker URL, status, time until next scrape, and DHT status
Download location, file size, torrent creation date, number of pieces, piece size, torrent hash, and torrent comment

So not much special there. Any item can be right-clicked and copied to the clipboard. The interesting stuff is in the other tabs.

Peers tab. Similar to what's in Azureus, giving you a list of connected peers, their BT flags, their national flags (ie. which country they come from), their client, their % completion, the download speed from them and the amount uploaded or downloaded to them. You can copy the peer list to the clipboard with right-click, or even add a specific peer if you're trying to seed directly to or from a friend. (screenshot)

Pieces and files tabs. Same as in Azureus - shows you the active pieces and files, the pieces needed and obtained on those files, etc. Also allows you to set a specific file to not download, or set it to High, Normal or Low priority.

The speed graph. Just your regular speed graph, but hey.

The logger. If you turn it on, it'll dump all info relating to the torrent here. If not, it just displays info about hash fails.

Finally, there are a couple of features unique to µTorrent that really seal the deal..

When a download completes, there is an option to make it appear in a balloon at the bottom-right of the screen, along with the cool popping sound.
You can get it to move files to a different location once the download's finished.
It supports UPnP, and you can get it to randomize the port used on startup.
It supports global bandwidth limiting. You can also set a torrent's bandwidth usage as high, medium or low priority, or to a specific speed.
Torrents can have trackers added to them, be set to stop seeding at a certain ratio or after a certain time, and be super-seeded.
It has a full-featured scheduler built-in. (screenshot)
You can set it to automatically load torrents in a given directory.
It's updated frequently, and updating is as simple as clicking 'yes' - after a few seconds the executable replaces itself with the new version.
It has an excellent webpage with an informative FAQ and an active forum.

So, what are you waiting for? Download µTorrent now!

I've had enough of MSN Spaces' bullshit.

2005-11-14T18:14:00.000+08:00

Alright, I've had enough of MSN Spaces' bullshit. I don't want them editing my friggin' HTML after I put it in. Oh, and their service generally sucks.

The only reason I use it in the first place is just for MSN Messenger support. Now that I can get this working in Opera, fuck that. I'll just use Blogger and post a note on my Space everytime I update this.

scott