bytex64.net blog

ShIt MoThErFuCkIn YeAh My WiCkEd MoThErFuCkEr!

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 05:07:55 -0500

AT: iN THE MEANTIME, sHALL i,
AT: cUE UP THE,
AT: sTRICT BEATS????? }:D
TC: AwWwWw BrOtHeR nOw YoU aLl FuCk AnD uP aNd DoNe It.
TC: yOu ArE fUcKiN wHeEl DeEp In A bIg SlOpPy MaSsAcRe PiE tOpPeD wItH mOtHeRfUcKiN wHiPpEd RhYmE.
TC: HoW sTrIcT aRe ThOsE bEaTs At, MoThErFuCkEr?
AT: wELL, i,
AT: tURNED UP THOSE BITCHES TO PRETTY STERN,
AT: sET BEATS TO LECTURE, aND, i'M KIND OF GOING HOG WILD ON THE CURMUDGEON KNOB,
AT: wHICH, i HAD RECENTLY INSTALLED,
TC: gOd DaMn!!!
— MS Paint Adventures

New Saturday Night Mix is up. :)

A Simpler Fix for Mobile Stylesheets

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 23:50:10 -0500

If you have a smartphone, you probably really like it when a website has a mobile version. Too often, though, sites don't bother because it's a pain in the ass. Ironically, modern smartphones have actually made this problem worse by ignoring a lot of work that went into HTML 4 and CSS 2 — work that allows style to be dynamically applied depending on the intended medium.

In the beginning, there were no smartphones. As cell phones were taking off, you more than likely had a Palm Pilot if you wanted to keep track of calendars and appointments. What web you could get on phones was limited to WAP or some subset of HTML. Phones and PDAs simply couldn't handle what desktop browsers were doing (which, at the time, was mostly animated .GIFs and MIDI background music). As a web designer, you were pretty much required to create a separate website if you wanted a mobile version; most sites didn't bother.

Web design began to mature, and people started using CSS to style their websites. The advantages of CSS were clear — sites could be consistently styled in a way that kept style separate from content. One of the innovative features put into HTML 4 (which, I should remind you, became a W3C recommendation in 1998) was the use of media descriptors to allow browsers to selectively apply certain CSS styles for different media. One of those media types defined in HTML 4 was the 'handheld' type, for portable devices with small screens. With this feature, it was easy to make the same webpage look good on both the big screen and the small screen simply by creating two different stylesheets.

To be fair, the handheld media descriptor has never been implemented very consistently. Opera was always a good supporter, and Mobile IE supported it in a way (by enabling both handheld and screen styles). My last phone's built-in browser supported it beautifully, but a lot of phone browsers didn't.

Fast forward to 2007 — the iPhone comes out and takes the US smartphone market by storm. It packages a slimmed-down version of a desktop browser engine, WebKit, which would become a trend in smartphones. Frustratingly, WebKit on the iPhone paid no attention to the handheld media descriptor, most likely so that the "full web" could be experienced (This is, of course, a ridiculous idea — phones have only just now caught up with resolutions popular on PCs in the early 90's, and even infinite pixel density won't help you read three point text).

The popularity of the iPhone and Apple's intial unwillingness to support native applications on the platform led to a lot of mobile versions of sites that worked merely by detecting the iPhone's version string. Even today, you can find sites that assume any phone with "Mobile" and "WebKit" in the user agent string must be an iPhone, and will render the page at a fixed 320 pixels wide. Suddenly, we've taken a step back. Nowadays, if you want to make a mobile site, you make a completely new site and use user agent sniffing to switch to it. Witness the rise of m.whatever.com. So now we're worse off than we were with WAP, using fragile heuristic approaches and needlessly duplicating effort.

Well, Apple also gave us a useful tool to help sort out this mess. First seen in Mobile Safari, the viewport meta tag allows your webpage to tell the phone how wide its viewport is — which is to say, it changes how wide the phone's viewport pretends to be. It's admittedly a hack, but the upshot is if I say my viewport is 640 pixels wide, the page will be scaled as though it's 640 pixels wide even if it's rendered on a larger or smaller screen. By default, mobile WebKit based browsers tend to report that they're quite a bit larger than they are. My Pixi, for example, pretends that the screen is 960 pixels wide (If you're curious about yours, test here). If you want the page to act as though it is at whatever the native resolution of your screen is, just use "device-width" for your width.

So now that we have a way of un-fucking the browser zoom, how do we get our mobile style in place? Well, I came up with a sneaky solution. I wrote a JavaScript function which iterates over the page's stylesheets (via DOM Level 2 Style) and rewrites the media descriptors to change 'handheld' to 'screen' and 'screen' to 'unknown.' Then I simply detect the viewport width as the page loads, and enable the handheld styles if it's small enough. I currently specify my viewport as 480px wide and enable the handheld mode if the viewport is <= 480px. It's certainly a hack, but it works. And if you want to get fancy, you can remove the server-side user agent detection, put that logic in the javascript, and dump the m. site. Nice, huh?

The code in question is in force_handheld.js, the relevant functions are enableMobile() and disableMobile(). Don't use the whole file, it's designed around my site. For some reason, the technique doesn't work in Firefox. The data is properly mangled, but it seems that after the page is loaded, Gecko ignores any changes to the stylesheets' media descriptors. I'm sure all three Maemo users will be terribly disappointed.

I've already applied this hack to my site, which should make it much more usable on mobile browsers. I'm also using the hack in the case where a desktop browser is too narrow to fit the content column, which I think works a little better than the previous solution.

Hello, Party People

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 04:09:23 -0500

Don't feel obligated to put your hands in the air or wave them around as though you just don't care — I don't care that much, either.

I've been ~~shirking responsibilities at work~~ busy lately and have some cool stuff to show you. Firstly, there's a new Saturday Night Mix that prominently features Celldweller, a favorite of mine and my brother Tim's. It's not really dance-able like the last one, and to be honest, there's one really bad transition in there, but it's all good music, I swear. :)

On a more visual note, I have two new Hacks. The first was inspired by some extras on Jeph Jacques' Tumblr, and features everyone's favorite neurotic blonde, Hanners. The picture is, of course, a full-blown wallpaper-size version of panel 3 of QC #1696, and the music is "Cyclops," one of Jeph's many Deathmøle releases. No, the zooming never stops.

The second hack is one I found mostly finished but unpublished, spiro. I'm honestly not sure why I didn't publish it. It looked complete to me, so I dusted it off and threw it up there with the rest. The cool thing about spiro is that it's built on a small graphics library I built called Phosphor. It aims to emulate the electron-beam-on-phosphor graphics of the 70's. View the source, it's really simple.

That's all, party's over. Goodnight.

Words cannot convey this feeling

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 03:28:08 -0500

Hey Mike, remember when you laughingly said we should make a Twitter post shortener? I just stumbled upon Twitlonger. From their site:

Twitlonger is an easy way to post long messages to Twitter without the need to write a blog post. Write what you need here and we post the link to Twitter for you.

I made you a mixtape

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 19:09:42 -0500

For a long time I've been a wannabe DJ. Whenever I'm in a club, I want to be the guy playing the music. I've indulged in Beatmania IIDX, which despite having a turntable on the controller, is really more about micro-motor skills than DJing. I even have a pair of over-ear studio headphones (which are fucking excellent besides).

In the past year or so, I've been working on actual DJ skills. I started by toying with Mixxx, which is a pretty decent two-deck DJ mixer. Alex got a DJ controller that came with a copy of Traktor, which made things easier. Then I started playing with Ableton Live, which is powerful beyond compare. I got a KORG PadKONTROL to help with sequencing in Live. And last year, I co-DJ'd a party at our house with Alex. I crossed that line from wannabe to amateur. :)

I do a lot of playing around in Live, practicing mixing things that no one ever hears. I decided to take that a step further and produce some mixes for the web. It's a little practice, a little performance, and a lot of fun.

It is the Saturday Night Mix.

I threw in a number of advanced HTML tricks to make that page snazzy, including the use of two webfonts and the audio tag. Fun fact: The audio playing in the audio tag is Ogg Vorbis, which has become the de facto format for HTML5 audio. I tried a MP3 in Opera, and it wouldn't play.

The first mix is mostly things I've found on Too Many Sebastians, which is mostly House. It starts off with a song of questionable legality. It was done by Shinichi Osawa and Patrick Alavi, but couldn't be cleared for release because it samples Toto's Hold the Line. (Man, everything's just coming up Toto lately...) NEVERTHELESS, I have brought it to you, because in the Dominion of Awesome, awesome trumps copyright every time.

I also have plans for a mix next Saturday. The theme was suggested by my brother Tim, and it's going to be a little more... industrial/trance-ish. I'm looking forward to it. :)

Loving Love Hina

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 04:47:49 -0500

Lately, I've been both re-reading the Love Hina manga, and re-watching the anime adaptation. I've found, somewhat to my surprise, that my feelings about the series have changed. I still like it, but I didn't really understand why I still like it. Let's rewind.

It was over ten years ago when I first watched Love Hina, and I immediately identified with the protagonist, Keitaro. Keitaro is a loser, plain and simple. He's not too bright, not good looking, and his only hobby is taking photo booth pictures by himself. He's failed his college entrance exams twice already, and worse, he's 20 years old and has never had a girlfriend. The only girl who ever paid any attention to him was a playground friend whose name and face he can no longer remember and with whom he made a promise to get into Tokyo University together — an impossible dream with Keitaro's skills. He is pretty much the embodiment of low self-esteem, and as a young, hapless nerd in high school who was girl-repellent, I thought "Wow, this guy is me!"

In the intervening years, I'm both proud and surprised to say that I've matured a lot. When I look at Keitaro now, I can't help but think, "Wow, what a goober." I can't really relate anymore. It seems that a similar thing happened to Ken Akamatsu, the author. His first two stories revolved around the same kind of nerdy guy who was terrible with women; it's pretty clear Akamatsu was writing a lot of himself into these stories. His latest series, by contrast, involves a young boy who is very intelligent and confident (albeit inexperienced). Analysis of the fact that it also has 31 high-school girls, one of which is a robot, is left as an exercise to the reader.

"Well, why do I still like this?" I asked myself. Well, firstly, the stories in it are just plain fun. It has a great cast of characters, and it's never boring. But mainly, It's Naru. I realized something important about her.

She's a Right Proper Bastard.

Naru is sharp, and she never misses an opportunity to use the truth to cut people down to size. She has this really great expression you see when she's unamused with someone's bullshit. It looks like this:

In one instance, she even does a pretty good rendition of another great Bastard, House, M.D.

It doesn't hurt that she's also beautiful. Naru is an archetype for the kind of woman I'd like to meet but would probably despise after a few days. It's unsettling to find too much of yourself in someone else.

So I'll continue reading and maybe finally buy the rest of the series and give Akamatsu-sensei the money I should have paid years ago. :)

MIND = BLOWN

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 02:27:16 -0500

Sometimes you find something that shakes your understanding of the world so completely that you are left wondering what is real and what is not. Today, I found that in Forza 3.

Buried within the upgrades menu are several fundamental modifications you can do to a car: engine swaps, drivetrain swaps, and aspiration change. I bought a CRX SiR for a specific championship, and much to my surprise, drivetrain swaps were available. At the cost of a couple hundred extra pounds, I could turn my FWD CRX into a RWD car.

The transformation is pretty radical. You start with a car that already has really good handling and a 62/38 weight distribution, and you wind up with excellent handling and a 51/49 weight distribution. As an added bonus, you get a close ratio six-speed transmission, which probably means that the donor driveline was from a S2000. What goes into the shop is one of the best of the hot hatches. What comes out can only be described as ballistic.

But curiously, even with radical weight reduction down to ~2150 lbs, suspension enhancements, and a power boost to 171HP, Forza still considers it an E class car. To get some perspective, let's pick on the Mitsubishi Lancer Evo X, a car most people associate with "quick and nimble," and a car Forza considers to be considerably better — class C.

	Honda CRX SiR modified	Mitsubishi Lancer Evo X GSR
Power	171 HP	295 HP
Weight	2150 lbs	3585 lbs
Weight dist	52/48	56/44
Weight/power ratio	12.6 lb/hp	12.2 lb/hp
Wheelbase	90.6 in	104.3 in

Certainly, there are still some unknowns in there, like tire size and aerodynamics, but I'd say that on paper, it looks pretty close. Strangely, the Evo is the heavyweight, having the advantage on power, but the CRX definitely looks like it will handle better with its shorter wheelbase, lighter weight, and better weight distribution. Why did the CRX's weight distribution change to 52/48? Weight loss in the rear from a sport exhaust system. I will admit, I did cheat a little. An Evo X is not as fast as an Evo IX. :)

So how ridiculous is this? Well, swapping in a whole S2000 driveline into a civic is not unheard of (but IMO kind of pointless). And at least one person has taken the idea way too far and created a RWD civic with a Corvette engine in it (which just further supports the theory that you can, and people will, drop a Chevy small-block into anything). So maybe, with a lot of money, and a lot of work, this sort of thing could be a reality.

One can dream, anyway. :)

Adventures in Chicagoland

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 01:01:48 -0500

A couple of weeks ago, we had our yearly SpiderOak meet-up. Since all of us work and coordinate over the Internet, we periodically get together for some "face time." We usually don't get a whole lot of actual work done, but the collaboration typically results in an explosion of activity once we return home. It's also good to see the other guys — we had a lot of fun, too.

Last weekend I went up to Chicago for Erickson's housewarming party. I drove in the CRX, which is an experience not unlike riding a chainsaw. By the time I got to Erickson's, my hands were tingling from the vibration in the steering wheel. The party was good. Alex decided to go, despite his protestations. James drove in from Rockford, and Allie and Luke from Atmos showed up, too. There was beer, muppets, racist drawings, and some creative reinterpretation of Harry Potter. All in all, a good night.

The following day, we took the L out to the Goose Island brewpub and had some beer for breakfast. If you wind up there, I can say that the food is good, but expensive. The beer, however, is both reasonably priced and excellent. We couldn't get a tour, though, because you must reserve a place in advance. Apparently, it will fill up weeks ahead of time. The perils of a small brewery in a large city, I suppose.

After returning to Erickson's neck of the woods, we hit up a used bookstore. There I found a steal of a deal on some manga nearly sitting on the floor — the first three volumes of Love Hina for $3.99 each. :D I also got "A World Out of Time," a small novel by Larry Niven.

I was rather weary on the drive home, but it didn't stop me from playing a few hours of Forza 2 when I got to my parents' house. :) I'm back home in Urbana, now, reading through my books and catching up on work I've neglected this weekend. It's good to be back.

The Changing of the Guard

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 03:56:01 -0500

Well, it's finally happened. My rough-and-tumble Sony Ericcson K510a has finally started flaking out. Yeah, the D-pad has been flaky for a while, but now important things like the * and delete keys are going, making it about as fun to use as a Windows CE phone (zing!). It's time to take the old girl out back and put 'er out of her misery.

As for a replacement, you'll probably recall that I'm pretty picky. I thought I had it figured out a few months ago, and I was completely ready to plunk down a few hundred bucks on an unlocked Nokia E52, but I could find no one selling the US version. I wanted something "smarter" than the K510a, but I was universally turned off by that classic failing of smartphones: their batteries can't keep up with their features. iPhone, Android, Palm, Windows Mobile... they will all leave you stranded after a day of hard use.

It was a tough search, but ultimately, it came down to price. See, AT&T has a deal where you can get a Palm Pixi Plus for free after instant rebate with a two year contract. The only downside? It comes in a rather hideous blue color. But my good friend Alex made a rather valid point — for the $50 it saves over the black version, I can buy a case.

Alex has a Pixi, and he's pretty satisfied with it, even though his original one had the touch screen go screwy (he got it replaced under warranty). The software is certainly very attractive — Palm has always been top notch at usability. And behind the scenes, Palm has gone full-bore open with it. Any webOS phone can be dropped into developer mode where you have access to a root shell. In addition, the webOS community has developed some very nice applications that allow you to browse and install hundreds of homebrew apps. Unlike Android, webOS looks like a Linux system on the inside, using such modern amenities as dbus and upstart to tie things together. It's hacktackular.

As for the battery life, there's a simple solution — get a bigger battery. Several companies sell replacement batteries with upgraded capacity and performance. I'll be well worth it to get one of those, since I'm sure I'll be pushing the phone rather hard with all the hacks I'll be putting into it. :)

IT'S A NEW RECORD!

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 02:57:44 -0500

I signed the lease for my next year's living arrangement with only two days to spare. This blows away my previous record, when I signed a lease one week before handing over my keys. I think it bears repeating for the kids at home that you should not try this — I'm a professional procrastinator.

My new place is not too far away in the same area of Urbana. I'll be living with a fourth year vet student, a dog, two cats, and a roommate who has yet to be found. I should be clear — the roommate hasn't been misplaced, it's just that no one has shown interest in the second room, yet. ARE YOU A BAD ENOUGH DUDE TO LIVE WITH ME, A VET STUDENT, A DOG, AND TWO CATS? Inquire within.

The new place is quite a bit smaller (it would be nearly impossible for this to not be the case), so I've been jettisoning things I don't need via the ever-handy Craigslist. I even get money in return, isn't that great?

At the old place, we're now in FINAL CLEANUP MODE. I was panicking for a while because I had so much leftover trash from building computers, and it seemed to be an insurmountable problem. Mom, Tim, and my little cousin Scott came over to help, and we got quite a lot cleaned up. I'm pretty confident we'll get everything out in the final remaining day.

Here we go, one last push. :)

Fun with Computer Bits

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 03:37:00 -0500

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

:D

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 04:10:01 -0500

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.

From the Demented Minds of the B& Wagon

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 23:43:46 -0500

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.

ಠ_ಠ

Sat, 22 May 2010 03:37:44 -0500

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.

Social Application Pre-History: The Finger Protocol

Sun, 09 May 2010 03:40:17 -0500

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

Twitter Considered Harmful

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 03:12:16 -0500

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.

Your Favorite Computer Company Hates You

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:12:27 -0500

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.

Your PC: A Wealth of Uniquely Identifying Information

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 00:52:58 -0500

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? :)

A Steaming Pile of News

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 03:09:31 -0500

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!

A Brief History of Ego Expansion

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 03:07:19 -0500

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.