Author Archives: Josh

Josh’s freaky Compaq PC

I’m using a Compaq D5S/P1.7/20j/p/128c/6 AUST

I’m getting whitenoise in the soundcard at work. It’s there all the
time, but drowned out by music. It stops when I have the left mouse button
depressed to select cells in Excel, but releasing it resumes the whitenoise.
Clicking on or selecting stuff outside of Excel doesn’t affect it. Outlook
selections don’t stop it, but selecting stuff in Word stops the whitenoise –
but again, only while the mouse button is held down. Another thing to stop
the whitenoise is dragging splitter bars around in Visual Studio 6. So it’s
not the mouse per se. And just recently, these “fixes” have stopped
working. Stopping a particularly long build restored the fix. Popping up
task manager shows that it seems that the white noise goes away when the CPU
goes to 100%, unless there’s disk activity. Got any suggestions how I can
fix this? And, preemptively, I don’t intend to load the CPU at 100%
permanently for my listening pleasure.

Recent spam stopping techniques

Okay, two techniques, one that’s going to be comprimised sooner, one that’s going to be compromised later:

  1. A hidden field that must be supplied
  2. A javascript client-server MD5 oneway hash

I don’t see the second as a viable solution because it demands javascript (precluding certain users), and the first will be bested by the spammers when it becomes economically viable. I guess it depends on the implementation cost as to if it’s adopted here.

Why Googlebomb?

Why are webloggers googlebombing online poker?

I assume it’s to reduce the attractiveness of spaming the blogs with the term. Wouldn’t you want positions 1-10, rather than just #1, and really shut the action down? I don’t see that it will. But wikipedia will be regarded as a more relevant site, and that’s gotta be good, right? Speaking of which, I must go check for vandalisim on my pages…

Ad blocking begins to have an economic effect

So I was checking out copper (as you do), and followed the wikipedia copper entry link to EnvironmentalChemistry.com’s copper data, and I discovered that ad blockers are beginning to change the economics of the web. The web site whinged that they had detected ad blocking, and if I wanted to get the content I’d have to turn it off (and provided directions – which I followed, but it just turned out to be a bunch of atomic numbers and covalent bonds and useless crap like that).

The economics of a lot of the web are not dissimilar to those of free-to-air television; there’s a covenant between the producers (broadcasters/webauthors) and the consumers – we will let this stuff out to anyone, and you will consume our advertising. Advertisers give the producers cash to cover the costs of publishing. There’s a profit in it, and everyone’s happy.

Except that consumers have decided they don’t like the deal anymore. People are taping TV shows, and skipping the ads. People are using ad blockers in their browsers. The economics of the model are breaking down. I personally am behaving this way because I find the advertising increasingly intrusive and irrelevant, and thus annoying. The ads suck, for products that suck, and they’re shoved down my throat. So I avoid them. This is how a character in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact became the richest man on earth – by selling TV ad blockers.

The three outcomes I can forecast from this are:

  1. increased relevance of advertising (unlikely, the reason advertising is necessary is because of an inherent suckiness of the products, otherwise they’d be compelling)
  2. decreased expenditure on content provision (on TV, cheaper nastier shows – if that’s possible; on the web, uneconomic sites being pulled or at least not updated)
  3. product placement, which is a bit like 1, ‘cept different because it’s more about appropriate products in appropriate places

I for one have no idea how this will play out, but I’m sure advertising will get more subtle. It’s done that over the last century, and will continue to in response to increasing consumer sophistication. Perhaps advertisers will find a way to back off, and only offer their products to customers who want them; they certainly want to act that way, because it’s a waste of money advertising women’s sanitary napkins to the gay male viewers of Friends — unless they’re planning to fix their car’s leaky roof with one.

BTW, how did they figure out I was blocking their ads?

VoIP ain’t gonna happen this month

I’ve just moved houses and thought it would be a grand idea to replace our fixed phone line with a VoIP phone like that supplied by Engin. Save the $30/month fixed line rental, skip the $60 connection fee and also upgrade our net connection to broadband, come out ahead with features and finances. Everything would be great.

What a stupid idea.

The VoIP service offered by Engin is $20/mo, so you are saving $10/mo on connectivity. Our ISP costs $10/mo, so the most we can afford to pay for an ISP and come out equal is $20/mo. But if we pay only that then we are effectively getting broadband for free. The VoIP is $150, but we’ll just ignore that cost. It’s only $90 more than hooking up a fixed line.

Obviously, to use a VoIP phone you need IP connectivity – an ISP. Okay, so we’ll just sign up to one of those $20 / 200meg plans ADSL and that’ll be great; I did some figuring and we’d use nothing like that kind of traffic, even with voice calls consuming 1K/sec (all figuring based on Engin’s figures, supplied in the user forum, which has been pulled – methinks because the users were slagging them off). No problem signing up for a couple of years, no worries, I’ll be in the new place for at least that long.

You can’t have ADSL without a fixed line phone.

You Freaking WHAT?!

Fine. Cable, I’ll have cable. Call one of the two cable providers, the house has been cabled up by both. Except they’ve merged, to increase competition. No worries, I’ll call the only monopolistic cable provider, hook up (ought to be cheap, the house is already cabled up) and away we go. $279 to connect to your cable service?!?! $40/month to stay connected?!?! You Freaking WHAT?!

Fine. I happen to know that although cable and ADSL are widely regarded as your two options for broadband, there’s a third option here in Melbourne – radio. Alphalink provide superfast wireless access for only $33/mo; but connection is $286. But guess what? $33 is greater than $20. So we come out Losers.

So I resigned myself and we got a fixed line. And that’s why VoIP isn’t gonna happen this month, and I suspect won’t be happening for a long time yet.

Pornzilla

As everyone knows, the web is the best place for finding and viewing high quality pornography in the comfort of your own home. Or internet cafe.

Pornzilla is a collection of tools for surfing porn with Firefox. These bookmarklets and extensions make it easier to find and view porn, letting you spend more time looking at smut you like.

I love the tools including the one that allows you to “… find galleries similar to one you have open without using the keyboard”

They need funding:

“Since nobody has contributed to our testing budget, these tools have only been tested with free porn sites.”

Is it good that they’re being kept off the streets? Perhaps you’d like to give the authors jobs?

This is how to write a job ad

*************** Job 2 ***************

Title: IVR Developer (Visual C++ and SQL)
Location: Melbourne
Advertiser: eQuus IT Resources
Date Posted: 11-01-2005
Description: IVR Developer with Visual C++ and SQL development experience required to earn $70-$100K with fabulous company in futuristic undersea laboratory*.
Get the full details of this job, here :
http://it.seek.com.au/jobmail.asp?jobid=4478466
Continue reading →

Stupid KDE print dialog

The print dialog in KDE is tabbed, and one of the tabs allows you to pick via a radio button:
a) Print everything (default)
b) The following page range, from x to y.
The x and y boxes are enabled. Fiddle with them, drop your enormous graphics document to a single page, press ‘Print’.

And you’ll get the whole document. Because you didn’t pick (b), even though you clearly wanted it, what with changing the page range. And the developers haven’t either greyed out the x and y boxes in response to (b) not being picked, or made it so that changing x or y causes (b) to be selected.

Stupid Linux developers.

Subsequent investigations have discovered that it’s the print dialog from the Gnome PDF viewer. What’s that doing under KDE?
Gnome PDF viewer print dialog

Imp hates Firefox… or is it the other way around?

Missing HTML?
The webmail my ISP uses (a horde IMP, or somesuch opensource thingy) doesn’t play nicely with Firefox. It was broken in 0.9.2 and it’s broken in 1.0PR. Why does it stop in the middle, or miss the start, or something, of the HTML transfer?

The only things I keep IE around for now are Flash amusements and webmail.

I demand that someone who isn’t me fix this. It’s my right as a freeloader.

Copy Protection?

Back for my birthday, Cathy bought me The Cat Empire CD. Which is great, I love The Cat Empire. After unwrapping the present, I read the back cover and realized it was one of the broken copy protected EMI CDs. And after much howling and frustration it went back to the shop (still in its shrinkwrap) to be swapped for a CD that complies with the Red Book standard.
Fast forward to last week, when I was at my local library. There was The Cat Empire CD! “Great, I’d Love to listen to that”, thinks I. I take it home, and in a fit of pique decide to see if I can load it onto my MP3/WMA player… and it does, using XP’s Media Player.
Isn’t copy protection meant to work? I guess that’s why I bought the LiteOn CD drive – it has a reputation for reading “difficult” disks. I can listen to the music, and haven’t paid for it, when I would have been happy to pay for it… the CIA calls that “blowback”, don’t they?