Coyote Blog

From a BBC poll:

Almost four in five people around the world believe that access to the internet is a fundamental right, a poll for the BBC World Service suggests.

The survey – of more than 27,000 adults across 26 countries – found strong support for net access on both sides of the digital divide.

Countries such as Finland and Estonia have already ruled that access is a human right for their citizens.

International bodies such as the UN are also pushing for universal net access.

So everyone who ever lived before about 1990 were denied a fundamental human right.  I would rewrite this study either as “80% of people have a silly definition of human rights” or probably more correctly “100% of BBC poll authors do not know how to write a good poll question.”

If you are lonely and want to see your email box quickly fill up with messages from people you have never met, a great way to do that is to be interviewed on a national cable news show.  All of those who have written me, I am trying to get back to you all but I am a bit overwhelmed.

I have started a new blog because, you know, I don’t have enough to do already.  To some extent this is a reaction to a lot of interest I am getting on the topic of recreation privatization, and in part because the nature of climate blogging has changed of late to requiring one to keep up with a fast flow of stories, and I just don’t have the time.  Anyway, the new blog is called Park Privatization.  I hope those who are interested in the topic find it compelling.  If nothing else, at least with this post Google will now find it.  I will still post here regularly and on the climate blog as often as I can.

The first thing I do when I buy a DVD is rip it to my video server.  I have a 10TB RAID and I don’t even try to compress the disks, just copy them over in video_ts format using DVDfab6.    I run SageTV on the server with the absolutely essential SageMC mod.  I then can watch the video at every TV that has a Sage HD200 box.  The whole system works for Bluray as well.

I built the system to try to duplicate a $60,000+ Kaleidoscape system for less than $2000, and the functionality, with some tweaking, comes pretty dang close.  The real work was the drudgery for ripping hundreds of DVD’s, but I had already performed this death march with a much larger CD collection so I knew what I was getting into.   SageTV, by the way, is very rewarding if you want to get your hands dirty messing around in the innards but it is not for those who want plug and play.

Anyway, one of the reasons I did all this, beyond the coolness factor, was this.  I can rip just the main movie out of the DVD, leaving behind menus, trailers, FBI warmings, special features, etc.

Via the Telegraph:

The American blogosphere is going increasingly “viral” about a proposal advanced at the recent meeting of the Davos Economic Forum by Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, that an equivalent of a “driver’s licence” should be introduced for access to the web. This totalitarian call has been backed by articles and blogs in Time magazine and the New York Times.

As bloggers have not been slow to point out, the system being proposed is very similar to one that the government of Red China reluctantly abandoned as too repressive. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, the usual unholy alliance of government totalitarians and big business would attempt to end the democratic free-for-all that is the blogosphere. The United Nations is showing similar interest in moving to eliminate free speech.

I called this one back in 2005.  This isn’t the first attempt by the UN in particular to throttle free speech via licensing way back in 1985.

From a reader, are these really the top searches?

It was pointed out to me that a number of my old posts from my unlamented Typepad era are full of comment spam that carried over into the wordpress database.  My current comment spam filtering for new comments works fine.  Does anyone know of a solution that will actually go back through the data base and mine out old spam?

Just what Windows needs – a bit of competition.    I don’t consider the Apple real competition, because it requires proprietary hardware to run.  And Linux is way too geeky and not packaged well for the average NOOB, though some netbooks have done surprisingly well with it.  Today, however, Google announced a browser-based OS built on top of Linux and entirely open source.  Might not be my cup of Darjeeling, as I am skeptical of a browser dominated OS for anything larger than a phone, but it sure may keep Windows honest.

Google had a low-key event today to preview Chrome OS, its new operating system based on Linux and the Chrome browser. Things are still pretty early — it’s not even in beta yet, let alone on shipping products — but that’s the first official screen shot right there, and the big features are all roughed out. The entire system is web-based and runs in the Chrome browser — right down to USB drive contents, which show up in a browser tab, and the notepad, which actually creates a Google Docs document. Web apps are launched from a persistent apps panel, which includes Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and Hulu, among others, and background apps like Google Talk can be minimized to “panels” that dock to the bottom of the screen. Local storage is just used to speed up the system — everything actually lives in the cloud, so all it takes to swap or borrow machines is a login, and you’re good to go. Google also said it’s “very committed” to Flash, and that it’s looking to hardware accelerate whatever code it can — although Google didn’t have a solid answer to give when asked about Silverlight. Overall, Google was upfront in saying that Chrome OS is focused on very clear use cases for people who primarily use the web, and that it’s not trying to do everything: “If you’re a lawyer, editing contracts back and forth, this will not be the right machine for you.”

On the road this week in Southern California.

For years I have used Adobe Premier Elements v. 3.0 to edit my videos because it worked OK and probably more importantly came in a package with Adobe Photoshop Elements (which is a very good tool, except for the organizer which I don’t like).  But I have a PC with a 64-bit operating system and a quad core CPU for which this older software is not optimized — the old 3.0 was running painfully slowly even on my new computer.   So I downloaded a trial edition of Premier Elements 7 and was horrified at how buggy and unstable it was, without adding any real functionality that I wanted over the old 3.0 edition.  So I then downloaded the brand new v 8.0 and found it if anything even worse.  In retrospect, I could have seen this in the reviews for both products on Amazon.

I have a general rule of thumb that one bad version generation happens, but two in a row means it is time for a change  (the exception to this being Quickbooks, which has had about 4 versions in a row where each is worse than the last, but there is really not a good alternative for me right now).

For video editing, I eventually landed on the oddly named Sony Vegas Movie Studio, v9.0.  I am extremely happy.  It works a lot like Elements used to but is rock solid stable.  I have been working with a 90-minute HD video for 2 days straight without a reboot and it has had no problems and is fast and has all the functionality I could want.  Not for casual applications probably, but I really like it.  I don’t usually write posts like this, but this piece of software almost never makes it into the magazine reviews or comparisons at sites like PC Magazine or CNET.  Not sure why, but its an excellent program.  Thanks to the Amazon community, whose reviews again helped me make a good decision.

Postscript: I have never been wildly impressed with Adobe programming and their most recent iteration of Photoshop Elements really worries me as the organizer seems to be badly bugged.  Their programs have always been pigs — the only way they could get a tolerable load time for Elements was to break the program into four parts and start up with a menu that lets one choose one part or the other.   I know they did this to fight the classic Adobe load time problem (used to have it in spades with Acrobat reader) but I think they have broken something in the process.    You know Adobe programs are a pig when I get impatient for them to load from the new Intel SSD, which generally serves up programs lightening fast.

Olson has a series of posts on the new FTC rules.  They are here and here.

The scariest part for me is not just the rules, but the frank admission that they will be enforced unequally as the FTC says it will apply discretion as to who to prosecute for picayune violations and who they won’t.  As I often say to folks, even if you trust this administration   (e.g. “your guys”) to not abuse this power, what about the next administration (ie “the other guys”)?

Olson has a priceless picture a medical blogger snapped at a recent trade show showing that there is reason to fear that rules aimed at ridiculously small conflicts of interest will be enforced even when they are dumb:

Anyone who has been involved in NCAA recruiting can tell you the absurd results that flow from defining even tiny freebies as violations.  For example, when I interview high school students for Princeton, I have to be careful not to buy them lunch or coffee on the off-chance they turn out to be athletes where such a purchase could trigger a recruiting violation.

I suppose it is difficult maintaining a platform like eBay in a world of ever more sophisticated security intrusions.  But last night eBay went over the line, at least for me, making the platform so secure that I could not use my account.

We have an enormous pile of stuff we have tagged to sell on eBay, but just have not done it yet.  Yesterday, I convinced my son to do all the selling work on eBay in exchange for a revenue split.  As we sat down on his computer to sell the first item together so he could learn the process, eBay refused to let me use my account because I was on a computer it did not recognize or had not used before  (we’ll forget for now the basic creepiness of eBay tracking me well enough to know I was on a new computer it had not seen me on before).

It turns out the whole confirmation process is keyed to the phone number I put in when I started the account.  The problem is that I was an eBay early adopter.  I have had an account for at least 12 years.  In trying to remember the phone number, it was probably not my home number.  That made it either a work number from 4-5 jobs ago or else a fake (remember, in 1997 eBay was just another little startup — I may well have given it a fake phone number).

Anyway, the first verification process involved a phone call.  Whoever owns that phone right now is probably pretty confused.  The second involved an online chat.  I verified my name and account user name and address and all kind of other details, but apparently we just could not get past the agent’s need for me to verify my 12 year old phone number.  She started trying to give me hints – like the area code and the last digit.  I told her that unless she gave me all 10 digits, we weren’t going to get there.

We never did get the account opened on my son’s laptop, he never did learn how to use eBay, and I guess I will still have a big pile of unsold stuff in my garage building up.  At some point I will find a computer eBay recognizes and I guess put in a better phone number, but all momentum with my teenage son is lost  (you know how that goes).

Update: So I did the logical thing, I found a computer that eBay would let me use with my account and changed my phone number in the account page to my new number.  Unfortunately, when I went back through the account verification process back on my son’s laptop, they still wanted me to be able to come up with the old phone number (that number was x-ed out in the account page so I couldn’t just look it up).  Somehow they have come up with a process that appears to be keyed to the phone number you used when you created the account, fine for relatively new users but a broken process for some of us with 12-year-old accounts.  Eventually, by the way, after about 30 minutes I was able to come up with some piece of information that they accepted and I got access to eBay on that computer.

I love Google Reader, but over the last several days have had problems with hundreds, or even thousands of old, already read posts suddenly being marked “unread.”  Anyone else having this problem?

XKCD

Having the dreaded Wordpress WP-Cron bad behavior with my server resources, causing my host to be less than amused.  Working on it….

In Lucifer’s Hammer, one Astronaut up in space observed that you couldn’t see international borders up there.  The other astronaut told him to shut up — if he kept making such a big deal about it, countries would all paint two mile wide stripes in flourescent orange around their countries.

I thought of that when I saw this – corporate branding meets Google Earth.  Hat tip Virtual Globetrotting

View Larger Map

XKCD

Sorry to feed readers for all the spam test posts yesterday.  I thought I was catching them before they hit the RSS feed, but I was obviously wrong.  I did finally figure out how to make email and email picture posts work.

I just got an invited to join Google Voice.  This is a really awesome looking service.  In about 5 minutes I had a phone number in my area code picked out that would be my one number.  I then added phones I had that I wanted this number to ring.  The account gives me web access to voice mail (both a sound file and a written transcript) and text messages.  It also gives me free long distance calling any where in the US, all for $0 a month.  Lots of other features like customized greetings and call forwarding that depends on the caller which I have not played with yet.  Pretty cool.  If you get an invite, I would grab your number.

The hamster who powers my server apparently fell off his treadmill and the server went down for a while today.  Those most affected were probably folks who were trying to comment, as most of the time the blog could read from the server but not write.  Hopefull things are fixed now.

I have been a frequent detractor of Windows Vista.  However, after playing around with the Windows 7 beta for a while, I am very encouraged about this new OS.    For a limited time, Microsoft is offering pre-order sales of Windows 7 home and pro upgrade packages (these require you to already have Windows on your computer).  Prices are $49.99 and $99.99 respectively, which represent a 50% discount to the planned prices of these products at roll-out.  I already bought 3 copies from Amazon  (that is the limit, apparently, that Amazon is setting).  Delivery is not until some time in October.

Amazon links:  Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade and Windows 7 Professional Upgrade.

I am on vacation with my family.  We went to my 25th reunion at Princeton last week, and are now spending some tourist time in Washington DC.  Be back soon.

Get all the information and download links here.  I am going to try this on my extra PC this weekend.

I had to wait until TJIC left, but I joined Facebook today mainly so I can better monitor my kid’s page.  The deal was that he could have a Facebook account but only if he accepted my wife and I as friends and we had access to his pages.

Having gotten an account, I am having nearly as much trouble trying to figure out what I can usefully do with it as I had when I signed up for a Twitter account (dropped within a week) over  a year ago.  Anyone who has ideas of how it might be useful (given that I am not in a business that runs on contact or relationship management) is welcome to send me those ideas.  Also, all you Facebook cultists are welcome to send me “friend” invites.  The least I can do is humiliate my kids by dwarfing their friends lists.   The email on my account is the same as for this blog, which you can get by mousing over the contact button on the top bar of this site.

Via Engadget:

Looks like the rumor of a new larger Kindle is true. Amazon just sent us an invitation to a press conference scheduled for Wednesday, May 6 at 10:30am ET. You know what Amazon does at press events? It launches new Kindles!

As noted by Peter Kafka over at All Things Digital, the location of the Amazon event — Pace University — is the historic, 19th century HQ to the New York Times which is said to be partnering with Amazon on the larger Kindle. That makes for a perfect symbolic bridge from old to new media. We’ll have to wait and see if newspaper subscribers can be lured across.

I was an early Kindle adopter and love my Kindle 2.  My only complaint is the lack of electronic versions of a lot of older books I would like to read (example — various James Clavell novels) but I am hoping this is similar to the early phase of CD’s and DVD’s when publishers had not yet seen the market or had the time to convert older music and movies to the new media.