Cheerful Curmudgeon

I am not surprised, but I am still dismayed, by the continued erosion of our personal privacy in the shadow of George W. Bush’s administration. The New York Times reports in E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress that the National Security Agency (NSA), as recently as early this year, is illegally collecting email from Americans:

Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.

A decade ago, I was a strong proponent of OpenPGP-encrypted email. I gave up when I got tired of trying to push that rope uphill. Maybe it’s time to try again.

Did you know that, unless you encrypt your email, it is as easy to read as a note written on a postcard? Now before you say, “So what? I don’t care,” consider how you would feel if NSA wanted to listen to all of your phone calls or wanted to read all of your regular mail. I suspect that, even though you are a law-abiding citizen and have nothing to hide, you might object a tad to that invasion of your privacy.

I have published my PGP key on this web site (and it is in the popular key servers). Using this key, you can send encrypted messages to me and you can confirm that messages which I sign electronically actually were signed by me.

I sign and encrypt my email messages using EnigMail and GnuPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) with Thunderbird, all highly reliable and free software. If you use something other than Thunderbird for your email (like Outlook or Eudora), here is a list of other mail user agent frontends. And if you use Gmail or any of the other email systems though a web browser, FireGPG is just the ticket.

Setting up the software is a little bit of work, but you will probably be done in less time than it would take you to drive to Office Depot and buy a box of envelopes. Once you have the software installed, you can encrypt an email message faster than you can lick and seal an envelope.

Cindy and Geoff did a great job and produced Caedmon Geoffrey, a wonderful, healthy baby boy at 7:12pm on May 20. He’s 9 lbs 1 oz, 21 inches tall. His plumbing works so well that he peed on the doctor during delivery. I take that as a great omen!

I have been writing a new program, having a ball doing it, and it has brought to consciousness something which I have not thought about for years: There is a bit of Dr. Henry Frankenstein in me. I love to create things which do stuff autonomously and, when I create these things, bigger is definitely better.

My current creation has lots of parts, including:

1. A daemon (I love that word, all the more since daemon’s are useful and not evil at all) which runs all the time and wakes up once a minute to see if anything interesting has happened and decide whether it should do something.
2. A script which watches for people to click special links in email messages. It leaves a “note” for the daemon, telling it that a human being received the email and did something. Cool; my program is making humans do things!
3. A script which watches for secret messages sent from another program on another computer. This script also leaves notes for the daemon, telling it that the other computer is set up and running and ready to do a human being’s bidding.

The daemon gets to do all sorts of fun things, including summoning new (virtual) computers into existance and turning them loose on the world. In the end, the daemon even gets to kill off the computers. The daemon spends real money (hopefully, this part does not get out of control!) with a real multi-national company.  And as the daemon works, it attracts the attention of people at four different companies, all of which are very interested in what this little beastie is doing.

Not bad for a creation which only exists in the virtual world inside a computer. If you see me walking around with a smug smile on my face, now you know why.

Researchers have found a strong correlation between newborn feeding patterns and the seemingly immutable “night person” or “morning person”  patterns which govern our adult lives. Dr. Emily Erudita of the Hatch Institute of Mamalian Studies reports in today’s issue of Pan Generational Physiology,

In a study of 1,063 adults, 97.2% of the “night people” had been fed in the evening as newborns. Furthermore, 97.6% of the “morning people” had been fed in the morning as newborns. The remaining approximately 2.5% may have been fed during those periods but conclusive evidence was not available due to failing memories on the parts of the only living adult relatives and a lack of timestamped photographic records.

Dr. Erudita has announced her imminent departure from the Hatch Institute and will be founding a company to provide infant betrothal services, guaranteeing that no married couple need ever be mismatched again.

I woke up in a good mood this morning and then…

Sometimes one piece of technology makes another, seemingly unrelated, piece of technology misbehave. It happened this morning at 12:15am CDT when an automated program that I run in Amazon EC2 failed to do its thing. The EC2 instances (that’s geek speak for “virtual machines” which is geek speak for “computers which aren’t really there but act like they are”) started up but never got around to doing any useful work. Six hours later, all of the instances were still running; they should have finished their work and died off in about two hours. I killed all of the instances, grumbling because I had paid for six hours of time and gotten nothing for it and did not even know why.

The underlying problem, it turned out, was a new SSL certificate that we had installed on our e-commerce store yesterday. One of the first things that each EC2 instance does is to fetch the latest version of the software from a Subversion server, which, coincidentally, is on the same machine as our e-commerce store. With a new SSL certificate on the server, each instance was waiting for a human being to say that the new certificate was OK. Inconveniently, the human being was sound asleep.

Who would have thought that renewing the SSL certificate for our on-line store would break an unrelated Amazon EC2-based application? Hidden dependencies suck.

Now I am in a bad mood, grumbling because I did not get my relaxed waking-up time after my shower, sitting next to my wife, drinking coffee, cruising blogs. Instead I dove directly from the shower into debugging and it left me feeling edgy.

We have a mechanism at Hen’s Teeth Network which works pretty well to keep emotional baggage like this from blindsiding our coworkers: we check-in every morning. It is a chance for me to say, “I’m in a bad mood. Better watch out; I may bite.” Better forewarned than not.

I am finishing this post a couple of hours later, after checking in with my coworkers. The check-in worked beautifully, giving me a chance to blow off some of the steam. I am more relaxed and I got some support from sympathetic ears. We even laughed a bit about the situation.

We missed the hidden dependency between the e-commerce store’s SSL certificate and the EC2 application and were caught unawares. Fortunately, we did not miss the hidden dependency between my early morning upset and my interactions with my co-workers. Knowing about the dependency and having tools at hand and in daily use for handling the dependency, proved a good thing for all of us.

I am thrilled to report that the magic software which Sony requires me to use to download ebooks from their on-line bookstore finally runs under VirtualBox. For reasons which I understand, but do not agree with, Sony requires use of their special software to download anything from their eBook Store, even free ebooks. Since I use Ubuntu Linux on my computer, the only way I am able to use the store is by running Sony’s software under Windows under VirtualBox. Unfortunately, that did not work, as many of us reported to VirtualBox.

Being barred from use of the Sony eBook Store did not bother me very much. I refuse to buy DRM-locked books so there was not much in the store which I wanted. That changed this morning, though, when I read that Sony and Google have partnered to make 500,000 public domain ebooks available through the store. I wanted access these books so I downloaded the latest version of Sony’s eBook Library software and installed it on Windows XP running under VirtualBox and, lo and behold, it worked. I have successfully downloaded a book from the store onto my computer and then transfered it onto my PRS-505 ebook reader.

The Sony eBook Library software is kind of flakey. I have had to kill and restart it twice to get my PRS-505 “authorized” and to get a batch of books downloaded, but at least it runs. All of this would be completely unnecessary, of course, if the publishers did not DRM-lock their books. One of these days, they will get a clue and give that up. It has taken several years for the music industry to figure it out but they finally seem to have. I do hope that the book publishers will “get it,” too.

I am fed up with wasting clients’ dollars “fixing” web sites so that they look good in Internet Explorer 6. IE7 has been out for 2 1/2 years. IE8 is available as a free beta. There are lots of other browsers available for free. All of these browsers work better than IE6. If you still use IE6, it’s time to get over it and move on. Upgrade for free to something better.

This web site, and the others for which I am responsible, now display a warning similar to this when visited with IE6:

Sample IE6 warning message

For more information, see Moving Past Internet Explorer 6.

Candy and I have talked about building or buying a home theater computer (HTPC) for years. We have a pretty nice home theater including a projected HD picture that is almost 100″ diagonal and fairly impressive 5.1 sound. This gear works great for DVDs and HD-DVDs (yes, I picked the wrong horse in that race) but, being me, I want more. I want to be able to listen to all of my music on it, including the tracks that I buy from emusic.com and I do not want to mess around with CDs. (Isn’t it amazing that, back in the Dark Ages, I used to be annoyed when I had to flip an LP over every 15 to 20 minutes; now I am annoyed that I have to change CDs every hour.) I have gazillions of digital photos which I would like to enjoy in the comfort of my den and in a more share-able form than my laptop screen. I even have a small collection of digital video which, like the digital photos, I want to see bigger than my laptop screen.

I have noodled, off and on, with building an HTPC from open source projects such as MythTV and Freevo and Medibuntu. None really hooked me. The technology is still so new that you need a pretty carefully crafted recipe of hardware components to make it all work well and the chore of concocting the recipe and then locating all the right parts was too daunting. Worse, I was afraid that I would end up with a system that was so complex that only I could dependably run it.

I even considered buying a pre-built system with Windows Vista Home Premium. My friend, Steve, has one and it is a beautiful thing: everything just works. In my den, when it is time to watch a movie, I want to turn the equipment on and simply watch the movie. Three things put me off of this idea, though. I do not want a whole computer in my den. I certainly do not want to mess with a keyboard and mouse. And I do not want to pay as much for a HTPC as such a system would cost by the time I bought hardware which included a Blu-ray player, a video card with HDMI output, and a sound card with optical output.

Given this state of affairs, I had given up on getting a HTPC, figuring that I would revisit the idea in a year or so.

Candy and I are narrowing in on our tenth wedding anniversary. As a present to ourselves, we decided to replace our HD-DVD with a Blu-ray player and that meant that I got to play one of my favorite games: comparison shopping for electronics! I was completely surprised to find many reviews like CNET’S Best Blu-ray Players from January 28, 2009 which rank the Sony PlayStation 3 at the top of the list.

This list consists of the best Blu-ray players on the market and the bottom line is clear — the Sony PlayStation 3 is by far the most recommendable Blu-ray player available today. There are a few caveats — the PS3 doesn’t have analog multichannel outputs or an IR receptor — but they’re overshadowed by the fact that you also get a high-def gaming console and media streamer. Some home theater die-hards will insist on a standalone player, but everyone else should stick with the PS3 until standalones cost much less and perform comparably.

Beyond the basic PS3 system, I needed add only one accessory: a “real” remote control for playing movies so that I would not need to fiddle around with joysticks and a gaming remote. Sony sells a DVD remote control which looks surprisingly like the remote for any other DVD player; it has all of the right buttons in familiar places and with familiar labels. At $20, this was a no-brainer add-on. Read the rest of this entry »

This article in Slashdot about the electronic trash that we create hit home. I cannot think of a good way to paraphrase it so here is the whole thing:

Every day, Americans toss out more than 350,000 cell phones and 130,000 computers, making electronic waste the fastest-growing part of the US garbage stream. A lot of the world’s e-waste is exported to Guiyu, China, where peasants heat circuit boards over coal fires to recover lead (a 15″ computer monitor can pack up to 7 lbs. of Pb), while others use acid to burn off bits of gold. Guiyu’s willingness to deal with lead, mercury and other toxic materials generates $75 million a year for the village, but as a result. Guiyu is slowly poisoning itself with the highest level of cancer-causing dioxins in the world. The village experiences elevated rates of miscarriages, and its children suffer from an extremely high rate of lead poisoning. TIME suggests checking out recycling brokers and accredited e-stewards the next time you’re ready to toss a gizmo.

If you are one of my readers who lives in the St. Louis; Kansas City; Las Vegas; or Columbia, SC then I recommend you get in touch with your local EPC office. They demanufacture waste electronics down to recyclable components and they do it safely, right here in the US.

Regardless of where you live, check with your local city and county government. More and more of them are setting up electronic recycling centers. For instance, the St. Charles, MO county will recycle electronics for any resident. There is a nominal cost but paying a few dollars beats the heck out of wondering who’s back yard your old CRT will be dumped in.

We all know the story of Benjamin Franklin flying a kite in an electrical storm. I always thought that it was kind of fanciful, along the same lines as the myth about George Washington cutting down a cherry tree. Guess what: I was wrong. Franklin not only flew the kite in a storm, he held onto the string, and he stuck his hand near the key so that he could fully experience the “electric fire.”

I just finished reading the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, downloaded from Project Gutenberg. At the end, I found a letter Franklin wrote to Peter Collinson in 1752 describing the electrical kite experiment in exquisite detail.

Make a small cross of two light strips of cedar, the arms so long as to reach to the four corners of a large, thin silk handkerchief when extended; tie the corners of the handkerchief to the extremities of the cross, so you have the body of a kite; which being properly accommodated with a tail, loop, and string, will rise in the air, like those made of paper; but this being of silk, is fitter to bear the wet and wind of a thunder-gust without tearing. To the top of the upright stick of the cross is to be fixed a very sharp-pointed wire, rising a foot or more above the wood. To the end of the twine, next the hand, is to be tied a silk ribbon, and where the silk and twine join, a key may be fastened. This kite is to be raised when a thunder-gust appears to be coming on, and the person who holds the string must stand within a door or window, or under some cover, so that the silk ribbon may not be wet; and care must be taken that the twine does not touch the frame of the door or window. As soon as any of the thunder clouds come over the kite, the pointed wire will draw the electric fire from them, and the kite, with all the twine will be electrified, and the loose filaments of the twine will stand out every way and be attracted by an approaching finger. And when the rain has wet the kite and twine, so that it can conduct the electric fire freely, you will find it stream out plentifully from the key on the approach of your knuckle. At this key the phial may be charged; and from electric fire thus obtained, spirits may be kindled, and all the electric experiments be performed, which are usually done by the help of a rubbed glass globe or tube, and thereby the sameness of the electric matter with that of lightning completely demonstrated.

I also love the illustration:

"You will find it stream out plentifully from the key on the approach of your knuckle"

I think it is certainly fair to say, Don’t Try This At Home.

But if you do… be sure to let me know how it works out!