Cheerful Curmudgeon

Google released Chrome today and you will see “Google Chrome is a browser” if you visit the Chrome web page. Do not be deceived, though. Chrome is not designed to replace Internet Explorer or Firefox or Safari. Chrome is designed to replace your operating system and virtually all of the software that you use every day. Chrome is the key to letting you do all of your computer stuff on the web instead of on one computer.

Think of the advantages. If you edit your grocery list on your home computer and want to print it at work, you are stuck. You cannot print that grocery list until you get home again. But if you edit your grocery list on the web, you can get to the same document and print it from any computer anywhere in the world. Similarly, if your hard disk dies, you can still get to your stuff if it is on the web. All you have to do is switch to another computer and keep on working. I could wax rhapsodic about the possibilities for way more paragraphs than you want to read but I’ll spare you.

Google wants to make this transition so easy for you that you will wonder why you did not make the switch yesterday. Chrome will take over your whole computer and hide all of the confusing gunk of Windows or OSX or Linux so you do not have to worry about it any more. You will be able to simply do your work or read your email or stare at your videos or whatever strikes your fancy. And if you are on a Mac today and on a PC tomorrow, it will not matter one bit because everything will look exactly the same.

Does this seem a bit far fetched? Take a look at how your computer appears if you use Internet Explorer to read the news. (Click on the picture to see it larger.)

That looks pretty normal. You can see that you are running IE because there is lots of IE stuff on the top and bottom of the screen and the news is in the middle. Now here is the same web page in Firefox.

That is pretty much the same experience. You can see that you are running Firefox instead of IE because the stuff at the top and bottom is different but the browser stuff is still there and the news is in the middle.

Now look at the same page in Google Chrome:

Now that looks different. Where did the browser go? It vanished in much the same way that your operating system vanishes into the background. As you are reading the article, are you really aware of whether you are using Linux or Windows or OSX? Of course not. But you see Firefox or IE or Safari all the time because it intrudes on your life so boldly.

Chrome is not a web browser. It is the platform on which your application software runs. Reuters picked this up when it reported,

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said Chrome was designed to address the shift to using software from within a Web browser rather than as locally installed computer applications running inside Microsoft Windows or some other operating system.

“I think operating systems are kind of an old way to think of the world,” Brin told a group of reporters after the news conference at Google’s Mountain View, California headquarters.

in Google sees new browser displacing desktop software.

Does this sound familiar? Pick your poison:

1. Microsoft Windows + Microsoft Outlook + Microsoft Exchange + Microsoft Office
2. Google Chrome + Google GMail + Google Calendar + Google Docs

Is this good or bad? That is the $64 question, of course. Google’s web-based applications carry no license fees and ought to be highly reliable. But they come with advertisements and the implicit agreement that you trust Google to manage your data properly. Naturally, Chrome will also run other applications, just like Microsoft Windows runs applications which were not written by Microsoft. But by providing one platform which runs identically across all computers, and which is written and maintained by the same Google which provides all of those whiz-bang applications, you can bet that Google is assuring a first-class user experience if you settle comfortably into the Google environment whole heartedly.

Which do you want on your computer? Microsoft Windows or Apple OSX or Linux… or Google Chrome?

LibraryThing did something amazing last Thursday: it made images of the covers of a million books available for anyone to use for free. This is way better than using Amazon.com’s book covers because you can display them without linking to Amazon. If you are a library or an independent book store, having links on your web site which can draw your patrons or customers to Amazon is not a particularly good thing. It is obviously better than a commercial book cover service because, well, it’s free.

Here is an example. I own a copy of 100 Great Fantasy Short, Short Stories. Since I am using a LibraryThing cover, I can legally link the image to the LibraryThing description (which I have done) or I could have linked it to my own LibraryThing catalog or to anything else I choose.

There are a couple of small potential problems and these prompted me to write a little caching script for the LibraryThing covers. First, you need to use your own developer key to obtain the covers from LibraryThing and there is a slight chance that you could exceed the maximum number of covers per day that LT is willing to provide to you. Second, since I am quite sure that this service will be very popular, LT’s servers could get a bit overburdened if everybody hits them for images.

The solution? Install my little LTcovers PHP script on your own web server. It is just a single file and needs a single directory in which it can store copies of the book cover images that you need. As your patrons/customers/users display covers on your web site, LTcovers will grab the images from LibraryThing and keep a local copy. Once configured, it needs no maintenance.

What do you need?

1. The ltcovers.php script. Right-click on that link and “Save As” ltcovers.php on your own web server.
2. Your own LibraryThing developer key. It’s free and you need to have your own.
3. You might want a 1×1 pixel transparent GIF image as a default image, in case you request a cover which LibraryThing does not have. You can download one from here. (Use “Save As” again.)

My LTcovers script is available for free under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The images from LibraryThing are available under these terms, “You also agree to some very limited terms: You do not make LibraryThing cover images available to others in bulk. But you may cache bulk quantities of covers. Use does not involve or promote a LibraryThing competitor. If covers are fetched through an automatic process (eg., not by people hitting a web page), you may not fetch more than one cover per second.”

I hope that between LibraryThing and this script, you can save a few dollars (if you are now paying for a commercial book cover service) and provide a better experience for your web site visitors (if you are now linking to Amazon).

Shameless commercial plug: If you want to use LTcovers but cannot install it on your own web server, Hen’s Teeth Network will be glad to provide you with a small hosting account quite suitable for running it. We will even install LTcovers for free if you sign up for one of our hosting accounts.

Sure. Go head. Call tech support and tell him that the web site is down. No problem.

Did I admit that my business is hosting and supporting web sites? Nah. Didn’t think so.

Late last night, I ran across podPress, “a dream plugin for podcasters using WordPress. It’s so cool that Candy went to sleep… because I was donking around with the computer far into the night.

I have updated my two previous podcast postings, Podcast #1 and Performance Bonuses for Politicians. If you get a chance, go back and look at them again and let me know what you think of this player/downloader.

Also, podPress seems to provide its own podcast feed so if you have already added my feed to iTunes, please replace it with this: http://cheerfulcurmudgeon.com/?feed=podcast

Spam disgusts me. It has rendered free email, one of the most heartfelt examples of human cooperation, completely untenable.

I have been relying on email, for business and personal connections, since I worked at TRW in 1980. I used to run a medium-sized UUCP hub at FileNet in Orange County, CA on a VAX 750 named Felix with five 2400 baud Racal-Vadic modems. Email was not really free in those days. Everyone paid for their equipment and their phone calls with real cash.

The beauty of the email system, though, was that we all cooperated. We relayed each other’s email on the assumption that if everybody did what they could, then everybody would benefit. It worked. For the person with fingers on the keyboard, email was free and pretty darned quick. Even for-fee email systems like CompuServe and MCI Mail installed gateways between the “free” outside world and their customer base.

When the ARPAnet opened up into the publicly available internet, the intricate cooperation of UUCP sites relaying email after 11:00pm (when the long distance telephone rates were at their lowest) was no longer necessary. Virtually any company could have “an internet connection” and it got a whole lot easier to send an email message.

The advent of the internet meant that there was no direct relationship between the number of messages sent (or the size of the messages) and the cost to the company. The T-1 line cost the same whether it was sending email messages or sitting idle. The notion of free email persisted, easily transitioning from “free because of my neighbors’ generosity” to “free because no one wants to do a cost analysis of the networking hardware and connections and allocate it to individual email messages.”

In our naiveté, we cared about staying in touch with each other so much that we had built a system to make communication easy without worrying much about security. After all, if you send an email message, presumably you want the recipient to respond. If that is the case, why would you use a forged return address?

It turns out that there are several reasons to tweak your return address, if not forge it outright. The most common is that you are sending your email from one computer (at work, perhaps) but you want the responses to go somewhere else (to your home, for instance). This is almost always true, especially today when extremely few of us actually log into the computer which handles our email.

In 1984, the Moscow Institute for International Affairs demonstrated another reason to fake the return address: April Fools Day. If you remember the political climate in 1984, you can well imagine the belly-aches and belly-laughs which ensued when the Kremlin sent a message directly to American computer users! You can still read the original message, archived at Google Groups, and you can read about the hoax at Wikipedia.

A decade later, the most nefarious reason to forge a return address cropped up: the message is spam and the sender most definitely does not want the recipients to respond via email. The spammer just wants your money, usually illegally, and wants to hide his identity. This is so effective that we are all drowning under a deluge of crap which obscures the messages we do want. We waste time dealing with the spam. We waste money on software to filter out the spam. If we are employers, we waste money paying our employees to deal with spam instead of doing their jobs.

So if we all hate spam, why does it keep getting worse? The answer is surprisingly easy: money. It turns out that we don’t all hate spam. A few people actually spend money in response to receiving spam: not many but enough to make spamming wildly profitable. I won’t delve into the details; you can look them up on Google. Try searching for “spam economics” or something similar. The bottom line is that it costs essentially $0.00 to send a spam message. If you can send a million spam messages for free and you make a few sales, you have made a phenomenal profit.

I love technology but I have to admit: technology is not solving the spam problem. Spam keeps getting worse. My business, Hen’s Teeth Network, is pretty typical. Here is a graph showing our incoming email volume over the last seven days:

The dark green stuff at the bottom represents the only messages that I want to receive. The rest is crud, a lot of it downright dangerous.

If technology won’t fix the problem, how about the law? The feds passed the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and not only has it failed to solve the problem but spam volume continues to escalate. Many states have passed their own anti-spam legislation. None of it matters. Few would argue that we see less spam in 2007 than we did in 2003.

One good option remains: change the financial environment in which spam thrives. If it costs more to send spam then the money to be made off of it, spammers will stop sending the stuff. For the spammer, it’s all about the money. You can be certain of this: the spammer has nothing personal against you. He does not want to annoy you. He just wants your money. More to the point, he wants to receive more money than he spends. We may be failing abysmally at reducing the amount of money that the spammer receives. Fortunately, we can easily change the amount of money that he spends.

It is time to abandon the “free” email system that we built back in the good ol’ days. Let’s start paying to send email messages.

Holy cow! Did Art really say that?!

Yes, I did. Email has never been free, anyway. It cost significant amounts of money way back when and it still costs money now. These days I shell out hard cash for spam filtering software and I do it every month. Obviously, I’m willing to spend money to send email. You are, too. You spend money for an internet connection. You spend money for virus scanning software (to make your email and web surfing safe). You probably spend money for spam filtering and anti-phishing software. Here is my proposal:

Let’s establish a completely new email infrastructure where it costs a penny to send an email message. Messages sent via the new system land in a separate inbox from the traditional email. Spammer’s won’t use this system because their profit margins are nowhere near 1%. They would lose money big-time if they tried to pay $0.01 for each message.

But the spammers already use hapless victims’ computers to send their messages. This just means they will spend the hapless victims’ money, too.

No, it doesn’t. We are really good about protecting the things we spent money on. When was the last time you let someone steal your postage stamps or place unauthorized calls on your cell phone? Perhaps you would buy a “roll” of a hundred email stamps. If this vanishes, you’ll sit up and take notice. Sure, you only lost $1.00 but it is still a tangible loss. The flip side is that once your “roll” of email stamps is gone, your machine will no longer spew spam. At a cost of a whole dollar, we have both stopped the spammer dead in his tracks and brought to your attention that someone is stealing from you.

A penny per message is too much. Small businesses and individual people can’t afford it.

Oh come on. Get real. I send a lot of email. In the first half of 2007, I sent 2,343 messages. That would have cost me a whopping $23.43. That includes 1,753 business messages ($17.53) which my company would have paid for and leaves me with a personal six-month bill of a massive $5.90.

We can afford a penny per message. We are already paying way more than that.

I seem to be an internet omnivore, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project

Omnivores make up 8% of the American public.

Members of this group use their extensive suite of technology tools to do an enormous range of things online, on the go, and with their cell phones. Omnivores are highly engaged with video online and digital content. Between blogging, maintaining their Web pages, remixing digital content, or posting their creations to their websites, they are creative participants in cyberspace.

Where do you fit? Take the quiz to find out. Candy and I each fit into groups with median ages two decades younger than we are. I guess that means we have something in common.

As much as I love technology toys tools, there is one category that does not seem to pique my interest: e-books and e-magazines. Despite that, Zinio recently caught my eye. Unlike the on-line versions of magazines, Zinio is offering scans of the paper product. That means that you can read the ads. You can see the photos. Everything.

I like their business model. You can subscribe to pretty much any magazine and read it on your computer. You can buy single issues. Subscription prices are the same as paper mail subscriptions. You can cancel subscriptions for refunds of the unused portion, just like paper mail subscriptions. You can even print (most) magazines, although only two pages as a time.

Zinio’s software particularly impresses me. When reading an article, all you have to do is push the space bar. That will move the “viewport” down the page. When you get to the bottom of the page, it will move the viewport to the top of the next column. Very clean and intuitive. If you are zoomed in, Zinio even zooms out briefly so that you can see where you are going; then it zooms back in.

Unfortunately, as good as Zinio is, it cannot overcome my barriers to e-magazines: I do not carry my laptop with me everywhere that I want to read. Instead, I keep most of my magazines in the library. Last night, it was a simple matter to scoop one up as I left to pick my son up at the YMCA. When I finish with a magazine, I usually toss it onto my son’s bed so that he can read it. None of these things are impossible with a computer, just more difficult.

Sure, there are e-book readers but with prices significantly greater than $0.00, I am unlikely to have one in the library, one in my briefcase, one by my easy chair, one by my wife’s chair, etc.

Don MacAskill over at SmugMug (my favorite photo sharing site) brought my attention to OpenID, a budding solution to an old computer problem: If you use a computer, you have way too many passwords to conveniently remember. You might use one or two passwords, perhaps a simple one for web sites that you do not care much about and a more complex, carefully guarded one for things like your bank account. The thorny problem pricks you when one site has a policy which prevents you from using your favorite password and you have to create a special one for just that site: how do you remember it?

The ideal solution is simple (as ideal solutions are wont to be): You sign in once and everything just magically knows who you are.

Before we continue this discussion, let me introduce just a couple of technical terms: Read the rest of this entry »

Are you wondering what is new in Firefox 2.0? Read eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Firefox 2 Final Release.

Download Firefox (for free) from Mozilla.com.

Ms. Dewey is simply too funny. Crank up your speakers and prepare for a hillarious Flash event.

I don’t think that she will replace Google but then again… you never know….

I continue to find more uses for the wonderful (and $free) LibraryThing. Like so many of us, I have bunches of books that I have never had a good way to keep track of but now I do. Like…

• My wish list — yes, I do accept donations
• My to-be-read list. Most of these books are already at home, piled on bookshelves and waiting for me to remember (or rediscover) them and savor them.
• Books which I find at the library and want to remember have a list of their own.
• And then there are the not-owned books which I enjoyed but have given away.

These last few lists will keep growing as I recall old friends which no longer live with me. For now, I am still simply racing through the books which are still here.