Derik in Minnesota

Dispatches from Safe Mode: Google Chrome is the worst browser ever made

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:21:37 GMT

Preramble

I picked up a virus on… fridayish.
I call it a virus– I suppose technically it’s considered adware. My web searches get routed through ad sites instead of Google. Or my Google searches appear to go through– but any attempt to go to those sites instead gets routed through an ad-site. (It’s most annoying.)

Now, I picked up this virus from a WMA (a window media authenticated file) so you might think that this thread would be about how Window Media Player sucks, or the WMA format sucks (80% of WMA license-required files I’ve ever dealt with have been trying to infect my system with viruses) and loudly decry the death of the format.
…thing is, everyone knows that already.
I could decry Windows Defender, which warned me about the virus it saw Windows Media Player installing, and claimed to have caught it before it executed, which is clearly did not. But again– everyone knows Windows Defender (like most anything with “Windows” before its name) does not work. What’s the point?

So with my Firefox and Opera (I didn’t bother with Microsoft Internet Explorer… do I need to go into why?) thoroughly buggered, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the Google Chrome browser showed no signs of infection.
You’d think that would make Google Chrome the best browser ever made, right?

Side note: Whatever revelations this provides about the level at which my system is infected are largely moot, as the infection doesn’t appear to be a particularly deep one, merely prolific. Several attempts to sweep it off my system, including browser clean installs, have ended in re-infection, but a certain subcutaneous “feel” to the way reinfection occurs– the texture of it– makes me believe this is surface infection spawning copies of itself behind the sweeps, and not a hidden downloader burping out new infections like zlob.

Tarnished Chrome

So what drives Google Chrome from best to worst? I dislike the interface, but that’s not it, the appearance of complete control while actually lacking any in many areas gets closer… online integration gets closest.

Bitching about online integration in a web browser is a bit pedantic… but the fact it bounces URL’s you’re typing off the Gogole server to fill in suggestions bothers me.
I mean– it makes perfect sense to do so… Chrome has one textfield for both URL’s and web searches. So when I’m typing in www.hotzebraonwalrusaction.com, it’s in the same field search field where I’d type “zebra walrus fireman drama,” so naturally Google tries to suggest completions for that search.
But the net result is that Google gets to see the url’s of the sites I visit… even if I’m not arriving there via Google, and even if they don’t have Google Analytics installed. Not content with analyzing my traffic patterns within their system, they are now gathering data about my patterns outside of it.
You can turn this functionality off. This was the first time I’d had to work with Google Chrome extensively since installing it, so I’d simply never noticed before.

No, what squicks me on Chrome is the RLZ thing. Every web search you conduct through Google Chrome appends a “RLZ” code– a unique hash identifier of your i>Chrome</i> install. (Specifically, the exact time it was downloaded, which version it is, and where it was downloaded from.)

If you’ve gotten this far into my rant, you probably know that every page, image, file etc… loaded off the web includes a “return address” identifying your computer so that the server (which is statistically located in in either Texas or Siberia) knows where to send that data so that you can find it. No web surfing it truly “anonymous.”
But like a mailing address the destination is not perfectly specific. If 4 people live in a house, letters to any of them can go to the same address. In the case of wireless modems, the modem sorts out who gets what data-packets among all people in the house. (Or a few doors down… or across the street…) it’s not a perfect system. In a college, hundreds or thousands of users may be connected to the same wireless service, assigned anonymous dynamic user-id’s for the duration of their session, and the packets they request routed accordingly. Ditto for a lunchateria that offers free internet.
There is some ambiguity to this system. Like a letter arriving at your house with no name could be for anyone. it might even be for the guy across the road.

The RLZ code removes that ambiguity. The result of every search performed is still routed to an anonymous IP address… but the request for the search now includes a unique identifier- “Made with this version of this browser, downloaded from this source, at this time.”
How unique is such a label? Could it identify a single person on a university campus, as they move from anonymous-wifi point to anonymous wifi point? Stopping in cafes? Is the number unique enough to identify that person’s searches despite being anonymous?

Yes of course it is. That’s the point of it. The RLZ id is supposed to be Google’s way of tracking it’s affiliates– “we know these people use our Chrome browser, but we’d like to know who they downloaded it from so we can identify our optimum distribution channels and guage uptake traffic on them translates to actual usage.” And to do that properly, they need to uniquely identify each user and distinguish them from every other user.

It’s not your name… it’s more like if you wore a t-shit reading “Bought at Target #220 in Even Prairie, Minnesota on July 22, 2005 3:15:29 p.m.” and wore it everywhere. Your name isn’t needed– that time-location stamp in essence becomes your identity.
(And of course if you log into anything, anywhere, ever, it can be correlated back to your name, forever.)

In short, it takes the already-somewhat-iffy concept of online anonymity, demolishes it, insults its mother and then urinates on its face.

…did I mention these RLZ id’s are included in the search-suggest requests as well? so even if www.ducttapedkoalas.ru isn’t on the Google network and you made sure to use anonymous internet access… Google still know you’re going there because when you type the URL in to direct-navigate to the site, it Chrome sends what you’re typing back to their central server, along with the RLZ id that uniquely identifies this browser on this computer. (And of course your IP address, which provides your physical location.)

The Eternal Question

The eternal question with a company like Google is where does the limit of my trust lie? They know an awful lot about me, and though “don’t be evil” is part of their pledge, I’m not just trusting Google today, I’m trusting Google in the future, for the rest of my lifetime. Very few institutions can resist idealism-rot over a 30-year period.
So, right there, the limit of my trust. This crosses it.

There are other ways Google could gather this kind of distribution-network-to-usage-correlation data– time-on-site, anonymous hashes, etc. A unique fingerprint-id with every URL request? This isn’t even about trusting Google– it’s about trusting my local telcom, my ISP (owned by a major media company with a history of suing individuals based on their IP addresses) my state and federal government… all places that request with my unique fingerprint passes through (and can be archived!) before it even reaches Google! They’ve decided to imprint a unique fingerprint-ID with my name on it (or as good as) as it moves through every single insecure step down that line.
Do I trust those institutions? Yeah… today. But like Google, this requires trusting them forever into the future. And cycles of social orthodoxy have a nasty tendency of coming and going.

At least when it’s Google that had my data I knew they’d usually put up a fight for it! But this way everyone has it!
“Would I trust this system if I lived in China?” That’s the test I’m using.

Fergods sake, I’m a registered Libertarian! I know damn well that’s considered grounds for a FBI file in many circumstances! (Incidentally, Libertarians are insane. There’s nothing that will disillusion you with a cause more quickly than getting regular mailings from the people running it.)

To what effect

One of the nasty economic rules that governs modern human existance is that there’s upset, and there’s meaningful upset. Something that angers or worries a lot of people may have minimal impact because while many people are worried… few care enough to do anything about it. So beyond not using Google Chrome, (which I wasn’t anyway,) what am I going to do?

Well, I’m going to be making a smartphone purchase within the next year, and I thought it was going to be a second generation G-Phone. …but I’m not plunking down money for a platform that locks me into using Chrome as a browser.
(Data sent over cell-phone connections points to a single handset anyway, but as technology matures I believe more and more will be piggybacking on local wi-fi. This is a forward-looking decision.)

Apple’s a smidge eviler than Google but it’s also smaller. I find them less threatening. (I suppose I could try Windows Mobile– Microsoft isn’t competent enough to be threatening. Google is just too good at what they do not to be concerned.)

On a more imemdiate level, I’ve disabled search-suggestions for when I have to use Chrome, I do too much web development to uninstall it. The suggestions are now generated locally as God intended.
You know, it’s massively annoying to see the my recent site URL’s mixed in with the search-term suggestions, they really make SO MUCH MORE SENSE to keep separate, I wonder why Google made them one field? No other browser does that!
(It is probably paranoid to think “because otherwise they wouldn’t have an excuse to ‘accidentally’ gather url’s as you type them in.” After all Google isn’t out to get anyone… yet.)

Oh, and I killed the RLZ code. It’s not that hard… you just delete rlz.dll and modify a few registry entries. I’d point to the livejournal of the user “emiraga” who posted instructions on how to do this… but he purged his account and erased all traces in the system sometime in the last year. (Now that’s someone even more paranoid about privacy than I am!)
(I wonder if I should be worried about the {rlz_failure_count} registry value Chrome is now constantly updating?)

The final analysis

I don’t trust Google that much. Hell, I wouldnt’ trust me that much.

And neither should you.

…also my computer is now playing audio ads despite having no web-browser-windows open. So I am unable to stop it. *force-quits Internet explorer* Yeah, that did it! Ooh, I can tell this virus is gonna be a fun one to pin down!

(I never thought I’d say this… but maybe next time I get a laptop it’ll be a mac.)

Test

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 02:59:15 GMT

TYhis is a test post. You should ignore it.

LEGO More Dakka?

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 03:31:32 GMT

Awesomely unsafe at any speed setting.

I learned two things tonight:

When connecting a LEGO TECHNIC™ building set to a Dremel rotary tool, no matter how favorable a gearing is used, a drive shaft spinning at 15,000 RPM’s will generate enough friction to melt plastic.
Despite its excellent performance in loosening tight mechanisms, WD-40 is in fact a cleaner, not a lubricant, and is highly flammable. It should not be used to combat friction in a gearbox.

I could probably have arrived at both of these discoveries via Socratic reasoning had I stopped to think through the implications of my actions beforehand.

…but where’s the fun in that? (Video of attempt #3 below the cut.)

It’s just a Lego gearbox, running so fast that it would melt if it wasn’t being liquid-cooled. :)
(No application in mind for this; I had a few free hours, was tired of coding PHP, and there was my Dremel saying “Play with me!”)

I imagine you could come up with some nasty applications involving cordless Dremels in cars. (Could you rig a working Torque Converter out of Lego? With Mindstorms controlling the throttle?)

Note: This gearbox wasn’t fully enclosed because I wanted to be able to lubricate it. Big mistake. You can’t see on the video, but it’s spraying stuff EVERYWHERE. A sealed unit with a reservoir would be the way to go for any practical application.

Note #2: Attention to detail matters– I dremel’d down the drive shaft to fit the tools’ head… but the result wasn’t perfectly even, which means it’s vibrating at a frequency of ~15,000 cycles/minute. Holding the box steady reallyhurt– my hand was acting as a shock absorber/vibration sink. Without a balanced drive shaft, any finished project will shake itself apart. (I suppose you could just try find a 4-point screwdriver head that’s compatible with the TECHNIC… but that seems like a bad situation, torque-wise.)

Coincidence Is Not Just a Valley in Egypt

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:20:04 GMT

Reading House of Leaves, and my hot water has just gone out.

…I shall wait until it’s light out to look into this.

(No spoilers, I want to be surprised.)

Remote Wiki Backup

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:43:59 GMT

I am not a trusting soul.
When the Wiki I contribute to crashed a few months ago, we discovered that our backups were not being performed as billed. That was a great sadness, and a scramble to back up ~27,000 pages out of web-caches, plus re-creating some very complicated templates from scratch. It was not fun.

Several months later… TWiki is safely ensconced in a new host and humming along. Our new host’s backups have been tested and verified to work.

I still worry. I mean… it’s not like the backups are off-site. A fire would wipe us out. A properly robust backup system must allow users to download their own backups.
(Quite aside the fact that our ostensible philosophical commitment when departing from Wikia should compel us to make reasonable backups to allow others to leave from us.)
Complicating things… I don’t have database access, so any backup system must, perforce, run remotely.

With all that in mind, I’ve been noodling at a script to scrape the name of every page in every namespace from the wiki, then archive’s the page’s raw contents. No history, no user data, no IP addresses… just the essentials.

…it’s harder than you’d think. We’ve got plenty of articles with multibyte names (non-english characters) in addition to multi-byte text. MySQL handles multibye text easily enough… as does PHP if you beat it hard enough, but the default behavior of mySQL seems to be to deliver multibyte-encoded content as latin-1, scrambling foreign characters. Getting all the ducks lined up has been a back-burner project for a couple months.
(It was actually backburner since BEFORE the Bookworm Crash that wiped out TFWiki. I regret not having it worked out before then.)

After some debugging, this is what I have:

A script that scrapes the names/namespaces of all the pages currently on the wiki– that’s about 37,000 pages.
A script that will then query the wiki for the raw (pre-render) text of these pages and store them in a database.

This isn’t a great solution. Since I’m running on a remote web-server, it means making 37,000 individual queries to the server I’m querying. I could do this in minutes with database access, but since this is a live wiki, I’m throttling the queries to one every 10 seconds to prevent overloading the server, which means snapshotting all 37,000 pages will take… 10 days.
There is no guarantee that the version I snapshot won’t be a vandalized page, reverted seconds after i take a picture. Or with templates… that I’m not grabbing a micro-version that’s not working, or incomparable with an inter-dependent template snapshotted later. (My solution was to hard-code the templates to be snapshotted first, and simply monitor the recentChanges to make sure there were no edits to them while they were being scraped.)
And of course the results aren’t in an easily imported format– they’re BLOB fields in an associative database that doesn’t correspond to mediaWiki structure. You cant’ really do much with them in this form.

…except hold onto them. If something goes wrong… they’re not in the best format– but they’re archived with no character-encoding issues, in original wikitext. It would take some custom-coding, but the text would get back into the wiki with 0 loss.
Well, no loss… except the pages which have been edited since they had a snapshot taken.

In an ideal world… this script would be crontab’d and monitor its own progress and execution-time to adjust its own throttle, it would monitor recentChanges, and it would import the edits onto its own wiki– live-mirroring the other. Oh– and it’d do something about the images, which this doesn’t back up at all.

That goes on the backburner though. Next up for me is a total rewrite of the site’s bot, using some of what I learned here… there are some links it stubbornly refuses to fix, and I think that a proper systematic script will get it working better.

For now… I can hold onto this and be content. Whatever else may happen… I know the site will not be wiped out.
Bird in the hand.

5 Things You Are Not Supposed to Say About Race and Sexuality in America

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 03:48:33 GMT

From CNN: Black university passes “no-crossdressing” rules targeting targeting 5 gay students

We are by now conditioned for the usual “not targeted at any one in particular, just a revision of…” blah blah blah have-our-cake-and-eat-it-too spin cycle. Which is what makes this story so openly refreshing!

"We are talking about five students who are living a gay lifestyle that is leading them to dress a way we do not expect in Morehouse men." -Dr. William Bynum, vice president for Student Services.

So just this once, I’m gonna gently touch on some stuff I’m Not Supposed To Talk About:

The Black Community is homophobic. Whether it’s rooted in class, religion, collective cultural memory of some of the ugly parts of Slavery you don’t see in movies or a lingering legacy of the Nation of Islam’s involvement in the civil rights movement I can’t say… but a black community that’s preached tolerance for 50 years isn’t big on practicing it themselves. The surprise defeat of Proposition 8 is the most public example, but the fact is that within Black circles expressing and even advocating for these kind of view is deemed is culturally acceptable, and no one wants to call them on it because… you know!
The Gay Community is extremely racist, or at least prejudiced. One of the “problems” with a cross-section of society defined by their preferred sexual partners is that this preference takes on a more prominent role in that culture; namely the ‘I’m not attracted to other races’ thing that exists across the board. It’s not that there aren’t black gays… (though on a per-capita basis there are fewer) it’s that a gay black man inherits a triple-burden of their own cultural baggage, stereotypical and/or degrading ideas of what it means to be black within gay culture, and in a society defined primarily by the dating scene black members can find themselves “separate but equal.”
I’m not black, so it’s hard for me to be sure on this… but I suspect a lot of this represents an “old guard” of leaders in the African American community, mostly the guys who were activists in the 1970’s; like Jesse Jackson, whose ouster in 2007 came because he couldn’t see the war they’d fought for 50 years had been won, and American could elect a black man President. That generation needs to learn how to be quietly gaycist like the Republicans! Sure, everyone knows what’s going on… buy you’d don’t go around giving interviews confirming that “yes, this is exactly what’s going on!” That whole “attitude” needs to be kept in the closet! You know… keep it on the down low!
The Gay community is changing, and it’s changing quickly! We threw out our irrelevant leadership 5 years ago and replaced then with younger, sexier spokespeople! Honored war veterans wrongly discharged, accomplished politicians, Sulu! The 90’s were a sea change… a whole generation of gays that (unlike their predecessors) didn’t grow up sucking off strangers in park bathrooms! And they’re a lot less screwed up as a result! Plus the ‘turnaround time’ on a gay “generation,” from emergent awareness of adolescent sexuality to joining the adult community… is only 10 years. That makes gay culture a lot lighter on its feet, able to adapt and respond to cultural changes faster than other groups. The de-institutionalization of racial identity we’ve been living through for the past few years is gonna hit big; 7 years from now the racial barriers in gay culture will be– if not gone– at least reduced to a knee-high fence that’s easily stepped over.
We know you’re pissed that it took Gays 15 years to go from persona-non-grata to #1 sitcom stars, episcopal conventions and the marriage rights you’re apparently still fighting for. (WTF?) Frankly, it caught us by surprise too, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to give it back. Tell you what… in 35 years when being Gay is considered about as significant as being Irish and our shared cultural identity has disintegrated, leaving nothing but a meaningless parade and “Queer 4 Beer” t-shirts… then you can laugh. You can remind us not to discriminate against the Trangendered, and we can keep our mouths shut instead of telling you that your insistence on a separate African-America culture is a big part of why your own progress is so glacial.

Deal?

Dispatches From Safe Mode: Reverse Cowgirl

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:05:50 GMT

I Installed McAfee 2 days ago from my old disks. (I’ve been running without Anti-virus for months.)
I like McAfee. I’ve run it off-and-on for years. It’s much lighter than, say, Norton… just a tiny lag while opening files as it scans them.

So imagine my rude awakening when it downloads updates, (which I’m apparently still entitled to?) and I suddenly realize I’m running something called McAffey “Security Center.”

Now, apparently this has existed since 2005… so I must have had Security Center when i was running XP. That sounds vaguely plausible… I have some memory of there being two active-process icons associated with the program.
But I remember the program I was interacting with as VirusScan– that was where all the “stuff” happened. …not anymore. I am now constantly aware of Security Center’s presence.

Here’s the thing… McAffee’s anti-virus program has grown into a whole suite of bloated crap I don’t want. So naturally… I only install VirusScan– all I want is on-access file scanning! I don’t want their firewall, I don’t want their wireless protection, SiteAdvisor or registry protection. I don’t even want constant scanning… I’ll do one manually when I feel like it.
All I want is on-access file scan. McAfee is good at on-access file scan! I know– I used it for years! It caught shit! So it’s the only component I install.

So I run updates… and my system bogs horribly. What? How could this be? This isn’t what McAffee feels like!
Turns out (upon research) that in mid-2008 McAffee pushed out and update that causes some systems to idiosyncratically bog horribly. It’s idiosyncratic, and somehow related to Vista’s “search for files” function.
Now, I understand how some of McAfee’s functions might intersect with that Vista function… by how in seven green hells is it causing my system to bog when the only thing I’m running is scan-on-access? McAffey is hogging my system resources… yet the only thing I’ve given it permission to do it scan-on-access! This bogging cannot be caused by scan-on-access!

You’ve probably already guessed what I slowly realized.
McAffee Security Center is the ‘hub’ management application meant to coral the 6-or-7 separate tools in their security suite. it doesn’t actually do anything… but you cannot install the tools without installing it, because many common functions run through it.
So despite only having installed VirusScan, and having de-activated 70% of VirusScan’s functionality specifically so the program would have the smallest possible footprint on my system… McAfee had installed a monolithic mega-program designed to insinuate itself into every nook and cranny of my system so that it can manage the 500 different ways its anti-virus tools can rape my performance in the name of perfect security… and then simply turned those functions off.

Security Center is riding my system like a reverse cowgirl. And this is why the spastic allegic reactions between McAffee and Vista’s search functions are going off even though I didn’t (theoretically) install anything that should cause them. Security Center did install itself in these areas. It does so regardless of whether or not you’re using those functions, even if you specifically chose not to install them.

*sigh*

Vista has all the system integrity of two bricks tied together with tissue paper. Thus my desire to tread as lightly as possible, installing a bare-minimum of functions to interfere with the already rickety OS. Anti-virus programs burrow even deeper into the OS than most programs, so this is a very deliberate choice.
And in order to get a single scan-on-access function running… I had to install SecurityCenter, which burrows down and insinuates itself into virtually every function of the system… despite the fact I specifically chose not to install the applications related to that burrowing.
And so, my system wigs out.

This, in itself, doesn’t make for a very interesting story. I uninstalled McAfee and the bog-down stopped.

The part that makes for a good story is that when I rebooted after having done so… my optical drive vanished again. One of the hundreds of system-hooks SecurityCenter first installed, then removed, has managed to fuck it up again.

I’m not a fan of Adobe Bridge, Nero Whatever-its-called or any other “monolitic central component that sucks” that seem to be all the rage in “software suites” these days. When you install Photoshop, you’re not installing Photoshop– you’re installing a special version of the Adobe Creative Suite (with the ‘bridge’ hub-program) whose only suite-component is Photoshop. …but you still get Bridge because the Photoshop program on a fundamental architectural level is no longer capable of ’standing alone.’

That’s fine for Photoshop and stuff… hell, for most suites. It doesn’t really bother me.

But anti-virus is… something different. People have been screaming for years that Anti-virus is terrible (The benchmarks I’ve been reading indicate a 700-1200% computer-slowdown is average for any anti-virus program.) The processing burden placed on a computer is not a subtle one. And when an OS, frankly, sucks as badly as Vista does… crap is going to start breaking. (Crap breaks on vista out of the box. It shipped with a search function that didn’t work.)
It’s… you can’t do this. If McAfee actually intends for it’s program to be useful for people who know what they’re doing… it has to be able to run components in a true standalone fashion, without a central hub that sends tendrils and execution hooks throughout Window’s unstable 47 dependency layers. That’s just daring the operating system to break!

But that’s a good, useful AV program. Which is not the same thing as a good, marketable product. A product has bazillions of functions, and a central hub so you can justify selling them all-in-one to the customer instead of piecemeal.
And a product mentality says… you want to make it hard for the customer to only install part of the suite, and certainly not encourage it. “Because if they buy our AV product, then get a virus… they say we have a bad product even if they’re the ones that decided to turn all the protection off. It’s better for our brand to impose a 700-1200% slowdown that renders computers unusable than to develop a product that leaves computers useful but offers less perfect protection.”

Guess what? Your product is terrible. Not just McAfee… all anti-virus products are terrible. Look at those benchmarks… the 1200% slowdown is middle of the pack. The industry has somehow come together to create a product category so terrible that the only way to use my computer is to run without anti-virus. There is literally not an anti-virus product on the market today that will not make you bleed out of your eyes.

Allow me to be more explicit… I have never had a virus that crippled my computer as badly, or made the system as unstable or as likely to lose data as an Anti-virus program does! These programs act more like viruses than viruses do.
As near as I am able to determine… there does not exist a serious AV solution that allows me to manually scan my computer computer once a week without also demanding I accept it insinuating itself into my OS so that it can fuck my system with perform real-time protection.

(All I want is a virus-scanner! With a single hook to check a file before I open it. 90% of the protection, 10% of the performance hit. I will pay money for this! WHY IS NO ONE WILLING TO SELL IT TO ME?)
Or at least have the decency to look me in the face when you’re screwing me!

Dispatches from Safe Mode: Optical Disllusionment

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:14:44 GMT

I’ve been relatively inactive online for the past two weeks. (I’ve been on, but not participating much.) What follows is about 50% of the reason why.
13 days ago I went to burn some CD’s for work… and discovered I couldn’t. My optical drive was missing.

It's back now, but where did it go?

No, not stolen… missing. Not showing up in my computer– and completely unlisted in the device manager.

This is a pretty common problem for Windows users. In fact, it’s existed for 9 years, dating from early versions of XP. Optical drives under XP don’t require a driver to run– the operating system talks to them directly with nothing to configure. Unfortunately, some pieces of very standard software (Nero, iTunes… even Microsoft’s Zune software!) insert themselves between the drive and the operating system. And if the registry entries that muck with this ‘innate driverless connection,’ it can become a massive headache to fix it… because it’s no longer as simple as reinstalling the driver. (Bugger!)

This is what I’ve been poking at for two weeks, in increasingly radical ways. Sometimes uninstalling the offending software fixes the problem. Sometimes a registry patch from Microsoft will fix the problem. (About 50% of the time, I’d estimate.)
Sometimes a good rogering in Safe Mode and changing settings does it. Or updating the bios. Installing major OS upgrades. Uninstalling system components (not necessarily related to optical drives.) Installing certain optional components for Microsoft Office that are integrated into the OS. Registry cleaners. …sometimes.

Basically, this bug has existed for 9 years. There is no fix that works reliably. The registry patch that Microsoft provides will often work once… only to have the drive vanish again on reboot (or more mystifyingly, when awakening form sleep mode!) It will generally NOT work a second time.

Frustratingly, this is not a drive problem. The bios can still ’see’ the drive, it will be checked at startup and can be booted from. It’s when the computer initializes Windows that your drive seem to vanish– no longer even registering hardware changes if the drive is physically removed!

Fading in and out of limbo, neither alive nor dead

What IS established is that IF you can make your optical drive reappear while bludgeoning your system… you must take GREAT CARE, lest it vanish again as quickly as it came! Specifically, you should insert a CD-Rom AND a region-encoded DVD into the drive, as this seems to somehow “anchor” it so Windows does not once again lose it.

After re-awakening my computer from sleep mode an hour ago– my optical drive is duddenly back, for the third time since it vanished. I am now attempting to insert as many disc combinations as I can think of before restarting my computer in the hopes that it does not vanish again.

I have reamed my operating system backwards and sideways in the past two weeks trying to get exactly this result (after believing I’d had it fixed two other times.) But today it simply… showed up. I hadn’t even done anything today! No registry patches, no software changes… nothing! I am humbled before this, for it now becomes clear that what I have practices is not software debugging, but voodoo. And now I make sacrifice to the optical device gods, trying to find a region and disc combination that will gladden its heart so it no longer leaves me in famine.

I never appreciated how often I use that damn drive! But since it went down… I’ve wanted to burn or read something at least twice a day. I stare at my shelf full of DVD’s and realize I may never be able to watch them without pirating them. (When faced with chronic examples of this problem, it’s not uncommon for computer companies such as HP to advise their customers to BUY A NEW DRIVE. Yes, to get around a software mis-configuration problem.)

I do not know what caused my optical drive to come back. I have faced this same problem under XP (where it was less recalcitrant) but here, in increasing order of likelihood are the new things I DID do today that may have caused the drive to reappear.

•I played a video using FLVPlayer instead of VLCPlayer. I also accidentally attempted to use the Adobe video player. This was the first time either program had been open in almost a year.
•I accidentally installed (and then uninstalled) the software informer software.
•I attached a new USB mouse to my system. (a mini-mouse!) Unlike many mice, the OS did not immediately recognize it, and had to install a generic driver to address the hardware.

That last seems promising, in that it triggered a ‘hardware changes’ event. I noticed the drive was back about 30 minutes after. It was completely new hardware which had never touched this computer before, hence the moment of unfamiliarity.

I hope this list may he useful to others in the future, either to myself or to others with this same problem.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to set a restore point in my system, reboot and hope my optical drive is still here when I get back.

CSS Discovery of the Day: Inline inheritance

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 23:14:07 GMT

This has has very little applicability to anything… but it made me smile.

A link in the footer of a site I’m working on was obnoxiously showing up in bright red. This is the color all non-navigation links are set to. But footers are meta-information, they’re not supposed to be highlighted like that!

(Obviously I didn’t write the main CSS for this site.)

So the color needs to be overriden. Problem: I happen to know the design on the site is slated to change, so if I override the global link color with another color to match the gray of the rest of the footer text, it may just drive some future web-dev person batty. (Likewise, I probably shouldn’t make sweeping changes to the global link markup in the CSS file, since it’s used on a lot of things.)

“Inherit” isn’t a value a lot of web-developers use… it’s used primarily to ’switch off’ a CSS attribute value that has already been set by overriding the setting of another rule with a more specific value telling it to “inherit the value of this attribute from your parent.”
So if all the <a>’s have colors set, you can override that color setting and say “in this circumstance, inherit the color setting from <div id="body">.”
It’s absurdly useful, especially when re-skinning a site– I just reset CSS values back to default/null/inherit until I remove the offending rule instead of trying to override them one at a time… all without touching the original CSS.

CSS operates on 4 levels of “authority”; general rule, rule with explicit identifier, !important rule, inline.

I set the link’s color to inherit using inline code… and was delighted to see it properly inherit the color set by the general rule.
<a href="http://domain.com" style="color:inherit;">domain.com</a>

Inline style code is all about overriding rule-based style definitions. But I was able to use an inline override to tell this element to adhere to a rule-based style definition with lower authority than the original rule-based definition!
It makes perfect sense, but it also makes my eyes cross at how non-instinctive the idea is, so I has a reasonable expectation that it would not work. “I’m setting a local variable to override a global variable… that’s an alias for a global variable’s value.”

Works perfectly in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and I.E.

Awesome.

ZX License: Key Ideas

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 20:18:04 GMT

It is September 14. I am crazy busy. All Hail Megatron #15 is released in the 16th.
Let’s do this thing.

I’ve been calling my proposal for TFWiki’s hypothetical “second license” intended to protect producers of official Transformers-related material from legal complications around the CC-BY-SA license which governs our content the “ZX License.” I’ve never really defined what that means. I do so now, shotgun style.

Given: Copyright exists

It is a given of this license that TFWiki has a basic copyright over its own value-added contributions which is separate from the raw facts of the universe which are indisputably Hasbro’s property.

(Whether or not Hasbro is able to exert copyright over those ‘bare facts’ is a question; people can publish “unauthorized guides,” which suggests that collections of fiction-fact may not be subject to copyright. However, such guides are written in a very specific “voice” to toe this legal line very carefully. TFWiki’s articles are not- and frequently include direct quotes from Hasbro’s material they indisputably can exert copyright control over. So for our purposes, we’ll just say ‘yes, Hasbro can exert ownership over its portion of our content.’)

The result is that TFWiki’s articles are under joint copyright, partly Hasbro’s property, partly our own. Neither party can legally publish them without the permission of the other. That is not the same thing as “Hasbro owns our articles,” rather it is “Hasbro’s partial ownership of our articles restricts our ability to do whatever we want with them.”
The correlary that many seem to miss is that our partial ownership of the article restricts Hasbro from doing whatever they want with them. Specifically, if Hasbro use them, our portion is automatically licensed under CC-BY-SA, whose viral license terms (including the right for anyone to make or distribute copies) will then contaminate the resulting work.
Thus… the need for a second license.

Permissive vs. restrictive law

IP License grants tend to be very long and legally complicated things, because they wish to grant the licensee very specific, non-blanket usage rights, so every way in which those rights are granted-but-then-limited must be outlined in mind-numbeing detail phrased in the most unambiguous way possible.

…we’re not doing that. The ZX License is permissive, not restrictive. It essentially boils down to “You can do literally anything as long as you limit the content used to a small ammount. This license is only offered for small-amount usage.”
As a result, the legalese can be short.

Legal concepts

The “ZX” in the ZX License is rooted in two basic concepts of common or natural law.

Customary Freehold – The unwritten legal relationship between a landowner and tenants on his land whose right to be there has never been officially written down but stands from long tradition. These include the tenants responsibilities towards the landowner, their rights towards the land, etc. Customary Freehold has largely fallen out of use since the 19th century (when it became typical for all contracts to be written down) but is still recognized to be legally valid.

Xenia – The ritualized “guest-host” relationship that exists between a Household and the temporary guests within it. The guest’s responsibility not to abuse the Host’s hospitality and the Host’s not to make his guests feel a burden, as well as some social and even legal obligations. Somewhat notably, it includes an obligation for guests to defend their host from attack. (This last bit was actually the cause of the Trojan War… Hellen of Troy may have been beautiful, but it was the honor-obligation from all the guests at her husband’s dinner party where she was stolen that launched the thousand ships…)

In both cases the obligations between Guest-Resident and Host center on ideas of “implied consent” and “duty to rescue” found in most modern Good Samaritan Laws. (Indemnification: not so much.)

Intellectual Property as Real Estate

The concepts above govern the relationship between a guest and host on physical property.
We hold that the same basic principles apply with intellectual property. Both recognize a difference between trespass and theft, concepts of adverse possession and (most importantly) have guests… not just int he form of business partners (who are granted explicit license to be on that property) but individuals who are invited to stay for a bit and play with the owned-concepts fount there.

Broadly, you can divide this sort of “intellectual real estate” into two types, dependent on the landowner’s relationship to guests on their property.
* Closed Culture – Guests are allowed to visit, but strictly on a look-but-do-not-touch basis, like a tour. Melrose Place is a good example of a Closed Culture; the Spelling Entertainment Group has consistently (and notoriously) acted to shut down many type of “fan” activities, including fanfic archives and even discussion boards. Melrose Place is a Closed Culture entertainment where fans are welcome to visit and view, but not wander freely or create their own works. It is very much provided with “no user serviceable parts inside.”
* Open Culture – Guests are allowed to wander freely and actively encouraged to create their own derivations based on the IP found there, which are recognized as belonging to them. Dungeons & Dragons would be an extreme example of an Open Culture. Users are provided a sandbox kit and expected to make their own characters, settings and adventures that TSR will not have no ownership of except for those elements which were drawn from the D&D lexicon.

Most properties fall somewhere between these extremes. Increasingly in recent years the fans-as-receivers closed model has fallen out of favor as a relic of an management culture that made no distinction between fandom-activity and piracy… but it is still sometimes practiced today by property owners who want to exert control over the manner in which fans interact with their product.
Transformers is something of a middle-ground. Cartoon, comics et all are centrally produced, but (fairly uniquely at the time) every Transformers toy produced since 1984 has included a bio, and character stats including a ranking within the faction command hierarchy, and the play-pattern presented by it’s own commercials has consistently been one of narrative roleplay. Clearly children have been encouraged to create their own adventures, and each character comes with their own bio and stat-set as a starter kit to do so.

What this all essentially amounts to is the idea that if a Copyright owner has historically extended safe harbor to fanish activities, they cannot summarily retract it, in the same way a Landowner cannot summarily eject customary freeholders and similar to the way a trademark owner cannot seek to exert control over a trademark which they have allowed to fall into general use.

This means that the status fans occupy on the owner’s property is more akin to Homesteading than squatting. (Arguably this is legally important, because it characterizes many common fandom activities as a permitted or semi-permitted use rather than an ongoing copyright violation that weakens the general copyright on the core property.)

(There is something of a fandom-bill-of-rights-and-responsibilities at work here… but that’s more of a side effect of the root law being used than an intention. The intention comes in with the next bit.)

Key Meta-concepts

Having identified underlying concepts and applied them to IP-as-property, it’s time to label our understanding of those ideas:
* Zeloxenia – The “ZX” in ZX License, this loosely translates as “fan guest-hospitality.” Zeloxenia encompasses Xenia, Customary Freehold, and homesteading as outlined above. Fans who have been invited to play on another’s property are recognized to have a right to do so, while also having significant responsibility toward the property-owner not to damage the landscape in the process.
Fans who choose to tarry or ‘camp’ in this property and build more complex derivations may have an understood right to do so… but in so doing they also become more responsible for the area they occupy. As their level of involvement deepens, fans bear an increasing burden to protect the value of the property; this may mean properly citing copyright so their use does not erode the owner’s property, and a basic responsibility cultivate the property they are occupying. To a certain extent, resident-fans go from being visitors on this property to stewards or Yeomen of it.
Xenia includes a ritual exchange of gifts, which may be fulfilled here by a “good-neighbor” relationship; you may borrow one another’s hedgeclippers as long as you make sure to return them. This is similar to land-use rights that might be expected under common freehold… a basic diffusion or interchange of rights and property occurs between both parties that is mutually-forgiven/freely-gifted as a natural part of their relationship.
Good faith is a prerequisite for Zeloxenia to exist, and in Closed Culture broadcast-receiver models where fans have no rights, it is understood to be very weak or not exist at all.

An important point to note here: This is all describing a relationship and understanding that has always existed between fans and the object of their fandom. (At least in media fandom, most non-media fandom qualifies as a Close Culture.) As such, we hold that these principles (and the unwritten contract they encompass) have always been in effect, and fans’ past contributions to TFWiki were made under this understanding. (Asking people to explicitly ratify the license largely renders this distinction moot though.)

* Lagom measure – A Sweedish/Norwegian concept of “just the right amount.” (If you know Norwegians… this explains a lot about their personality.) Under the ZX License, a licensee will be granted the right to re-use a Lagom measure of content– an amount which does not prohibit use, but also does not encourage it. This means the unit size of a Lagom measure variable by situation… which heads off precedent-based license jailbreaking; just because X amount of re-use was Lagon for one situation does not mean it is automatically Lagom for another. The maximum ammount of re-use in a Lagom measure is understood to be greater than that permitted by Fair Use.
You could use a dozen pages of legalese to try to define how that works… or you could just fall back on the pre-existing Sweedish concept. Since our license is permissive and not restrictive… we can just cite the Sweedish concept.
Basic bounds are set via a philosophical statement to the effect that: “We think it is bad for the vitality of the Transformers brand to be re-using our content because that may cause it to become fixed and cease to grow and change… but recognize that some re-use is inevitable and wish to permit that without consequence.” …and you are essentially granting a blank check for content re-usage that still strongly encourages such usage to be minimal: Gross abuse of the definition constitutes bad faith and causes the license to lapse.

How content is used

For a hypothetical content re-user (such as IDW) that wanted to use our content under the ZX license, their re-use can be broken down as follows:
* Use under the ZX license. That is to say– usage rights afforded to content generated after the date of the ZX Licens’es adoption, or to prior content which was generated by users ratifying the ZX License and explicitly re-releasing their contributions.
* Use under principle of Zeloxenia. The balance of past contributions not signed-off-on, but whose usage in combination with the prior category up to a Lagom measure is implicitly provided for under the operative principle of fan guest-hospitality.
* Use under Fair Use. A portion of any remaining content not covered by the ZX license or beyond the size of a Lagon measure may be used as fair use.
* Any use more extensive than a Lagom Measure + fair use of the remainder must be licensed under the terms governing the remainder. (In most wikis’ case, this is CC-BY-SA.)

In short, if a re-user (such as IDW) takes shallow sips of our content, they are provided by 3 level of cascading protection before the question of CC-BY-SA license contamination can even come into play. You would have to drink a mighty gulp from our content to exceed all 3.

Structure

Finally, I believe the license structure would (roughly) break down into the following sections.

License deed – (nonbinding) – plain-English statement of “what you get”
Philosophical statement – (nonbinding) – Responsibilities fans have toward a brand
Key ideas – (nonbinding) – Summary of legal concept, as above
Application of Key Ideas – (nonbinding) – How we understand them to apply to our situation
License code – (binding) – “consistent with the principles granted above, the copyright holders grant you use to…” Because the license hangs on pre-existing legal principles, we do not need to outline them in legalese; and any deficiency in our description in the prior nonbinding sections is moot, because that deficiency would not be ‘consistent with the principles.’ Again, this is only possible because we’re drafting a permissive license, not a restrictive one.
Clauses – (binding) – Future versions and enforceability caveats; cribbed from existing licenses.
Adoption – (binding) – Proviso to allow individual users to ratify this license beyond just the community doing so and thus explicitly re-release their prior contributions under the ZX license “to remove any doubt.”

Ugh. Anyway– that’s the reasoning and skeleton I’m thinking of. Most of the license is essentially a “statement of understanding” of legal principles which exist outside this license… no more binding than the Creative Commons “GUI” deed. The actual binding legal code is kept to an absolute minimum and essentially boils down to “you can use it under the relationship described above, if you exceed this or act in bad faith, your use lapses and you may incur CC-BY-SA consequences.” Because it would require truly heroic abuse to do so, this provides more-than-reasonable protection for a content re-user.

If each of those sections can be boiled down to a few sentences (and I’m fairly sure they can) then you have the basis for a serviceable plain-English license that covers our ass, covers Hasbro and it’s licensees ass, does not give away the farm, recognizes the rights of fans to exist, and codifies or recognizes the moral imperative of good conduct and good faith that should underlay fans relationship to the underlying brand.
Oh– and it doesn’t violate the terms of CC-BY-SA. Important that.
And it doesn’t weaken CC-BY-SA3, since the core principle of Zeloxenia, by fundamental definition, only exists in relation to media fandom– so the principles of the ZX License cannot be used as to pry other content out of CC-BY-SA– and actually (as outlined in a previous post) strengthens the CC license by relieving unresolved legal “pressure” at stress points where CC-BY-SA fails in relation to wikis.

But thank god most of that can go unwritten, because I’m exhausted just looking at it.

Brilliant Blue Batshit Strikes Back: Cold Lasers

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:56:21 GMT

Seriously, freeze rays?

Isn’t this exactly the kind of crap “hard” sci-fi threw out 30 years ago because it was impossible?

As I follow the science (which turns out to be rather poorly) it operates on come cockamamie variation of the Photoelectric Effect, which causes the electron shells of the gas freezing medium to ‘expand.’ Because higher orbits require more speed/energy to maintain, that means the gas medium has to suck in heat.
A traditional refrigerator uses a compressor motor to lower the pressure within a liquid freezing medium, which causes it to expand and thus suck up heat. This is a super-efficient atomic-level version of the same– changing volumes of the atoms instead of the liquid itself.

So shouldn’t changing the volume of the atoms increase the pressure on the gas medium and counteract the effect?
1) No, because the photoelectric effect is irresistible.
2) No because while the overall radius of the atoms is increasing, their physical density is not, which means the increase in pressure due to radius is blah blah blah cube root law. (Or something similar.) Anyway, the atoms-per-spatial-unit aren’t increasing, which means the increase in pressure is pretty factional.
3) No, because apparently the high pressure is what causes the electrons to act funny in the first place. Increasing it more just increases their tendency towards such shenanigans. Basically it’s a big chilly-willy physics… thing.

In layman’s terms: They get the electrons really drunk, which causes them to think/act like they’re hot, even though their temperature is dropping. There, sorted.

Physics! Freeze rays! This shit is CRAZY.
Last time they had a breakthrough in superfreezing we got transparent aluminum! And this seems MUCH more effective!

Run and hide in terror, RUN BEFORE THE SCIENCE GETS YOU!
What rules are left to be broken? Cordless electricity and teleportation are next up.

Ooh, I know! Scientists at Harvard will isolate the morphogenic field using orgone accumulators, and then use it to teach us all to like Fanta!
I am shitting myself in terror. Seriously. The rule book is going out the window in the next 20 years.

If A Tree Falls in the Woods: Fair Dealing vs. Fair Use

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 16:19:39 GMT

Doing six rounds on copyright, I keep running into the concepts of fair use and fair dealing.

The United States (and Israel) have fair use, the rest of the world has fair dealing. The two concepts are legally distinct, but for practical purposes tend to be considered more-or-less equivalent, with a caveat that fair dealing may allow for ’slightly less’ than fair use does.

I think I’ve figured out the difference. And as usual… it’s all the Mormons’ fault.

Order of Operations

Fair use is an inherent right of an individual. Fair dealing is a right that occurs in the individual’s relation to another party. Stemming from that, they have a different order of operations in determining whether a use was ‘fair’ or should be punished.

fair use	fair dealing
Offense ~~Violation~~ ~~Judgment~~ ~~Consequence~~	Violation Offense Judgment ~~Consequence~~

Under fair use, the very first question asked is “was offense given” to the party whose property was being used? If there was not, then no crime has occurred, regardless of what the legal status of the act itself.

Under fair dealing, the very first question asked is “was the law violated?” Since fair use and fair dealing both deal with the re-use of another’s intellectual property, the answer to this question will always be “yes, a violation has occoured.” You then move on to whether or not offense was given, to which the answer is “no,” but that’s still not the end… because while a no-offense argument is part of fair dealing… the assertion that no offense was given (to excuse the violation) is untested until a judge declares that your excuse was good enough that ye be not guilty.

In practical terms, fair use has an unproven assertion of no-offense-given, and fair dealing also has an unproven assertion of no-offense-given. So is there an actual difference?

Yes. Under fair dealing, you have committed a crime in the eyes of the law for you have not yet been charged, but you hold, were it to come to judgment, would result in your exoneration due to circumstances.

Under fair use, no crime has occurred. Under fair dealing a crime occurs even if you’re in the right.
Put very simply, under fair use, if a tree falls in the woods and nobody hear it, it does not make a sound. Unless offense is given, no violation of the law occurs.

A State of Legal Grace

When you get down to it, it’s kinda wacky that the otherwise aggressively legally positivist American system has fair use. We litigate everything– why do we have some sort of right to violate the letter of a law without a crime taking place? You can’t blame it on tradition… England uses fair dealing!

So who did settle America? Puritans. Dirty Calvinists.

A cornerstone of most Calvanists faiths (such as the Mormons, more properly called the LDS Church) is the principle of Unconditional Election; the idea that some people were inherently bound for heaven, and other for hell. (Since you didn’t know who was who, this was arguably little different from the more popular ‘damned by your actions’ doctrine.) Those who were Elect were going to heaven and would not be weighted down by sin no matter what their actions were in life; they existed in a state of perpetual divine grace by the will of God.

So America was founded by wacky religious folks (I say that affectionately, I grew up in a Dutch Reform town) who believed in teflon souls to which sin would not cling, no matter their actions. And we ended up with this crazy practiced-nowhere-else-in-the-world idea of fair use, which is essentially “a state of legal grace” wherein no crime occurs in spite of the letter of the law being violated.

The legal doctrine of fair use is the natural outgrowth of Calvinist religious doctrine.

(I still prefer it to fair dealing.)

19 days, 351 Words and Patient Zero

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:50:44 GMT

When the Transformers Wiki was deciding to relicense its content under the Creative Commons, we spent a lot of time discussing it. I mean—an insane amount of time. The GFDL’s relicensing option offered a single up-or-down choice; stay with GFDL or switch to Creative Commons. Why bother?

Well, because the community is concerned about potential problems our license might cause for Hasbro. CC-BY-SA is not a ‘play license,’ it’s court-tested and carries significant consequences.
The question that we kept coming back to: So what if some official Transformers publication re-uses a portion of our content? Of course, what are the odds of that happening?

19 days later

On August 1, 2009, TFWiki.net switched to a CC-BY-SA3 license. On August 19, 2009 IDW comics published Transformers: All Hail Megatron #14. One page of that comic (pictured) features text from one of our articles. Specifically, it features 351 words from two sections of the Perceptor article; the complete text of his main bio and history in the IDW comics, quoted verbatim. (They even left in an image caption.)

351 words isn’t a lot, right? It sounds trivial!
Let’s take a look at what was used:

Perceptor is a scientist, one of the most astute minds the whole of Cybertron can offer. He is perpetually seeking the continued quest for knowledge, and his discoveries have repeatedly proven invaluable. Though his specialties lie in metallurgy, electrical engineering, and additional sciences closely concomitant to Transformer physiology, his thirst for knowledge has made him kind of a scientific jack-of-all-trades.</p>

One of Perceptor’s most infamous mannerisms is the tendency in which he verbally communicates using scientific terminology. This has the unforeseen result of exasperating and occasionally frustrating his comrades. One might hypothesize that the jovial mechanoid is unaware that not everyone with whom he seeks to communicate shares his extensive vocabulary.

Engaging in physical melee is not his preferred activity. He is content to make his contributions to the Autobot cause in the manner in which he deems sufficient, but will engage in combat if the situation requires. Optimus Prime often relies on Perceptor’s perspicacity, and considers him as inestimable as any of his officers.

Perceptor embarked upon a mission in which the Ark-17 was the principal mode of transport as likewise did Springer, attempting to disentangle Kup from a scenario that would all but undoubtedly lead to his expiration. Perceptor, as was the general consensus of those who had embarked upon the voyage, attempted to dissuade Springer of the less than optimal, considering resource allotment, military operation he had accepted.

He later served on Autobot Orbital Command Hub, acting as a peer to acting-commander Silverbolt. He appeared to know Blaster of old, and helped him with his investigation.

Like every other tough-guy group walk in the movies… Sporting what appeared to be a lovely monocle and a decidedly dour demeanor, Perceptor obtained a modicum of prominence. In the company of Kup, Springer, et. al, Perceptor had opted to become more directly involved in deeply discomfiting the Decepticons… until their inopportune crash-landing on Cybertron.

Aside from the monocle and dour mien, he also displayed a targeting proficiency of almost disturbing proportions for one of his scientific inclination, inflicting immediate and conclusive damage on an Insecticon swarm scout with only minimal effort.

The Bad News: Like an inexorable physical reaction

…oh dear. Okay, that’s clearly not fair use. The amount of text used, and its significance constitute a complete bio of the character. The fact that it’s being used for visual ‘texture’ is irrelevant; if IDW had (for example) chosen to quote the complete text from a page of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix there would be no question that they are using someone else’s copyright. The fact that the text is only being used for visual texture is irrelevant; it’s legible.

The text of that article is licensed under CC-BY-SA3. Using that text in another work (except as Fair Use, which this exceeds) automatically makes that work also CC-BY-SA3. Conscious choice or even acknowledgment on the part of the publisher that CC-BY-SA3 was used is irrelevant; downsteam liability means that the work, and any new work derived from it, is ‘infected’ by the CC-BY-SA3 license.

What does that mean, practically? It means anyone can copy and distribute a copy of that work, or produce derived works… legally. When I include pictures with blog entries on this site, I usually have to cite “fair use” to justify that use. I’m not this time. I have a perfect legal right to use, copy and remix these images, and so does anybody else. (It’s a bit like if they’d accidentally fallen into the public domain, except the opposite, because they infect me when I use them too; this blog entry is now CC-BY-SA, which means I’ve lost control of my copyright over it.)

IDW Publishing has just lost control of its own content. In fact it’s now holding content that can potentially infect everything else.

The Good News: The infection is small

It’s not quite as bad as all that… yet. IDW has several things working in its favor.

The page in question is actually an advertisement for the next issue, #15. (It’s one of 2 covers.) So that means that only this image has fallen into CC-BY-SA. If the text had been re-used inside the story of #14, it would have rendered the entire story CC-BY-SA and enable anyone to make and distribute bootlegged copies of the comic… legally.
It’s a cover. Issue #15 will be published with two different covers in a 50:50 ratio. Because both versions are considered to “be” #15, it stands that the cover is a legally distinct from the story itself, #15 is #15 whether or not it has Cover A or Cover B. This means that when #15 itself is published a month from now, the resulting pamphlet will probably be defined as a “collection of multiple works” in the eyes of CC-BY-SA3; and the license allows CC-BY-SA3 to be collected with non-CC-BY-SA3 works. This means that the cover will not infect the comic itself. (There is no need/point to pulp the issue if it’s already been printed, the legal complications get no worse by #15’s publication.) GFDL doesn’t allow this; it would have infected to whole issue when it was published. Good thing we switched on August 1st!
This Section 4(a) applies to the Work as incorporated in a Collection, but this does not require the Collection apart from the Work itself to be made subject to the terms of this License.
TFWiki.net gives a shit. The community that runs the wiki wasn’t blindsided by this problem; we’ve been discussing exactly this scenario for the last 3 months and had been settling in on the best strategy for preventing it; adding a second non-public license for the site’s content that will be open only to parties that already have a license to create official Transformers works. (Such as IDW comics.) Since the Creative Commons license specifically forbids “jailbreaking” content out of it, we’ve been taking our time to make sure the process by which we roll out this license does not conflict with the terms of CC-BY-SA3.
TFWiki.net is a courteous guest. We ‘play’ with works that are the intellectual property of Hasbro. Hasbro reaps benefit by our play (both in promotion and documentation) but also, demonstrably, incurs risks. Our play has just fed back into their material and caused legal problems. TFWiki.net feels it incurs a basic responsibility to steward Hasbro’s interests for the health of the Transformers brand, which is the entire reason we’d been working on the problem. Now, we figured to have a few months to get all the bugs ironed out… but for IDW we can probably get it ready before #15 is released.
All of which means that once our second license is in place, IDW will be covered, legally. If such a gaffe happens again in the future, it will no longer cause the resulting work to become CC-BY-SA.
It might even be possible (legally speaking) to ‘rescue’ the cover that’s already become CC-BY-SA. Not to recall it from CC-BY-SA3… that train has sailed. But IDW could (at least theoretically) relicense our text under the forthcoming “second license” and create a new work that would not be CC-BY-SA.
A non-trivial detail: this would require going back to colorist Joana Lafuente to get a version of the cover without the text; ‘rewinding’ back to a point before the image became infected by the license. She would then re-license the text under the new terms and IDW would have a version of the cover not subject to the infective license. For this to work, there would have to be some visible change made to the cover to demonstrate that it was a new version such as removing the text "Like every other tough-guy group walk in the movies…" (That was an image caption, it should never have been included in the first place anyway.) Just like a sitcom whose DVD replaces a popular song with generic music; material you didn’t earn the rights to has been replaced by something you did. (It wouldn’t matter if this change were made in time for #15’s publication… but it would be advisable to have a ‘clean’ version of the cover in the long run to prevent future complications involving art books, cover collections and any reuse of the art that could potentially cause its ‘infectious’ license to spread.)

In all, this doesn’t sound so bad. It’d be perfectly possible (though inadvisable) for IDW to keep the CC-BY-SA cover within it’s archives, publishing it in TPB’s and such… without infecting the rest of its content! Does that mean that the Creative Commons isn’t actually that infectious?

No, it means that IDW dodged a bullet. See, one doesn’t really ‘build on’ covers, so it’s relatively hard for them to inflict downstream contamination on future works… they aren’t actually blending or mixing with the new works.
But what if the use had been in the story itself? There is no “degree” of contamination under Creative Commons, it’s like a zombie bite, you’re either infected or you’re not. All parts of the story would become CC-BY-SA. And any future work that ‘built off of’ that story would also become CC-BY-SA. Comic books are serial fiction. Each story builds on everything that’s come before. Any flashbacks to this issue, any direct references ot its events, and changes the character underwent… if they appear in any future story, that story would become infected, and could then likewise infect others… the end result of which is that every Transformers comic IDW published would eventually become CC-BY-SA3; and anyone could legally copy or distribute them.

Next Steps: 19+28 Days Later

TFWiki.net is probably going to try to roll out a functioning “second license” within the next month in time for All Hail Megatron #15’s publication, so that if IDW does have time to update the cover as outlined above the license will be in place to meet it.

I am not a TFWiki.net administrator or sysop. I hold no sway over the body of users beyond my own ability to make suggestions… but this is the skeleton I’m going to be using to develop what I call the “ZX License.”

Statement of Legal Principles</p>
1. Customary Freehold
2. Ξενία
Statement of How these Principles Apply
License

Sections 1 and 2 are re-assertions of established fact and a statement of belief, respectively. Like an opinion draft, they cannot be ‘wrong,’ at least not in a way that carries legal consequences.

Section 1.1 and 1.2 outline established legal principles, both widely and historically recognized to be valid, both concerning unwritten contracts. It will be my contention in Section 2 that these principles have been in effect since the wiki began, and that the overlap of the two principles is an unwritten moral and legal compact with respect to Media Fandom that has always been in place. (In fairness to myself… this is not bullshit. The principles involved have a virtually 1:1 correlation to TFWiki.net’s written standards of good conduct in fandom.)

Section 3 is the only (strictly speaking) legally binding part, which will offer “consistent with the above principles” a limited private (or conditional, I need to check the wording) license to persons who already have the official “Transformers license” from Hasbro/Takara to legally reuse a small portion of our content beyond the limits of allowed by fair use.
This actually carries two distinct meanings; 1) All future submissions to the site will explicitly be available under this license. It further asserts that 2) because the principles in Section 1 have always been in play, past submissions were actually dual licensed; explicitly under GFDL/CC-BY-SA and implicitly under ζῆλοξενία… a separate-but-more-limited right of use

(Yes, that’s Ancient Greek. “ζξ” = “ZX License” as in. I did say it was established legal theory. 3000+ years, and still in practice.)

This sidesteps the problem of “jailbreaking” content out of the Creative Commons because we’re not breaking it out… this is a completely separate pre-existing (and more limited) right-of-use. Nor does it constitute an assault on the integrity of the Creative Commons general ability to protect content because the operative principle does not exist outside of Media Fandom. “ζῆλο” is Ancient Greek for “Fandom.” (More or less. The word ‘fanatic’ only dates from the 16th century. I’ve substituted the root from “zelotes“, which is “an admiring follower.”) Ignoring for the moment that this license was granted by the submitter separately from CC-BY-SA and the Creative Commons doesn’t get to say fudge about the matter… “normal” CC-BY-SA content does not fall under this license, it is incredibly specific to activities surrounding media fandom and simply does not exist unless something is… fanish. (Am I going to have to explain this in a followup post? Oh yeah.)

If I had been looking for a loophole I could use to break our content out of the CC-BY-SA3 via dubious legal gymnastics, I’d be worried about this standing up to scrutiny. But I stumbled across this concept only after concluding that the CC license was not breakable, so the discovery was a very happy “wow, this exactly matches what’s going on on TFWiki… and it provides a pre-existing mechanism for a reciprocal exchange of limited rights”, which is exactly what we’d wanted.

TFWiki.net has spent 3 years re-synthesizing the natural law underlying these concepts… only to discover that someone else beat us to it 3,500 years ago. I hate having to repeat that kind work unnecessarily. That’s why we have Creative Commons in the first place, so people share and benefit from one another’s work freely, enriching all!

…anyway, in the final analysis, that whole concept falls under Section 2; the legally non-binding part. So irrespective of whether you believe the concept is valid (and it is) it shifts the burden of proof off IDW and onto anyone who wants to claims otherwise. Before they can assume such a use is CC-BY-SA, they need to go to court and prove it’s not ζξ.
And that’s much better than the current situation, where someone can copy, remix and redistribute such a work and the burden is on IDW to prove it’s not CC-BY-SA.

And it will do this without putting our balls in the legal crossfire.

Princesses and Kilolangs

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:31:30 GMT

Defining “word” as a language unit 5.1 Latin-alphabet letters in length followed by a space or punctuation: “1000 words” is ~ 6.1 x 1000 x 8 bits, or 5.95kb of information.

The place I’m working doesn’t have a brand identity or mission statement, but they know they want one that will give them a leg up on the competition. So over the last few months I’ve been ambushing people with value surveys, brand architectures, market segmentation and positioning questions.

If you have enough of those, it’s actually possible to feed subjective impressions into spreadsheets and get a graphs out. (Terrifyingly, this actually works.)

It’s all being chunked and slowly regurgitated into a Powerpoint presentation, but this is my favorite bit so far, about brand positioning;

Industry trends favor speciation; your peers are transforming into specialist shops that only provide one kind of service, in volume.
This leaves new customers bewildered. They’re not sure how to determine which specialist is best at (or is even capable of) meeting their needs.
Value surveys indicate that your company’s most fervent desire is to never become this guy:

I should feel like I’m misbehaving… but everyone gets it from this example. Not just as a game reference… they understand the frustration of customers who can’t even figure out where to start, they get that their own values (skill, knowledge and relationships) are antithetical to the high-volume low-craftsmanship model others are embracing and they see how this presents the opportunity to counter-position themselves.

So Toad actually makes a really good didactic model for what you don’t want to be.

Actual size of 8-color PNG file: 4.32kb, which makes this picture worth 1,375 words!

Lists, Tabs and Institutional Autism 2007

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:31:07 GMT

Today, I was forced to work with bulleted lists in Microsoft Word 2007.

I almost put a chair through a window.

Not as a flight of fancy not ‘had an urge to,’ I was literally half a second from throwing my chair through a plate glass window while screaming in unholy rage and had to force myself to stop.

For the curious; 2007 changed the ‘automatic indenting’ behavior used by lists. You can’t tab-indent anymore.

Microsoft helpfully tells you to use the incredibly non-instinctive ‘add/decrease indent’ icons in their list area; so stop typing and use the mouse every time you want to change something.
Or you can switch to outline view, where tab-updating works… but everything is listed on a flat hierarchy with icon columns to indicate what level you’re on. (Basically “the most brain-bendingly noninstinctive display mode ever.”)
Or (as the Microsoft Word 2007 help documents assure you) you can use the Tab keys. (I know they don’t work, but the help still insists they work, presumably because they work in Outline view.)

Microsoft. MICROSOFT. You actually had something that worked, and people were used to it… so of course you broke it and told people to use your $%^&*() ribbon icons.

Now, I want to be clear… it is apparently possible to get list tabbing to work in Microsoft Word 2007. This (from what I’ve read) involves defining a custom list style and burrowing approximately 18 levels deep to define custom attributes. …for every list you create.
Not only is the old behavior no longer the default list behavior… Word doesn’t even provide it as the behavior of an alternate style. Annoying as constantly side-clicking for Style B in would be… it’s not even an option. You have to go in and do it custom style. (And be sure not to accidentally apply any of Words default styles later, because that’ll overwrite ‘em!)

Any feature that requires that many steps every time it’s used is simply broken. Plain and simple.

I’m sure this approach makes perfect sense for formatting pre-existing text as a list. …but that’s not what I’m using it for; I’m chunking raw data and notes and pushing it around until the natural information hierarchy becomes apparent, so I need to be able to move stuff around easily. And frankly Microsoft Word is (at least ostensibly) a word processor. Something you write in. It shouldn’t be behaving like a prepress formatting program!

What I’ve settled on is using the ALT + SHIFT + RIGHT-ARROW / ALT + SHIFT + LEFT-ARROW keys; shortcuts for the increase/decrease indent ribbon icons.
Why am I still upset? They’re keyboard shortcuts, isn’t that what I wanted?

Try typing them. (If you’re on a Mac, remember on a PC ALT is where your CONTROL key is.)
Both your hands have to leave the default position to use these shortcuts. It’s as disruptive to typing as having to stop and use the %^&*() mouse!

Thoughts on Health Care

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:42:11 GMT

Andy’s Blog posted Thoughts on Health Care the other day. This is my take.

I was born in 1978, which is the ‘trough’ in the US population bubble.

The boomers will start hitting retirement age in 2012. and they’ll keep on doing so for 20 years.

2025 is the year the ‘peak’ of the baby boom hits 65. It’s also the year that the ‘trough’ will hit 45. In the year 2025…
At that point, the peak-earning population (45 years old) will be supporting a retiree population many times its size due to the sustained 20-year nature of the bubble. Worse… the 1945 boomers who retired in 2012 will be reaching the end of their lifespans, and starting to incur the staggering increase in health-care costs that comes in the last 6 months of life. And they’ll be coming up short, because even if they put away money for this… there will have been twice as much demand for any service targeted at retirees, driving up costs (and simply overall inflation) across the board.
Oh, and because many boomers have their savings in 401K’s… drawing them down is going to crash the stock market– which will depress the value of the remainder– which…

This is why 2025 is identified as the ‘crisis point’ in health care cost projections. It’s when the system goes from strained to breaking… and it’s not even at a peak yet, because people have just started dying, which is their peak period of consumption… and it’s goign to go on for 20 more years.

Right now, Health Care consumes 15% of the US GDP. In 2025 it’s going to consume 25%.

That doesn’t work. Not “I disagree with it,” not “I want it not to happen,” it simply does not work. Health care costs are already choking corporate, and state budgets… a 66% increase is not something that can be weathered. Companies will drop health care– dumping the costs on states– states will slash it… leaving it to be handled by families which are now paying insane taxes to support health care they aren’t receiving, and crunched by having their elders move in with them, and having to provide for their own health care. All of which means more and more of the un-served population will be getting health care from emergency services… which aren’t meant to handle basic health care, and cost significantly more to provide it.
It’s not one dam bursting… it’s one dam bursting… and the runoff causes the backup dam to burst, which in turn causes another to burst…

The U.S. could grimace and wade through it by borrowing the costs from other countries. China’s population bubble is 20 years offset from our own. Japan doesn’t have one. India doesn’t have one. Their economies aren’t going to be screwed by this demographic bubble… they remain viable sources to borrow from.

Here’s the thing… the United States Federal government is 11 trillion dollars in debt. (we’re runnign a shortfall this year too.) The feferal government only takes in between 2 and 2.5 trillion in taxes every year. If a person was in debt for 5 times their annual income… we call them beyond broke. Unless that gets paid down, come 2025 we won’t have a credit rating to borrow on.

So ultimately, here’s my thing. I’m not fond of the health care plans being proposed. They seem like unwieldy hybrids designed to please no one.
But the most vocal opponents of the plan aren’t offering an alternative. (And really don’t seem to have one. I’ve seen the proposals being floated… they’re not serious health-care proposals, they’re nonviable political constructs designed to beat up the other guy.) They are essentially arguing for no change.

And a vote against changing health care is a vote for the United States to no longer exist in 15 years. Would you remain a member of an organization that provides you with no services but demands onorous membership fees to pay down its debts?
I’m serious. Dissolution of the United States. Look at those numbers. They are fundamentally non-sustainable. If nothing changes, in 2025 we’ll have endured long-term economic stress only to have it redouble while the services we depend on collapse, requiring us to provide them for ourselves. Oh, and the stock market will probably crash as end-of-life savings in 401k are consumed and not reinvested. Oh– and the prime tax base will have contracted 30%, while the largest chunk of the population enters into a phase of life where they’re no longer earning income.

Right now there’s tremendous static resistance against any change in the system. That’s one of the reasons it has resisted “gentle market pressure” that should have encouraged change for 20 years. It’s the fundamental reason the choices we’re being presented with now are “Obamacare” and “no change.” Because it doesn’t want to change.

It really doesn’t matter how bad Obama’s health care plan is, we can patch it once it’s in place. (We’re going to be patching it anyway, because what everyone is talking about is sweeping changes with agile “on rails” adaption as the needs of a new system become clearer.) Overcoming the resistance to change is the real victory.

Evangelion Rebuild 2.0 Subs

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 19:16:32 GMT

Evangelion Rebuild 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance premiered in Japan on June 27. Predictably, a CAM bootleg of the film made its way to the internet.

Let’s talk about the economics of fansubs. Groups of people who work together to translate and redistribute foreign-language television shows or movies… often within hours of their premiere.

But this time weeks passed, and no one bothered to sub the film. Why is that?

First; the CAM wasn’t very good. Established groups will often resist subtitling a low-quality product.
Second; Evangelion isn’t an ‘easy’ work to subtitle. It’s dense, uses obscure argot, has many people talking at the same time, and uses words that can be translated many ways… but for which there is usually only one “correct” translation.
Third; the film will actually be premiering in Europe next month… with official English subtitles. So there was reason for such groups to expect a better version to be forthcoming “in a month of two.”

These 3 factors combined were enough to dis-incentivize groups from tackling the project… despite rabid interest in the film, no one jumped into the breach. Big job, low quality, soon to be obsolete.

At least… it was enough for the English-speaking fanbase. For the Spanish-speaking fanbase, a European premiere with burned-in English subtitles wasn’t much of an inventive. So two weeks after the premiere a set of Spanish-language subtitles appeared online.

At this point, the barrier to participation gets much lower. In fact, you could almost run them through online translators. Oh sure, they’d be mangled but…

"They're not 100% accurate (they're based on me going through the Spanish subs with Babelfish and Google) but they should tide people over until a proper translation from the Japanese is available. If nothing else they're completely de-engrishfied."

So here’s the thing; a couple users who spoke neither Spanish nor Japanese went back-and-forth over the subtitles a couple times, comparing the very bad web-translations with their knowledge of the material… to rather good effect. How good?

Until I went back to look it up after, I assumed they were a set of ‘proper’ subs. They were damn smooth. All from comparing two auto-translators and a few rounds of cleanup; substituting eyeballs and time for expertise and speed.

In fact, there’s apparently been a full Japanese-language transcript of the movie since shortly after it premiered. (A useful cross-check for translators.) So it’s entirely possible that the Spanish-language subtitles were made in the same way… Japanese-to-Spanish with no one along the way speaking both languages.

Crowdsource translation without translators? What the hell hero!?

This world is full of marvels, and it’s getting moreso every day.

(Also, the CAM is shit, wait for a proper release.)

Translate Japanese with Wiki Templates

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 06:28:32 GMT

Everyone has “someday maybe” creative projects; the kind of think they’d like to do if they got an opportunity, but rarely make time for. Sometimes these are passionate fever-dreams, more often they’re simple roads-not-taken… a possible path you glimpse while on your way to another destination, and regret not having the time to explore.

I’ve done a lot of (fairly complicated) Wikiparser template programming for The Transformers Wiki over the years. You can combine the conditional and transformative control-structures that come standard on wikis in surprisingly complicated ways. It’s a bit like a programming language where there are no variables.

"It amazes me just how...complex...the TFWiki is. I was looking at their Templates earlier when it really hit me [...] They've done things with their wiki that I didn't think was possible" —Andy’s blog: “TFWiki is the Matrix”

For over a year I’ve been wanting to apply Wikiparser to the problem of translating Japanese; at least Hiragana and Katakana (their ‘phoenetic’ alphabets.) I had the idea while gut-deep in another template… and I was pretty sure it could be done, the question was how well?

I got off work early last Friday and decided to find out.

Breaking down the problem

Let me begin by saying; I don’t know Japanese. I can’t speak it, I can’t read it, and I don’t even know the alphabet well enough to spell it out. But hey… how hard could it be? Sure– there’s all sorts of problems involving character-encoding involved with handling foreign languages… but mediaWiki already handles all of that for me, and unlike many programming languages, it’s own string-manipulation functions handle multi-byte characters as a single character properly!

When constructing a complicated template, it’s best to start in small bites. I started by creating a template designed to break apart any incoming string and return it as individual characters. So given “Test” it would return a list;

Doing this required creating a self-referential loop, allowing the template to call itself and pass on the ‘remainder’ of a string while shaving a single character off it per-iteration. Wiki software actually forbids this sort of recursive template execution though…you have to create another template that redirects to the first. ;) {{romanize}} and {{romanize_recurs}}.

This working, I ran a SWITCH over each character as it came through, replacing it with its relevant Japanese equivalent. (There are ~45 characters in the Japanese phonetic alphabet, compared 26 in the English language.) The result was a really bad phonetic rendering, and a couple missing characters. Japanese also has multi-character combinations that change the sound of the character by adding a “short” vowel. And accents that’re a bit like diacritical marks.

Long-story short, I moved the guts into a ‘child’ template {{romanize/utility}} so that {{romanize}} could call it as a subroutine. (Actually several different subroutines– you just string {{#if}}s back-to-back testing for passed terms and put the subroutine inside ‘em.) I noodled around with this (including a disastrous early decision to try and ‘capitalize’ the short-vowels) and attempted to figure out the proper order-of-operations while other helpful TFWiki-ers pointed out problems. (This is important, since we’ve already established I don’t speak a lick of Japanese.)
The result is the following conversion:

トランスフォーマースーパーリンク :: Katakana for Transformers: Energon, the 2004 cartoon.
toransufōmā sūpārinku :: “Trasnsformer: Super Link”

Japanese is phonetically impoverished; several sounds (such as the distinction between L and R) are simply ‘lost’ when English is translated into Japanese… but that’s a pretty darn readable result! Here’s a table of common Katakana words from the Wikipedia Katakana article (fair use) comparing how good a job my parser did at down-rendering them vs. ‘proper’ romanizations;

katakana	{{romanize}}	romanized
マージャン	mājan	mājan	mahjong	麻雀	má-jiàng
ウーロン茶	ūron茶	ūroncha	Oolong tea	烏龍茶	wū-lóng-chá
チャーハン	chāhan	chāhan	fried rice	炒飯	chǎo-fàn
チャーシュー	chāshū	chāshū	barbecued pork	叉焼	chā-shāu
シューマイ	shūmai	shūmai	a form of dim sum	焼売	shāu-mài

Except for one word that uses a Kanji (non-phoenetic ideogram) as part of it’s spelling… that’s a 1:1 correlation! Pretty damn awesome if I say so myself!

"From the outside most people can't tell the rapid exploitation of a belatedly recognized opportunity from deep-laid planning." -Miles Vorkosigan, Komarr

Inspiration is one thing, demonstration quite another

When I wasn’t quite sure how to go about this, I created my complicated multi-part template with sub-routines and <blink> tags (I like blink tags!) to give myself maximum flexibility. Once I got all the bugs ironed out, it turned out none of that was needed. No conditionals, no recursion… nothing. It just required careful replacement done in the proper order;

Yōon
Single-character sounds
vowel+longs (ー)
small-Tsu+consonant (ッ)

With that in mind; I rewrote the entire Katakana parser using just nested {{#replace:}} parsers. 232 of them.

View working {{katakana}} source code.

That should be portable to any mediaWiki install that also has basic parserFunctions. I’m not sure I’d want to cut-and-paste it on a system that didn’t have Japanese fonts installed… but I suppose you could use special:Export!

That’s just Katakana, which is used for loan-words (English rendered-down to Japanese will use Katakana.) I haven’t re-done a filter for Hiragana, the other phonetic alphabet Japan uses because I’ve had much less opportunity to test it. But the original {{romanize}} template converts both.

View working {{romanize}} source code. (Remember to grab the dependencies listed in the Technical notes section!)

Final thoughts

I started this template at about 3PM, spent an hour on it to get basic functionality… then went to go swim with my nieces for several hours and grill dinner before coming back to it and revising the whole thing based on comments and problems people flagged. Total work time: 4 hours.

Bear in mind… I don’t know Japanese. I can’t read its alphabet, and I don’t know any of the pronunciation rules involved in that alphabet.
I literally copy-pasted the individual characters out of Wikipedia’s articles on Hiragana and Template:Katakana so I didn’t have to type them. …and the result is 1:1 correlation with ‘proper’ renderings of hiragana and katakana.

Who says you need to know what you’re doing?
Sometimes you just need to do.

Pontifex Maximus and the Arcana of Timestamps

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:59:14 GMT

On February 18th, 2009 I had too much time on my hands. As I am wont to do in such circumstances, I pursued a blue sky inquiry. Everyone has odd or silly questions about the world; I make it a hobby to answer mine. In this case, I was curious about leap seconds.

After a bit of digging, I determined that the people I needed to ask were the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, and send the following e-mail:

To: IERS Central Bureau Subject: Do Leap Seconds require the approval of the Pope? (Serious question!)

It’s my understanding that the Intl. Earth Rotation n’ Reference Service is responsible for calculating and announcing the leap seconds on our calendar, and thus you are the persons I should be directing this question towards.

Here’s my question…
As I understand it, back in Ancient Rome the High Priest of the Collegium Pontificum was responsible for the regulation of the Roman calendar system. When Rome became the Holy Roman Empire that office became entailed with the Papacy. So when Pope Gregory rolled out our modern Gregorian calendar in the 16th century, he did so under his authority as Pontifex Maximus, keeper of the calendars.

Since that office has existed for almost two thousand years (the sole remaining governmental position of the original Roman Empire!) I imagine it has a certain seniority in matters pertaining to the Gregorian calendar.

So when you decide it’s time to add a leap second, do you ask the Pope to approve it? Or bless it…. or whatever?

A very prompt 59 minutes later I recieved this reply.

Subject: RE: Do Leap Seconds require the approval of the Pope? (Serious question!)

No, the leap second has nothing to do with the Papacy. Leap seconds are part of the time system (i.e. what clocks and watches are showing), not of the calendar. Changes in the system of the calendar (e.g. how the Easter date is to be calculated) are indeed connected with the churches (not only with the Catholic one), so that all attempts to make a calendar reform failed due to the resistance of one or the other of the churches. But the time system is completely independent from religion and was established by scientific organizations.

Kind regards,
Dr. Wolfgang R. Dick
Bundesamt fuer Kartographie und Geodaesie
Germany

I didn’t find this answer very satisfying.
For one thing, it’s historically inaccurate on most levels, the modern Gregorian Calendar being a reform implemented by Pope Gregory XIII that finally ended centuries of countries thinking it was different years and the claiming the time system is “completely independent from religion and established by scientific organizations” is mind-boggling, since we’ve been using hours, minutes and seconds since before any scientific organizations existed.
But what really left me unsatisfied was having my hope crushed. I want to live in a world that’s full of wonderful, marvelous things. Where institutions celebrate in Mankind’s vast contradictory, often non-nonsensical history of achievement! And things like the last remaining office of the roman empire are given deference (however symbolic) in matters relating to its area of authority.

excerpted from Wikipedia (fair use):
The Pontifex Maximus were in charge of the Roman calendar and determined when intercalary days needed to be added to sync the calendar to the seasons. Since the Pontifices were often politicians, and because a Roman magistrate’s term of office corresponded with a calendar year, this power was prone to abuse: a Pontifex could lengthen a year in which he or one of his political allies was in office, or refuse to lengthen one in which his opponents were in power. Under his authority as Pontifex Maximus, Julius Caesar introduced the calendar reform that created the Julian calendar, with a fault under a day per century, easily corrected by a modification of the rules for bisextile days (only added in a leap-year) to produce our present Gregorian calendar.

Dr. Dick’s cold answer renders the world becomes a more ordinary, utilitarian place; devoid of the wonder and celebration I am seeking.

I will just have to keep looking.

JQuery assisted page moves on MediaWiki

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 21:45:14 GMT

On august 6, I was presented with a large-but-finite set of pages that needed to be moved on a MediaWiki project; the parenthetical disambig was changing from “Page Name (Object)” to “Page Name (Obj).”

Since there were more than 100 such pages (and the disambig change wasn’t actually quite so neat) I decided to streamline. All these pages belonged to the same MediaWiki category, which we’ll call “Things.”

I added the following code to my ‘execute when the page loads’ JQuery file:


if (wgPageName == "Category:Things"){

    jQuery.each( jQuery('#mw-pages a'), function(i){

        var href = jQuery(this).attr('href');

        var uri = 'http://domain.com/w/index.php?title=Special:Movepage&wpOldTitle=';

        uri += href.replace('/wiki/','');

        uri += '&wpNewTitle=';

        uri += href.replace('/wiki/','').replace('%28Object%29','%28Obj%29');

        uri += '&wpReason=Mass+Diambig+change';

jQuery(this).after(' (move)'); }); }

Once the page is finished loading, the scrit checks ff I on the page called “Category:Things”.
If so, it grabs every page link, and appends another link after it; (move).
Clicking on that link brings you to: http://domain.com/w/index.php?title=Special:Movepage&wpOldTitle=Page_Name_%28Object%29&wpNewTitle=Page_Name_%28Obj%29&wpReason=Mass+Diambig+change

The result is a pre-populared move form, reducing the entire move proscess to two clicks that can be accomplished very quickly in tabs!

See, MediaWiki, being a well-written computationally-wasteful piece of software (the two are not mutually exclusive) tests for certain query values and uses them to populate the form values. There is no place in the MediaWiki software that actually uses these values. But because the query test’s are there… it’s laughably easy to semi-automate a process like this.
Considerate of the programmers to include them, neh?

Before someone asks… this wiki does not include jQuery. I load it from offsite (on my own web-host) by adding the following lines to “Special:Mypage/monobook.js“:
/* Javascript Includes */ document.write('<' + 'script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="'); document.write('http://www.mydomain.com/jquery.js'); document.write('">

document.write('<' + 'script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="'); document.write('http://www.mydomain.com/execute_on_load.js'); document.write('">


It’s like MAGIC!  I get to run customized jQuery on a wiki that doesn’t have it– WITHOUT embedded the entire nasty code in my own JS file!  I can make all the edits on my own FTP server without spamming the WikiProject’s RecentChanges page!
Note: While I don’t think it matters… I do not use jQuery’s $(document).ready(); instead I use addOnloadHook(doStuff);

addOnloadHook() being a stock mediaWiki function that basically does the same thing.  doStuff() (obviously) being the nesting function I stick the code I execute on pageload inside.  (I don’t remember why I do it this way… so I thought I’d mention it in case it was important.)
Actual time… about 10-15 minutes.  Since I had about 120 pages to move, and 6-9 seconds per-move (which involves typing) seems a optimistic… I came out ahead-to-break-even.  And if I ever have to do something similar in the future, I’m way ahead!
(Writing this blog entry took longer than the code.)

TFWiki.net killed two people this year

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:46:46 GMT

Ages ago and for reasons which escape me at the moment, I was given access to TFWiki’s Google analytics account. (Probably because I once wrote custom software to track our downtime.) As a consequence, I make periodic traffic or architecture reports…. because no one else really cares to. (The last one prompted a redesign of the front page.)

I present my informal wrap-up (including the fatalities mentioned in the subject) below the cut:

State of Traffic August 2009

A lot of major websites (including YouTube) have begun to harass users running IE6. (I personally find that a bit obnoxious, and the design of the main site behind the movement irritates the hell out of me, as well as being a thinly disguised PR ploy) …which made me want to look up what % of our users still use IE6, (6.66%—no jokes) which got me into our analytics.

3 month overview

TFWiki had ~150,000 people visit us in the last month, making about 2 visits each. That’s trending down from the previous month (which included the movie) but still well up from 3 months ago. The chart at right shows our last 3 months (the heavy downtime we experienced due to software upgrade, caching and traffic issues makes the hump a lot less pronounced than might otherwise be expected– only about 200% our normal traffic. I estimate that about 400-500% our normal traffic was trying to get in at peak times though.)

Is there was to traffic-stress test our site before Botcon/TF3 in 2012?

Google analytics says that our “average time in site” per visit is 13 minutes, which means that TFWiki.net kills 1.5 parallel humans per year. That is to say; TFWiki.net absorbs 102 years of eyeball-time annually, or about 1.5 human lifetimes. (I rationalize my guilt about this by telling myself that the parallel dead would probably have just spent their lives watching youTube if we didn’t exist.)
Alexa (which doesn’t have access to Google Analytics more intimate knowledge of visitor activity and so makes ‘best guesses’) estimates our time-on-site as 7.9 minutes (so its numbers ‘lose’ about 40% of the actual time.) By way of contrast visitors to TVTropes spend about 15.9 minutes (26 minutes, corrected) per-visit. We are about 50% as ’sticky’ as TVTropes. (Our ‘bounce’ rate– people who leave shortly after coming here and don’t visit another page are about he same, their is ~5% lower.)

Our highest ‘quality’ users (spending the most time on site, viewing the most pages) comes from Bing and MSN searches. (I have no idea why people who use Microsoft web portals spend twice as long here, but they are only a tiny fraction of our users.)

Firefox has barely scraped ahead of IE as the most common browser used on our site. There’s no significant usage difference between FF and IE users… except that IE users tend to visit 50% more pages in the same amount of time. Does this mean IE users skim more? (I don’t know.) Safari users spend ~30% less time on the site, with a corresponding decrease in number-of-pages-per-visit… which means they’re spending ~ the same amount of time per-page. (I have no idea if this reflects the site being less usable on Safari, or simply mac users having a different demographic.) Safari users are ~6.7% of our traffic– so if a tech issue is causing us to lose that 30% of Safari users time, remedying it would cause a ~2.3% overall traffic increase. (In short “worth looking at.”)

New vs. returning users, 3 month view

The ‘quality’ of our users (time on site, # of pages visited) did not really change during the ROTF movie– which means new users that surfed in during the ROTF promo rush ‘behaved’ just like our normal new users. The new:old user ratio also barely shifted from 4:6 to 5:5. (see chart.) We got (I’m guessing on these numbers, everything else went through a calculator) a ~120% increase in new users, and a 85% increase in returning users. I suspect our downtime skewed this. (Returning users having more reason to keep trying to get us vs. Wikia.)

New Users spend ~ half as much time and view half as many pages as returning users. Those numbers have remained rock-solid since forever.

Compared to TV/Entertainment sites or Comics and animation sites of the same size… our daily page-views are below average, but our bounce rate is half of average, and pageviews/time on site are spectacularly above average. I think this just reflects how wikis behave differently than other sites. (And really… any entertainment sites that has 10,000 pages is freaking huge. It’s a poor benchmark for comparison all around.)

Things I discovered today (.NET edition)

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 06:02:37 GMT

Today I discovered that RDesc (a media download queue for Hotfire, Mediafire etc.) and LjArchive (archives your LiveJournal posts) both use Microsoft .Net Framework, and attempting to run both programs at once causes both to crash.

(I’m choose to define this as a problem with .NET.)

Between a rock and a hard place

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 17:09:51 GMT

I snapped this picture 20 minutes ago. It makes me laugh.

(Everything turned out alright, if you were wondering.)

TFWiki.net Relicencing Vote

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 12:44:18 GMT

TFWiki.net formally voted on the license change yesterday;

The funny timestamp on the vote’s conclusion is because we used Baker Island time, giving people another 8 hours to vote. (Our server is on Rhode Island time, since it’s where Hasbro is located and is thus arbitrarily considered the Transformers ‘capital.’)

Hilariously, only 3 of our 10 administrators bothered to vote, and Walky (site operator) was among the absentees. They all weighed in in earlier discussions though, so we carried the decision by plurality. Walky’s at comicon, and this was a dead Friday with no comics released, no episodes etc etc etc.

The vote itself was really a foregone conclusion. The business of replacing the Commons Deed (CC’s GUI) can come later. Some stuff I’d like to suggest we do long term might require another vote if the community seems to favor it… but that’s relatively far off.

(I’m going to claim that “May God Uphold the Right” is established legal boilerplate, because it is; for trial by combat. Which is to say “One man’s unsupported word vs. the World, may the World prove him right.” It sounds good anyway.)

DMCA vs. the World

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:23:14 GMT

Today I went to look up Grant Morrison’s 2000 DisinfoCon speech, because he explores several high-level issues that I think are philosophically relevant to my ongoing exploration of the Creative Commons.

So I was a little nonplussed to discover that the video– which was on literally dozens of online video sites… was missing. When media goes missing, sites usually don’t tell you why. Some sites pretended like the videos had never been existed, some retained the meta-data like descriptions and comments, but ditched the video itself. Some sites said simply that it had been removed due to a copyright violation. And exactly one site, (YouTube) provided any sort of followup info.

This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Hillsong Publishing.

Naturally, I assumed, Hillsong Publishing was The Disinformation Company, and they requested a takedown because they sell DVD’s of the ‘con. Regretable, but understandable. Or maybe Grant finally got someone to buy Pop Magic (a long-threatened book whose subject overlaps his DisinfoCon speech) and the publisher is protecting its interests. A bit more marginal… but still believable.

Turns out Hillsong Publishing is the publishing arm of Hillsong Church, and Australian megachurch with a somewhat questionable record of past actions.

So… fundamentalist megachurch issues takedown order against a speech they don’t own that happens to be about Shamanism, working magic, and how some groups (such as political parties, media multinationals, and organized religion) try to control what people can think.

The wonderful thing about the DMCA is that sites like youTube are required to comply with takedown requests, but there is no corresponding burden on the party making the request to establish that the video is a copyright violation.
In this case, Hillsong Church doesn’t even own the rights to the video– it seems they just claimed they did in order to get a video they disagreed with removed.

Abuse-prone as that system is… what really worries me is that 9/10 sites that this video was removed from gave no indication who had requested the removal, making it virtually impossible to tell when someone is abusing the system.
And that’s terrifying.