bytex64.net/blog

I'll admit, my laptop's pretty old. Not that it's useless. Some people confuse the two, but I argue that advancements in computer hardware over the last ten years serve only two major purposes: playing games and virtualizing servers. Since I don't do either of those with my laptop, I'm perfectly fine with an eight year old IBM Thinkpad T23. However, any machine that ages needs maintenance, and after getting a fan error from the BIOS after a spontaneous reboot, I decided it was high time to inspect the cooling system.

I have a copy of the T2x-series maintenance manual, so getting down to the fan was laid out in easy steps. Foolishly, I decided it wasn't necessary to take off the top bezel, and when yanking out the heatsink/fan, I ripped off one corner of an important looking transistor. Whoops. After dinner, I soldered the transistor back in, cleaned the fan, applied new thermal grease, reassembled everything, and it's now running fine. :)

I'm tellin' ya, man. They just don't make 'em like they used to. I do some pretty stupid shit with my laptop, and the T23 just takes it like a champ.

In other news, Alex's girlfriend found a use for all those little hard drive boxes I get when I build servers:

If you can't read the sign, it says "Fort Petite Chaton." :3

Lately, I feel like everything's falling apart. Maybe it's because the upstairs air conditioner wasn't draining properly and left a puddle in the carpet, or because the shower head has become more broken than before, or because the machines at work have been tag-teaming me on going down, or because my car wouldn't start the other day, or because I spent an hour tracking down slowness on our network only to find it was my roommate downloading ten things at once, or because the leaking kitchen faucet got a lot worse and was soaking the whole sink area, necessitating that it be replaced, and that the particleboard behind the sink has to dry for three days before the new faucet can be installed. Or maybe not.

But none of that is bothering me now, because I have great news. You probably aren't familiar with Scott Pilgrim and his comic book adventures. Well, get familiar, because it's spun off something absolutely jaw-dropping. No, I'm not talking about the movie for which they cast the wrong guy as the title character. Hold on a minute, I'm going to need to back up a minute to properly explain this.

Do you remember Paul Robertson? He's the guy who did all of those videos that looked like they were SNK video games, like Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight, or Kings of Power 4Billion%, or the music video for Architecture in Helsinki's Do the Whirlwind. Yeah, that guy. He's finally getting to do what he loves to do — Paul Robertson is the lead artist for the Scott Pilgrim Video Game.

If you've got a sharp ear, you'll note the other surprise in that video. The soundtrack will be done by none other than Anamanaguchi.

Best.

Game.

Ever.

:D

The Stevejob: A sexual move where you get millions of devoted followers to jerk each other off while moaning your name and giving you money.

Alright, be cool... don't be a dick about this, show them you're sympathetic... be cool.

I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO

Smooth, man... smooth.

I'll bet nearly everyone thinks social networking applications are a Web 2.0 thing. It's a new thing on the web, certainly, but applications of that nature have been around nearly forever. Witness Finger, a client/server system designed to let UNIX users know what other users were up to.

Finger itself dates back to 1977, and is described in RFC 742. The idea is simple and familiar: "What's John doing right now?" Let's find out.

$ finger john
Login: john                             Name: John Warden
Directory: /home/john                   Shell: /bin/sh
Last login Sat May  8 15:19 (CDT) on tty34
No mail.
Plan:
I'm off kayaking in Colorado. Be back Tuesday!

The "plan" was a message that the user could post to give other people more information about what they're doing. This is probably sounding eerily familiar. Finger was pretty much Twitter and Facebook of the late 70's (except that it was only used by CS nerds on UNIX machines). Users' plans were one of the first instances of personal publishing on the Internet, an idea that would later evolve into blogging. Notably, John Carmack used finger to publish a journal of his work progress (archived here).

Finger died out largely because it was an information disclosure problem. As Wikipedia puts it, "Supplying such detailed information as e-mail addresses and full names was considered acceptable and convenient in the early days of Internetworking, but later was considered questionable for privacy and security reasons." That statement is absolutely true, which is why it gave me a chuckle — in our post-finger world, people apparently have no problem with putting their real name and email address online.

But finger isn't really dead... it's just extremely disused. You will still find finger and fingerd in the repository for most Linux distributions, and you'll even find the client program on Macs and Windows!

One amusing section in later revised versions of the RFC are provisions for finger use with vending machines:

Vending machines SHOULD respond to a {C} request with a list of all items currently available for purchase and possible consumption. Vending machines SHOULD respond to a {U}{C} request with a detailed count or list of the particular product or product slot. Vending machines should NEVER NEVER EVER eat money.

I'll bet Facebook can't do that. :-P

It's official: Twitter is destroying the Internet. But before I explain, let's step back a bit and look at a brief history of the Web.

Way back in the late 80's, Sir Tim Berners Lee had the idea of creating a distributed repository of information that was different from existing services like FTP and USENET. Previously, the Internet was less of a single pool of information and more of a richly connected set of small pools of information. Certainly, there were references to other sites, but it was often more like a set of directions to get to a friend's house. Sir Tim's World Wide Web changed that by making hyperlinks part of the design. This allowed resources from all over the Web (and the greater Internet) to be referred to and navigated to with ease. The World Wide Web solidified the Internet as the vast interconnected repository of information we know today.

It's important, then, that these links remain valid. It's a tough job, to be sure — information on the Internet isn't static, and that thing you linked to yesterday could be gone today. You can search the archives of this blog and find lots of links that no longer work. A lot of the stuff that really matters, though, sticks around. Bytex64.net, for example, has been around for six and a half years! Woo!

Twitter, with its absurdly short message sizes, has necessitated a new kind of link mediator. Since Twitter doesn't support traditional hyperlinking, its users have come up with a workaround solution: URL shortening services. The idea is that you turn a long, cumbersome URL like http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/technology/personaltech/15basics.html?8dpc into a short, tweetable URL like http://nyti.ms/9JNdVY. (As an aside, I would like to point out that hyperlinks neatly hide long URLs behind a user-defined label, so having to paste raw URLs into a message is something of a step backwards.)

And in these URL shorteners, we have the rub. The link only works as long as the service stays online. Tr.im, for example, is barely hanging on with plans to shut down in the next year or so. To help protect these volatile links, organizations such as 301Works have sprung up to help preserve these services' links after they fail. The problem has been further compounded by the US Library of Congress's unfathomable decision to archive all tweets. Ostensibly they're saving some sort of valuable information in those tweets (though I'd argue to the contrary), which means those links may point to important information you'd like to find later, leading to even more pressure to keep these URL shortening services afloat.

The breakdown is this: Twitter, due to its arbitrary decision to limit tweets to 140 characters or less without hyperlinks, has necessitated the creation of URL shortening services that make already fragile links even more brittle, undermining the very innovation that created the Internet we know today. Twitter is destroying the Internet.

And this of course only matters when you really care about following those links years down the road. Most people won't even care, but it is an interesting study in how a seemingly innocuous decision can have far-reaching consequences.

You probably didn't hear about the latest PS3 update which removes Linux support from all PS3s, because you probably don't have a PS3, and if you do, you probably don't run Linux on it. Even if you do, you may not care anyway because the environment in which Linux ran was a nerfed hypervisor that wasn't good for much except toying around with the Cell SPEs. The official line is that removing Linux will help combat piracy, as some hackers were using Linux to help bypass the platform's copy protection. In a completely unsurprising turn of events, it hasn't stopped them. This goes way beyond piracy or Linux, though.

The issue in my mind is that these systems were sold with the Linux feature, and Sony decided you shouldn't have that feature anymore, so they removed it without warning or compensation. They have taken back something you bought. And sure, the update is "optional," much in the same way putting more gas in your car is optional. And I'm sure the EULA covers Sony's ass legally — Sony could probably brick your PS3 and you'd have no legal recourse whatsoever. But it's still a supreme dick move that has shaken my (and I'm sure a lot of others') faith in the platform. Before this, I was considering buying a PS3. Now I'm not.

On the mobile front, Apple is using its dominant position to clamp down on competition. They have officially forbidden using any language other than C or C++ to develop iPhone/iPad apps. It's pretty clear that this was done to make developers take sides, as it prevents code reuse from other platforms that use Java, C#, or Flash. Apple claims that restricting the language set will help prevent poorly written applications, which is of course hogwash. You can write poor applications in any language (and a lot of people do :-/).

It's an especially curious move in light of Apple's desire to be the #1 mobile gaming platform, as it excludes game toolkits like Unity3D. It also stymies the unreleased Adobe Flash CS5, which has a direct-to-native-iPhone compiler to get around Apple's existing prohibition on unapproved runtime engines. Apple has just taken everyone who was going to port their flash game to the iPhone and flipped them the bird. I wonder if anyone at Apple understands how much it hurts the platform when you anger its developers? Certainly Microsoft understands this. Oh, wait...

Were you excited about getting Machinarium on your Xbox? Well, too bad, because Microsoft has decided they don't want to publish Machinarium because it's not a Xbox exclusive. That's right, because you can get Machinarium on Mac and Linux, you won't see it on Xbox. Or at least, you won't see it published by Microsoft. Amanita Design does, of course, still have the option of getting it published through someone else, but they've decided not to bother. You will see Machinarium on PSN if you have a PS3, but as we've already established, you probably don't. And, if you play your video games on a PC like a man, all of this is pretty well moot.

So remember, kids: corporations don't have your best interests in mind.

Remember the kerfuffle in the late 90's about the Pentium III Processor Serial Number? Privacy advocates were worried that the PSN would be used for Big Brother shenanigans, destroying anonymity. Intel got enough heat that they backed down on it, but there's another vital piece in your computer that has a unique ID, and nobody really cared. Want to take a guess as to what that part is?

That's right, it's your hard drive. Hard drives have had serial numbers for ages, and it's been possible to read these serial numbers from software since at least the 1994 ATA-1 Specification^[PDF]. You can take a look yourself with hdparm, a tool available on Linux and Windows (this will, of course, require superuser access).

In my line of work, software-accessible serial numbers are very useful for inventory. I can look up the serial number of a failing drive and have the RMA request sent in before anyone even arrives in the server room. But tinfoil hatters beware: unlike the Pentium III's PSN, there's no way to turn them off.

Not that it really matters, anyway. The combination of seemingly innocuous information given away by your web browser — like its version, installed plugins, your OS, installed fonts, and time zone — serves as a pretty good fingerprint. If you're like me, it's good enough to identify you uniquely. Try it yourself over at the EFF's Panopticlick.

There are a lot of ad networks using both browser cookies and flash storage to track the sites you go to. Isn't it comforting to know that even if you don't have flash and disable cookies, ad networks can still be reasonably sure it's still you? All it would take is an ad or an app on Facebook to associate your real name with every site you've been to on that ad network. But you're not stupid enough to trust Facebook with your personal information, right?

Right? :)

I think we're all aware of the problems with social networking. Or, at least, I'm aware, and you should be too if you've been reading my blog. But anyway, never fear, The FSF is working on it! As much as I dislike Facebook, I don't think anyone's going to leap at the opportunity to ditch them if it involves paying $100 for a wall-plug computer. It's good to see that even though I agree with them, the FSF is still just as laughable as ever.

And in a bizarre twist, the Internet Explorer team has finally decided to start supporting DOM Level 2 (and 3) Events! Finally, I can get rid of the nasty shims to support less-featured DHTML events. And if they can get IE9 released before November, it will be just less than ten years since the specification became a W3C recommendation. Way to go, guys! Now if only there were some agreement on how to get the dimensions of a window and document...

And in what might be the best video game development all year, Cave Story is finally getting a proper release on the place it always wanted to be: a Nintendo system. Unfortunately, it's about fifteen years too late for the SNES, so we have the next best thing, Cave Story for WiiWare. It's not just a port, either. The game has been refreshed with new graphics and music, widescreen support, and bonus content. There's even the option for classic graphics and music for die-hard fans of the original. It's 1200 Wii Points (That's $12 — Wii Points aren't like the intentionally confusing eighty-to-the-dollar Microsoft Points), and it's available TODAY. And if that's too much, the original Cave Story is still available free on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

BONUS ROUND: If you like Cave Story, you'll probably also like Knytt Stories. It's the same kind of exploratory platformer, but with less shooting and more user-generated content!

Caveman A: Ooog ug ug og oog ugh!
Caveman B: Ug oog oog eeh ugg!
Caveman B draws a crude stick figure on the wall
Caveman A: Oog oog ugh ug ugg!!

Tens of thousands of years later

Middle Ages Man: Forsooth! I havve news to tell, but it is farr too much troubel to wryte on payper so that otherrs maye benefit.
Johannes Gutenberg: Ach! I have created ze printing press so zat ze written word can be duplicated many times without excessive effort!
Middle Ages Man: Horray!

Hundreds of years later

Eighteenth Century Man: Alas, this printing press is slow and its movable type is maddening! If only there were an easier way to create printed copies of my ideas!
Alois Senefelder: I have created a way to print using a stone as the transfer medium. I call it lithography!
Eighteenth Century Man: Excellent!

A hundred years or so later

Victorian Era Man: Having my work printed takes too long and there are always mistakes. If only there were a way to print things myself so that I could see clearly what it will look like before I make a thousand copies!
Any One of a Hundred Victorian Era Inventors: I have created the typewriter, which allows you to create neatly printed type without leaving your desk!
Victorian Era Man: Capital!

Another hundred or so years later

Post-Second World War Man: Typewriters are great, but I'm still limited to just a few copies using carbon transfer. Having my work professionally printed is too much trouble to make a hundred copies. If only there were a fast way to duplicate a printed page!
Chester Carlson: By using photoconductive methods, I have created a machine that can optically copy any printed page. It's called Xerography (and incidentally, I'm calling my company Xerox)!
Post-Second World War Man: Swell!

About twenty years later

Stoned College Student: Man, typing a paper and then making copies is too much work. Even with a dot-matrix printer, I still have to manually copy every page. If only there were an easier way!
Gary Starkweather (at Xerox): I've invented a photocopier that uses a laser, and can be computer controlled. Now you can make beautiful prints directly from a computer, and you can print as many as you want!
Stoned College Student: Far out!

At more or less the same time

Military Peon: Mail is slow. If only we had a widespread network to share porn information!
ARPA: We have created a widespread network to share porn information called ARPANET. It's distributed so that the Russians can't take it out, either!
Military Peon: Nice!

Twenty-odd years later

Physics Researcher: The Internet is great; I can publish porn results and other people around the world can see it. Unfortunately, there's no good way to present my porn research in a way that can easily and transparently reference other people's porn research.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee: I have created a hyperlinked system of hypertext documents I'm calling the World Wide Web. It will be the world's greatest system for sharing porn research!
Physics Researcher: Awesome!

In another decade's time

Netizen: I like this "web logging" idea, but understanding HTML and updating a webpage is too much trouble. If only there were a quick and easy way to publish a blog without any hassle!
I dunno, Livejournal?: We've created an easy way to update your blog with just a few clicks. Now it's dead simple to let other people know what you think!
Netizen: Cool!

five or six very short years later

Internet User: blogging is hard!!1! i dont want to write much just what im doing k? all i need is a text message worth
Chip Black: GO FUCK YOURSELF.