Carpet Baggers

The carpet layers were supposed to arrive between 7:30am to 8:00am on Friday. They finally straggled in at 11:15am. The pickup truck they were using was about 10 years old and looked it. I think it left enough oil in our driveway to run an aircraft carrier for a day or two.

As to the two installers. Well, lets just say one of them had more mileage on him than the truck. The other was his nephew and was being trained. They finished the second floor of the house around 8:00pm. They came back the next day at 8:30am and finished the first floor by 5:00pm.

Of course, we had to have them go over again most of the seams because they were so ragged. And there were several places where they had not tacked down the carpet. And to top things off, they were supposed to install a cove molding along the bathroom tubs, which they did not do and will not do until tomorrow. Sigh.

Letting the Cat out of the Bag

Or Genie back in the bottle. The BBC has an article here that says region coding of DVDs may bite the dust due to widespread bypassing of the system. As you may know, the movie industry, as a way of controlling release dates for other countries, created a system in which DVDs were coded by the region the industry intended it to be played in.

The reason they did this was because the movie industry traditionally did not release movies world-wide at the same time. Thus, Europe or Asia might see a movie a year after opening in the US. Also, sometimes versions were tailored/edited for a particular region due to local laws.

So, in order to enforce their will, the movie industry encoded disks with a region number and DVD players were not supposed to let you watch something outside of your home region. Unfortunately for the movie industry, the hardware industry did not like this because it limited the usefulness of their players and the customers did not like it because it artificially forced them to wait for the official release in their area.

As it seems to be the case whenever customers are treated unfairly, said customer will try to find a way around the obstruction. From what the article says, customers were aided by hardware manufacturers who left in back doors that allow people to watch what they want. I guess, living in the US, I don't have any need to know about such things so this was news to me but I think it illustrates the pointlessness of such systems.

It should be noted that none of this has anything to do with copyright infringement as the region system did not address the illegal copying of such material.

Pulling the rug from under our feet

If it's Monday, it must mean our brand new Lotus Notes email system must be down. I know some people make a good living writing Notes database applications but all I want and need is email. We are trying to get our IT people to enable the POP3 part of Notes (the SMTP service is already enabled) so that we can use our regular email clients to access and send email.

Right now, because they apparently want to control the desktop, our IT people are dragging their feet. And while I don't know how Notes works in other places, the client sure is a memory hog, not to mention locking up on a weekly basis. Oh well, what do I know?

Magic Carpet Ride

There are times when a rescue disk can save your data, almost as if by magic. And while many people are aware of such things for Windows, not too many people are aware there are similar disks for Linux.

So it is indeed timely that InfoWorld's Russell Pavlicek has a column on just this subject (see the column here). Note that in a pinch, you might also be able to use them on Windows systems.

Graduate Assistant

Things are still not nailed down but it looks like I will be a graduate assistant in a class of students from the Guongdong province of China. The University of Hawai'i has a relationship with the province and is trying to setup a program there. Until then, China is sending their students here.

When I know more details I will let you know but the upside is I will get some teaching experience. The downside is I will have to prepare for that class, my directed reading class, and my planning seminar class (which creates the experimental design for my capstone project, my last class before graduation, the following semester).

As a wise man once said: "Good work if the body doesn't fail."

Aloha!

The Empire Strikes Back

Some have said that the 'Net sees censorship as damage and routes around it. I think the RIAA has decided that this is true and is now attacking the routers, or at least they are attacking the network providers Sprint, AT&T, UUNET, and others, who control the routers. A suit filed by the RIAA alleges these routers allow customers to access the China-based Listen4ever.com site and unlawfully copy musical recordings. Bringing suit with the RIAA are the regular suspects Sony, Warner Brothers, BMG, RCA, and others. See the story here.

A New Hope

Speaking of the RIAA, we've all heard the propaganda from them about how Internet terrorist thieves downloading illegal copies of music have been the cause of the recent downturn in music sales the past two years. But a research group called Forrester Research is saying rather than killing the goose, the 'Net could be its savior - but only after the RIAA stops fighting the future.

I don't know if agree with all of what is in this article here, but what it says is that by 2005, the companies will agree on a standard download contract that supports burning of CDs and a greater range of devices [when hell freezes over, or they go out of business, whichever comes first- ed.].

However, I see no evidence of enlightened self-interest on the part of the RIAA. Nor am I naive enough to think that they will voluntarily switch from the Dark Side and come into the light. YMMV.

A Shining Light

Often times we frame the security versus freedom debate as an either/or question. But what if you can have both? The BBC is reporting (see the article here) that using spy cameras on every block does not reduce violent crime and that in fact, you can reduce crime by simply providing better street lighting.

What a concept, make the streets safer while not invading people's freedom to move about without having Big Brother following their every move. Further, providing better illumination costs less than the cameras! What more could you ask for?

Turn the Lights Out

Note that I had this ready before the unfortunate events with a black bear yesterday. After thinking it over, I decided to run this anyway. My apologies to anyone who may be offended but life goes on.

As an atheist walked through the forest, he smiled at the beauty that was all around him and said, "What natural wonders the powers of evolution have created." Just then he heard a rustling near the river. He went to investigate and a 7-foot-tall grizzly bear was tearing down the path towards him him. The man took off like a shot, and when he got up the courage to look back, he saw the bear was catching up fast. He tried with all his strength to pick up the pace, but he tripped and crashed to the ground. As he tried to get up, the bear jumped on his chest and picked up one paw to whack him. The atheist screamed, "Oh my God!!!" At that very instant, time stopped! The bear froze. The forest was silent. Even the river stopped moving.

As a bright light shone upon the man, a voice boomed from the heavens, "You deny my existence for all of these years, teach others I don't exist, and even credit creation to a cosmic accident. Do you expect me to help you out of this predicament? Am I to count you as a believer?" The atheist looked directly into the light, "It would be hypocritical of me to suddenly ask you to treat me as a Christian now, but perhaps could you make the bear a Christian?" "Very well," the voice said.

The light went out, the river ran again, and the sounds of the forest resumed. And then the bear dropped its right paw, brought both paws together, bowed its head and spoke: "Lord, for this food which I am about to receive, I am truly thankful."

Table That

I've been testing the newest beta version of the HTML editor I use called HTML-Kit (see it here). Part of what's new is a version of the TIDY syntax checker that now includes accessibility checking. In the past, I've run my HTML though various checkers to ensure my site is available to as many people as possible. Of course, the way you do that is to write standards compliant code.

Well, much to my surprise, while my code meets the XML/XHTML specs fine, it fails the accessibility check in the following ways: 1. Problems with the use of a table for formatting, rather than display of tabular data, 2. The use of links to differentiate the days of the week, and 3. Insufficient association between labels and the form controls for the search box.

The second and third problems I can probably work around. But the problem with using a table for formatting appears to be unsolvable without doing some pretty grungy things to the code.

So, I am giving fair warning to all 11 of my readers that starting the first of next year, you will need to have a browser that can do Cascading Style Sheets. I know of no way to format the text, other than a table (which is a non-starter) or CSS, so you will need to upgrade your browser.

In checking my server logs, 25 percent of the page reads come from the MS IE browser versions 5.01 or earlier and nine percent came for Netscape Navigator 4.7 or earlier. This means about one third of you out there will need to upgrade to at least MS IE 5.5 or Netscape 6 within the next three or four months.

If anyone can tell me how to meet the accessibility guidelines without using CSS let me know. Until then, start updating to something newer. Thanks in advance.

Aloha!

Waikiki Waterman

The U.S. Postal Service is honoring famed surfer and three-time Olympic gold medal winner Duke Kahanamoku with a commemorative stamp to be issued on Saturday. Kahanamoku, who died in 1968 at the age of 77, is considered to be the father of modern surfing and introduced it to the U.S. mainland in 1913 and to Australia the next year.

He competed in four Olympics (1912 - Stockholm: gold medal in the 100-meter freestyle and silver in the 4X200 freestyle relay; 1920 Antwerp: gold medals in the 100-meter freestyle and 4X200 freestyle relay; 1924 - Paris: silver medal in the 100-meter freestyle; and 1932 - Los Angeles: bronze medal water polo) and was inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of fame in 1984.

You can read more about the man, a true Hawai'ian hero here.

Mau'i Mutterings

The county council of Mau'i joined O'ahu yesterday by banning smoking in restaurants. The ban goes into effect on January 1st, and not a day too soon as far as I am concerned. When SWMBO and I were on Mau'i, we were constantly reminded how unpleasant, and unhealthful, it is to be in a room with smokers. Now don't get me wrong, it is none of my business if someone wants to kill themselves, by smoking, or by any other means. But their liberty to smoke ends at my liberty to breathe clean air. So I am happy that the council passed the ban.

If the experience of O'ahu is any indication, the restaurants may actually see an increase in business now that smoking will no longer be allowed, thus, finally putting to bed the FUD put forth by the smoking lobby that business would suffer, especially in the post-9/11 downturn. All that was, now wait for it, was just so much smoke.

Aloha!

Follow Suit

Some people's sense of self-importance is exceeded only by their self-inflated egos. A word of advice to them who threaten to sue people for libel based on something they read about themselves on a web site: talk to a lawyer first. If she or he is any good, they will probably advise you that the Constitution, law, case law, and the facts are against you so don't waste your time and money.

You can do a Google search and find your own sources but one I've been reading a lot lately is Steven Den Beste's site (see it here). As usual, I don't necessarily agree with everything he says, but he usually has an interesting way of saying it. Check out his site some time.

But to the point, Den Beste recently had a run in with someone who threatened to sue him, so Den Beste decided to do some research and then write an essay on the subject (see it here). I'm no lawyer (and neither is Den Beste), but as far as I've come across, this essay is as good an explanation as any on libel in cyberspace.

While there, check out his other essays, not all are jewels, but there are heck of a lot more good ones than bad. YMMV.

Secure in One's Own PC

The Center for Internet Security (see their site here) recently released a security inventory tool that checks your Windows 2000 PC system configuration against what is called the System Benchmark Consensus Baseline Security Settings. Not only are there benchmarks and tools for Windows 2000/NT, but also Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, and the Cisco IOS router. Coming Real Soon Now are marks for AIX, Apache Web Server, Cisco PIX Firewall, Windows IIS Web Server, Check Point FW-1/VPN-1, and the Cisco CAT Switches.

In their own words:

For the first time ever, a large group of user organizations, information security professionals and auditors have agreed on security configuration specifications that represent a prudent level of due care, and are working together to define consensus best-practice security configurations for computers connected to the Internet.

Now you can determine how your systems measure up to these widely accepted security benchmarks.

I took a look at the Win2K Pro gold template and found it relatively restrictive. For example, telnet is disabled, passwords must be at least 8 characters and include at least three of the following four characteristics: upper case alpha, lower case alpha, numeric, and special characters; alerts/message services are disabled; user installation of printer drivers are disabled; and the recovery console is disabled, to name just a few.

The list goes on, making up the bulk of the 51-page benchmark and is the result of the CIS, the SANS Institute, and the following agencies of the United States federal government: the National Security Agency, the Defense Information Systems Agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and The General Services Agency.

Using the included templates, you can automatically change your security settings based on your threat level. Of course, as your PC becomes hardened, it also become less useful to you as services are disabled. Each person will have to decide what level of security is prudent for your environment. Also, a word of warning to those in networked environments, know that something will probably break if you use even the lowest level of these templates. Further, perhaps users should not be implementing these changes at all. Rather, the network admins should be reviewing these tools/templates and deciding what to implement.

But in either case, these baseline benchmarks are at least a starting point from which you can make whichever local modifications your installation may require.

Streaking Bodies

Some of you may have already seen this video clip (see it here in .mov format, ~300kb) but for those who didn't, it's a series of still images taken by Yale University students using the WIYN (Wisconsin Univ., Indiana Univ., Yale Univ., and NOAO) 0.9m telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, near Tucson, Arizona, of an asteroid that recently passed through our space.

The asteroid, 2002 NY40, has an estimated diameter of 700m and at its closest, passed Earth at a distance of about 524,000km.

Aloha!

It's Friday!

A Fire Down Below

Sometimes you follow a link not knowing what you will find at the other end but following it anyway out of idle curiosity. So, did you know that there is a company that is manufacturing a "pulsing tampon"? Now, before you go running off into the night yelling eeeeeuuuuwwwww, know that the vibrating tampon supposedly relieves menstrual cramps, among other feminine ailments. I kid you not. Follow the link here. Or don't.

One Hole Behind

Given the tenor of this post, and given I haven't told any jokes lately, I figured I would continue in a similar vein (Geddit? Vein? Oh, never mind) and end with this one:

A man playing on a new golf course got confused as to what hole he was on. He saw a lady playing ahead of him. He walked up to her and asked if she knew what hole he was playing. She replied, "I'm on the 7th hole, and you're a hole behind me, so you must be on the 6th hole." He thanked her and went back to his golf game.

Later on, the same thing happened and he approached the lady again with the same request. She said, "I'm on the 14th, you are a hole behind me, so you must be on the 13th." Once again he thanked her.

He finished his round and went into the club house and saw the lady sitting at the end of the bar. He went up to her and said, "Let me buy you a drink to show my appreciation for your help."

He started a conversation and asked her what kind of work she did. She said she was in sales, and he said he was in sales also.

He asked what she sold. She replied, "If I told you, you would only laugh."

"No, I wouldn't," he said.

She said, "I sell tampons."

With that he fell on the floor laughing hysterically. She said, "See, I knew you would laugh."

"That's not what I'm laughing at," he replied. "I'm a toilet paper salesman, so I'm STILL one hole behind you."

Have a Great Weekend Everyone - Aloha!