Oblomovka

2003-07-19»

Collated statistics on Bush approval/disapproval ratings. The site's obviously a bit biased, but the figures are straight and quite fascinating. It's amazing how jittery opinion is about Bush, especially when compared to other presidents.

2003-07-18»

I was NTKing late Thursday night, and watched the David Kelly story develop. It was sad sitting on my own, reloading Google News, watching the reports get bolder, grow from rumour to suspicion to the front-page coverage of his death, even as the sun rose.

Kelly was suspected of being the source for the BBC's claims that a key government Iraqi dossier was "sexed up" for the press. Protecting sources is a tricky game - particularly in the UK where its legally unclear how much protection journalists can realistically provide. Courts can comply editors to reveal sources and have done so in the past. Newspapers have threatened to appeal to the European Human Rights Court in Strasbourg on this issue recently. NTK has a slightly simpler approach: we let people know we'll squeal like little piggies in court, so don't tell us anything you wouldn't want the world to know - and for God's sake, send it to us anonymously.

That's not ideal. Anonymity protects the source, but doesn't help the journalist much - because anonymous sources aren't that much use. Cryptography protects the message, and authenticates the source (if they digitally sign it), but leaves a damning paper trail if the journalist is forced to hand over their records.

What you really want is an encryption system which would allow that the journalist and the source to communicate privately, allow the journo to confirm who the source is, but provide complete deniability on the source's behalf should the messages be obtained at a later date. That's what Nikita Borisov, Ian Goldberg and Eric Brewer propose in this paper, "Off-the-Record Communication, or, Why Not To Use PGP". They plot out the flaws in using standard crypto, and implement an instant messanger extension that will let parties talk in a confidential, authenticated manner that cannot be decoded - even by each other - at a later date, and is fully deniable if intercepted.

A neat solution, although it doesn't stop Parliament calling you in on the merest suspicion you might be the source, then having the rest of the media follow you around with sixty-suns-worth of spotlight until the end of your poor life. But then, even crypto has its limits.

2003-07-17»

Dan Catt (who with Modesty B. Catt was responsible for the WAP version of Elite) has written a scraper for the UK traffic site, and spooled it all out in WAPPish. I have no idea if it's useful or not because I don't have a WAP phone, can't parse WML very well, and live in America now. Still, cool!

So I'm trying to nip this one in the bud before Andrew Orlowski writes another one of his rants about how Google is being paid off by corrupt blogger billionaires eager to control the minds of the unawakened lumpenproletariat or something.

Do a google search for "cook an artichoke". The top hit is pretty funny. It contains, as the friend who pointed it out says, "the most colorful discourse I've seen yet in an epicurial conversation".

Now I'm sure that this will eventually get back to Andy, who will ponder publically why it is that a meagre blog, full of swearing, managed to get top billing on Google, when there are many authoritative cooking sites out there simply begging for hits.

To save time, I'll point out that a) all the swearing comes from google searchers, so the site must have bubbled up before the fights began, that b) it is now far more entertaining than any cooking site (short of an episode of Iron Chef presented by Sweary Mary) so I imagine will stay up there forever, and c) does actually link to several sites that tells you how to cook an artichoke. Because it has comments - filthy disgusting comments - there's even a correction to the first link which is now broken.

So we have a top link is funny for a sizeable number of people, and which still compactly and briefly explains how to cook an artichoke. What's not to love?

2003-07-16»

The UK Highways Agency provides real time traffic information that let's see how bad London's M25 is, and what all the signs on the M1 look like right now.

This is begging to be scraped into something more mobile browsable.

DeCSS is now illegal to distribute in Germany. ( I can't believe they had the gall to pass this law on my birthday. Have they no sense of decency?)

2003-07-15»

rog took my haiku program, and created a blog->haiku add-on for Moveable Type. Nice!

It had to be all moblogging from the back of the car, as we were in transit all yesterday. And all last night and most of today thanks to Amtrak running Coast Starlight around four hours later than advertised.

It's odd stumbling across really bad government-run, customer-facing bureacracy in the US. It's not the way things are usually done here - which is a shame because when they try, they're really good at it. Amtrak had it all: weird seventies decor, bad timekeeping, a dining area with a waiting list (you had to sign up for breakfast in advance). But what I really had to admire was how the bureacratic strictures were both contradictory, and arbitrarily enforced. Surely the sign of a great Brazil theme trip.

I should have taken the hint when they wouldn't sell me tickets in advance, but did give me a special secret code number that I had to give the conductor before I'd be allowed on the train to buy a ticket. A security measure, apparently.

As it was, when I finally stumbled aboard at 6AM, having waited at Redding station since 2AM, the conductor didn't want my secret code. What he wanted me to tell him was how much I should pay for a ticket to San Jose. "Don't you know that?", I said, poorly hiding my surprise. Nobody had implied that I was enjoying any special offers. Or indeed, was supposed to remember how much I intended to pay. He grumbled, got out a big book and looked it up. "$60". Now, I couldn't remember the price I'd been quoted, but it was definitely less than that. "You're lucky," he said when I questioned him, "if you look here it actually says $69 for train-bought tickets. But I usually ignore that."

What? I was beginning to feel like maybe this was some complex haggling and/or bribing manoeuvre. "Well, you have the advantage of me," I began to say... and the conductor grew quite frenzied. "I do not! It was you who chose to get on the train!". I pointed out that there was not much else to do in Redding at 6AM in the morning, having waited four hours for the pleasure. "Well, that's the nature of trains, sir," he replied, delivering some sort of coup de random flail.

What? What? It's the nature of trains to arbitrarily choose the time and their fare structure? I'm terrible at fashioning snappy comebacks to surreal arguments, but I do pride myself on re-engineering odd bureacratic strange-loops. I told him that I had now remembered - perfectly - what price I was quoted, as was expected of me. I revealed that I was to pay $51. He grumpily announced that he wasn't going to argue with me (which was nice) and let me write down my chosen price and credit card number on his carbon paper and moved on. In retrospect, I think I could have got him down to $30.

I still don't know what the secret code number was about. Oh, and if you do go on the Coast Starlight , the laptop outlets are on next to seats 19/20 upstairs on the coach carriages. Bring a two-plug adaptor, and I bet you could share with whoever is sitting there.

2003-07-13»

I swear I had four ideas for mini-programming projects at some point last week. Now I find they've evaporated down to one. And even that one has already been thought up before by Kragen. But no-one, to my knowledge, has implemented it, and it's still a great idea.

I often find myself - as many did at OSCON last week - joining a network with a perfectly fine Net gateway but dead or unresponsive DHCP server. It'd be really useful under those situations to have a program that can deduce the gateway, network mask, spare IPs not in use on the Network, and optionally nearby DNS servers, Web proxies and authorised SMTP relays. You can work out much of these from judicious sniffing of traffic on the network; others you can deduce with some simple heuristics.

Kragen's thought about this a lot, but makes it sound a lot sneakier than it has to be, because he's trying to work out tricks to use in case you're plugged into a switch. On a switch, you don't see much other traffic. I'd be happy with the autoconfigurator if it only worked on hub-based networks (or wireless networks), where you can see most traffic already.

About the most potentially antisocial act this program would have to do is guess an IP address. If it chose one that was already in use, you'd disrupt that computer's connection. But a combination of sending out ARP requests, sending out test traffic, and being conservative in your choices (aiming for a reasonable distance away from present IPs, avoiding either edge of whatever netmask you've estimated the network to use).

2003-07-12»

Now I'm really peeved. I had to miss Miguel's keynote to write NTK. I spent the rest of the day regretting it, because Quinn told me it was very funny, and I like funny. But now I'm going to spend the next couple of weeks regretting it, because apparently they demo'ed dashboard.

A couple of weeks ago, when Nat Friedman first started hacking seriously on it, he wrote "I think this project has a lot of dorky-blogger-meme-virulence potential". I think it's more than that. This looks like the sort of app my friends would happily murder me for.

In a nutshell, it's a system-wide Remembrance Agent : a system that takes little clues from all the apps you're using and throws up suggested links to other items. So if I'm talking on IRC to, say, mouthbeef, my IRC client will send a cluepacket to dashboard, announcing that. Dashboard then echoes the cluepacket around to other listening apps, and they'll all chip in with their suggestions. "Mouthbeef", says my address book: I'm sure that's Cory's nym. "Cory?", says my mail archiver, "okay, here's the last five mails from Cory". "Right, I know that Cory writes for BoingBoing", says my aggregator, "so here's the RSS feed for that".

I've seen work like this from Microsoft Research, but it's always struck me as a bit too clever-clever. They always go for the angle of "well, you're makiing a lot of noise and not typing, and the phone is off the hook, so there must be someone else in the room, so I won't display these private messags"-type hints. It's far too deductive: it's smart for smart's sake. And their set-up always makes what I think is a key mistake, which is to work too hard to delegate decisions to the computer. I see this a lot in agent tech; all that bullshit about "My preferences show that you like tasty burgers, and we're in the neighbourhood of a Big Kahuna Burger joint. Let me show you the route.". No. I may well like burgers, but you'll show me the solution when I ask for it. Don't act like a personal assistant, making decisions for me. You're no good at that. Give me more information to make my own decisions. Increase my power, don't bleed it away.

Also the Microsoft stuff continues to have its head stuck right up the ass of corporate America. One of my big bones with MS stuff is that it always makes me feel like I'm eating out of the trash bins outside a cubicle farm. All of their software is designed to help busy executives plan their lives. Everyone I know uses it to try and write birthday cards and chat with their friends. When people use Microsoft Office they use it anywhere but in an office. Microsoft knows this - but it also knows that the money comes from their corporate clients, so there's a limit to how much it can bend its software toward a wider customer base. Ultimately when you use MS software, you're not the end user MS perceives at all: we're just living off the scraps Microsoft leaves out after feeding its big customers. This is especially true of their super-smart agent tech. Every demo I've seen presumes so much about how it's going to be used in an office environment that I can't imagine using it anywhere else. Actually, I can't even imagine using it in a non-WASP, non-North American office a lot of the time. I'm sure they'll try and fix this, but their hearts won't be in it. WASP America is their heartland.

Anyway, back to Dashboard. I like the look of Dashboard partly because it feels very informative, rather than anticipatory. It's not really making deductions about what you want to do, but throwing you extra information about what you're doing now. Think status bars versus paper clips. Also, the very fact that it's being hacked upon by the GNOME folk means that it's already working in an environment much closer to my own.

The first of those is, I think, a permanent advantage. Ever since I saw the Remembrance Agent , I've wanted something like Dashboard. It just seems to be the right idea for me, and I think for others too. It's what I liked about Lotus Agenda ; it's what I anticipate liking about Chandler.

The second is selfish. Just because Nat and Miguel have usage patterns closer to me than to a CEO isn't a universal good. The free software's bias towards hackers is no better than Microsoft's bias towards companies. But I do think there's more of a chance of software like Dashboard gravitating towards other lifestyles. Not really because I think that the free software movement is particularly good at accepting different user behaviours, but because Microsoft is so spectacularly bad at it that there's a real vacuum in the market. It's the Achilles heel that Apple is so carefully exploiting these days. I think that the open source movement would have to positively work at being close-minded not to win here.

There now; I've written a huge amount on a piece of software that I haven't even downloaded and run yet. I get the impression it's not really in a workable state yet, and anyway I'll have to get Mono back up and running before I can play around. And I'll probably have to write a set of clue-generating backends for vim or something. I'll do it in my copious spare time and let you know.

Okay, I mustn't gawp, and it's hardly germane to what she's writing about, but I still think it disarming to discover a Sixties Oxbridge, Hitchens and Clinton reminiscing, New Statesman crowd posting on Livejournal. And they have a little discussion afterwards! And they all have pre-raphaelite icons!

I can't quite put my finger on why this is so pleasantly unsettling: it's like seeing two class systems mix it up. It's like some online equivalent of Jeffrey Bernard's Low Life column, but you get to hear the discussion in the pub afterwards. I like it, but then I like most things that give me a headache afterwards.

Of course, learning more about Roz Kaveney, I'm no longer surprised. Anointed to be a gatekeeper.