Jay Leno did a bake-off between morse code and text messaging to see which one is faster. Watch it to find out if Motorola will be implementing a morse code SMS input mode on their next phone.

 › technology     2008-04-14 12:14   ...0 comments

Several years back I wrote about Captchas. By now we’re all familiar with them, they’re the little automated “please type these words” tests that websites use to stop automated systems from posing as users.

A very cool new project has popped up called Recaptcha that is getting users to digitize historical books by offering a captcha service to websites. They want digital copies of very old books, and scanning and using OCR (optical character recognition) just produces too many errors. What they do is take images of two words and present them as a captcha all over the net. You type the two words in, they get the help and you prove you’re human. It’s a great solution.

You can use this too. You can use their public “mailhide” api when you need to post your email address online. You post a link to their site and they reveal your real address only if a human correctly answers the captcha. It’s called Mailhide. Here’s my address: c…@orange-carb.org

Learn more about how Recaptcha works over here.

 › technology     2008-03-28 09:15   ...1 comment

Emacs is a pretty good editor. Recently I’ve been hosting a traditional music show and I find myself needing to type accents for Irish and Scottish. This is of course in addition to the french accents I’ve been needing for years.

I use the Mac OS X Terminal application and the system lets me enter accents using dead keys. I hold option and press e to set up an acute accent, then press e again and get é.

This worked in the shell, but did not work in emacs. Now, emacs has lots of different ways to do its own keyboard entry, but I wanted my mac keys to work.

To complicate matters, I use emacs on at least one machine running FreeBSD 4 which does not support UTF-8 encodings (the mac default).

I have had success with the following combination:

Now I can type and paste accented text into the terminal application and thence into emacs. The accents come through OK and seem to save and email OK too!

 › technology     2007-02-12 16:08   ...1 comment

I’ve recently upgraded my speakers and things are sounding fantastic around here at the moment. (Although I am a bit disappointed to discover that I was sold “last year’s model” that in truth was discontinued in 1999, gonna talk to them about that.)

Yesterday my friend Bob came over with a stack of his CDs to check them out for himself. It’s likely to have been an expensive visit for him because he agreed with me about how enjoyable the speakers are.

We listened to probably 30 discs, with a wide range of production values. A handful of those discs were obviously poorly produced and their flaws were laid bare. What was interesting was that those crummy discs were pretty evenly distributed across the time period we listened to… from the old days to today.

Anyway, bad CDs isn’t the point of this blog entry. The point of this blog entry is to discuss the obsession that people seem to have with digital things. My new speakers, for example, have the words digital monitor on the box. These are speakers, folks, they accept an analog signal and produce analog soundwaves. What’s digital about them? Nothing. Why do they say digital on the box? Marketers have decided that its a desirable term.

Anyone who thinks that CD audio is equivalent to an analog recording has never listened to a variety of CD players side-by-side on the same equipment. CD players are an instrument (in the musical sense), and vary in their ability to perform (in the musical sense) the string of numbers on the disc. CDs have many advantages over traditional analog recordings in terms of longevity, and it is true that digital signals are largely due immune to noise (although this is not true in digital devices with poor power supplies, which is most of them). I am not a vinyl purist, I think the tradeoffs made by CDs are good. But I am not onboard with the digitization of broadcasting (e.g. digital radio) which requires ridiculous destruction (compression) of the audio data.

Today I’m listening to CKCU and the audio sounds just as good as if I were listening to those CDs right here in the house or in the studio. Yet, CKCU is broadcasting that signal over the air from 20 km away, and it can easily be received by everyone in a 100 km radius.

Radio signals broadcast in FM are analog signals, and can (in theory) reproduce signals exactly at huge distances. All the subtleties of the buzzing of the pipes, the breath sounds of the singer, the fret noises of the guitar are coming through in fantastic detail. Once decoded into analog by the CD player at the station, this 50 year old technology is beaming a perfect copy of that signal into my house and onto my speakers.

Many people these days are easily satisfied. They purchase 128 kilobit/s recordings from online stores and listen to crummy feeds from around the world. These feeds surely offer an inexpensive and plentiful source of music. From a cultural point of view they are great. But they don’t stand up to good old FM radio for reaching power and good listening.

 › technology     2006-01-29 14:05   ...0 comments

PhoneHerald Broadcast Dialer 1.0 ships today. It has been a very very long week, but I can now announce this publically.

PhoneHerald is designed to place calls automatically for things like appointment reminders, overdue notices, and attendance notifications. It calls folks up, delivers a personalized message and then can accept a response (or even transfer the person to an operator). It’s cool. And it’s a great complement to our existing PhoneValet product that answers calls. (Perhaps we should get the one product talking to the other or something.) This product is a bit more business-focussed than PhoneValet so that’s complementary too.

This has been our smoothest product release ever <touches wood> but even a smooth product release takes a lot out of you. I’m looking forward to some slowing down a bit now.

 › technology     2006-01-09 03:46   ...0 comments

I am listening to Christmas songs in an attempt to start programming Christmas morning’s special edition of Music from the Glen. Maddy Prior’s CD A tapestry of carols has a track called Personent Hodie, a thirteenth century Christmas hymn. I misread this initially as “Persistent Hoodie” which I thought was a strange name for a track.

While doing random searches on the word ‘Hodie’, which I like, I found this interesting story about a Multics latin error message. I love that. The message translates to ‘today unto the Root a brother is born’ and refers to a problem where the root of the filesystem tree has a sibling node (which is impossible, and therefore is a pointer bug).

I think I am going to start writing latin error messages into my code. There is an online translator here.

 › technology     2005-12-20 23:16   ...3 comments

You’ve heard about cat-5 wiring… how about just leaving the wiring part off.

Here’s a suggestion for using cats to carry wifi signals. (Also some funny comments here in the metaquotes community regarding powering the cats.)

 › technology     2005-11-18 18:34   ...0 comments

Well folks, here’s a meta-blog entry for you. And it’s related to Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science to boot!

I’ve been having problems with spammers. They come and leave comments like ‘Very nice blog. Why not check out my great Viagra site at www.badsiteyoudonotwanttovisit.com.’

I had a great scheme that diverted spammers to expensive downloads of Microsoft operating systems, but it depended on knowing their addresses. Now spammers come from so many addresses that I can’t keep up with making the list.

My new solution is to use a captcha. Like everything else in this crazy business, captcha is an acronym for ‘Completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart’. A mouthful for sure. A captcha basically asks you to answer a skill testing question.

Sites like Yahoo! and Google use them to stop robotic computer programs for signing up for free email accounts. Big sites have complicated captchas that are hard for computers to break. My little blog has an easy captcha: read the mathematical question and type the answer. I suspect that even the most math-phobic human could answer my captcha.

So, folks, I’m sorry to inconvenience you, but please type one character into a field to prove you’re human when you leave me a comment.

Oh, and here’s some more captcha tests to play with if you’re so inclined. I like Bongo and Pix.

 › technology     2005-09-25 23:48   ...7 comments

Steganography means ‘hidden writing’. It has a long and proud tradition, with ideas dating back to the 1400s and 1500.

Steganography is the art of hiding a message so that it can easily be read, but only if you know where and how to look. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an encrypted message (although sometimes it is) it just has to do with hiding it.

One example of Steganography is that of an ancient Greek slave who had a message about invasion plans tattooed on his shaven scalp. When the messenger arrived at his destination the message was hidden under his hair, but when the scalp was re-shaved the message became visible. Steganography: hidden writing.

You may be surprised to know that Steganography is a feature in many colour printers and photocopiers. It turns out that the US Secret Service has deals with printer manufacturers to print tiny dot patterns which identify the printer used to make the print.

That’s right. If you make a colour printout, the serial number of the printer used is encoded right into your lovely colour output. That means that the US government can just read the serial number right off the page, and obtain your name and address from the store that sold you the printer.

Think twice before making a colour pamphlet advertising your next political demonstration! Big brother is watching!

Props to Chris for forwarding me the URL

 › technology     2005-08-10 12:10   ...1 comment

PhoneValet Message Center 3.0 (with my our new web access PhoneValet Anywhere and our new PodCasting Bundle) has just won the coveted MacWorld Best Of Show award. That’s the second year running for us. Looks like the last few weeks of hard work have paid off.

 › technology     2005-07-13 17:12   ...1 comment

I am at Apple’s developer conference in San Francisco this week. Of course, the big announcement of the week is that Apple is going to transition away from IBM’s Power PC processor line and move to Intel’s microprocessors (the same ones that generally run Windows).

While here I’ve been scanning Google News and it seems that a lot of pundits out there are venting a lot of hot air about this. I have to say — from the point of view of someone at the conference — this issue seems to be a bit overblown!

I think that IBM has not been able to deliver. We’ve been waiting for a 3 GHz G5 processor for two years now. Did IBM really think Steve was going to stand up at the keynote and apologize again? Plus, the G5 processors we’re seeing are still way too hot to put into a laptop. The G5 server requires eight fans, and the dual processors feature liquid cooling. You’re not going to want to cart those babies around too much.

Now most readers know that I came to Apple’s world through the NeXT world. Apple’s takeover of NeXT was truly a reverse takeover. NeXT’s CEO returned to head Apple, and the main technical team at NeXT took over the Apple positions. Apple’s technologies are NeXT technologies or NeXT-inheritors. What people don’t seem to remember is that NeXT’s OpenStep technologies ran on four platforms: Motorola m68k, Intel i386, Sun Sparc and HP PA-Risc. That worked boringly well, and all the operating system tools to support fat universal binaries that we used then have been shipping in Mac OS X since release 1. So supporting multiple architectures is no worry for us at all.

Apple has survived because they could convince a few people that their computers are better than Dell’s. Their computers are no longer much better than Dell’s from a performance perspective and the only way to resolve that issue is to get off the chips that are slowing them down.

As for other definitions of the word better, well Apple will likely be shipping computers that look identical to today’s machines except with custom Apple-designed motherboards that happen to feature Intel processors. Few buyers will know and fewer will care that the technology inside is different from last week. I do not believe Apple will let their OS run on crummy off the shelf machines, so Apple will continue to be a leader in design and great hardware.

So, no worries!

 › technology     2005-06-09 17:59   ...1 comment

Jen’s experience must have been a pilot here in town because now TD is offering a free iPod shuffle if you switch your chequing account to them.

They do the work for you to change the accounts over. There are a few conditions (like you need direct deposit or pre-auth bill payments) but I can confirm that Jen did in fact get a free iPod shuffle from them.

It’s interesting to me that the iPod is such a consumer phenomenon that even banks are now giving them out for free.

 › technology     2005-06-01 18:08   ...4 comments

I like the Safari web browser, but it is lacking a privacy option that I think is important. I want Safari to accept cookies, but to throw them away at the end of my session.

Background about cookies for those not in the know: The web serves files over transient connections. That means that if you request two web pages in a row from the same server, the server has no idea that you are the same person requesting both pages. This is both a great benefit and a terrible mistake in terms of system design. It is a benefit because (amongst other reasons) the powers that be have trouble tracking an individual to profile their use of the web. It is a mistake because many sites (think of your online banking) want to establish a session with you; they want to authenticate you using your password and then exchange a number of requests with someone who they hope continues to be you.

To partially mitigate the problem, Netscape developed the Cookie system. It was a silly name, but the idea was OK… The website essentially tells your web browser to take a number, and present that number whenever it asks for a page. Now you can have sessions, because that number identifies you. As long as the server gives out numbers intelligently, it can be reasonably sure that you are still you. This is how your online banking works.

Cookies have a light side and a dark side. They can help you do your online banking and then expire when you quit your browser. The site that hands it out can also ask that it be retained until a certain time; this is more problematic. This is how Amazon.com always seems to know your name, your browsing habits and what books you might like.

As you know, many browsers allow you to switch off cookies. This is a bad trade-off, however, if you want to do any banking online, or establish a session with any website at all. A few very good browsers allow you to do something smart: accept all the cookies, but throw them away when your browser is closed — even if the website had asked that they be kept indefinitely. That means that Amazon can try to track you (and they will, while your browser is open) but tomorrow you look like a new person they’ve never seen before. Meanwhile your banking keeps working.

Safari does not support this option. Which is my biggest irritation with it. However, someone has found a way to manipulate the filesystem permissions to produce the same effect! There’s a discussion of how to do it here. I haven’t tried it in Tiger, but it works in Panther!

 › technology     2005-04-18 22:57   ...0 comments

There. The title of this entry is sure to irritate Andrew.

I’m sitting in the living room, pretty much surrounded by iBooks. My old G3 is here (#1), as well as the iBook of the weirdo fonts (#2) and the spanky new iBook of the having half my files on it (#3). As well, Jen is in the office working on her old G3 (#not_appearing_in_this_film).

The goal of this entry is to bring you up to speed on the iBook situation. As you may recall, iBook #1’s screen gave out (again) and needed to be replaced. Hence, the order and subsequent delivery of iBook #2 (which looked wonky).

I talked my way through three phone support people to the ‘product specialist’ for iBooks at Apple. He went away for a week to talk to the designers of the iBook. After a THREE WEEK long game of phone tag I finally got in touch with him again, and he said they’d decided the problem was hardware. I had the choice of taking it in for a new logic board, or do a replacement. In the end I decided to order another G4 iBook, transfer my files onto it, and then return the old one. (A return option was offered to me because the issue was reported within 10 days of receipt.)

iBook #3 looks much better than iBook #2. Also, it was shipped from ASUS in China rather than from the Taiwanese factory (go go FedEx tracking) and so it has a different (nicer) keyboard and a nicer font for the ‘iBook G4’ under the monitor.

So now I can take in iBook #1 for service, and soon will be able to mail back iBook #2 for disposal, and then can enjoy iBook #3 — hopefully for a long time. I have a lot of power adaptors though… will have to sort that out.

 › technology     2005-03-06 15:11   ...1 comment

Want to see how bad my new iBook’s video really is? I took some macro photos of the screen of the old iBook and the new iBook.

Check it out here

I have a call into Apple, and they are raising the issue with their engineers. That will take a few days (up to a week) so we’ll see what happens!

 › technology     2005-01-19 12:55   ...8 comments

Well, my new iBook has arrived. So far things have gone fairly smoothly in terms of moving my files across (go go target disk mode and ditto). Things seem to be fairly snappy although much of my telnetting and web surfing seems to be about the same speed as before. That pig that is Photoshop seems to be a bit snappier though!

I’m not sure how I feel about the display yet. It looks a bit out of focus (not possible on an LCD) and I believe that some fonts display a bit too fat. I will play with some of the display options tomorrow in hopes of improving things a bit.

Anyway, the switch has been made. It does look like the old machine will eventually be sold, not sure how that’s going to go yet. It will go out to get its monitor replaced first.

 › technology     2005-01-19 00:50   ...2 comments

Those of you following along will know of my current obsession with RandomWeb, the screen saver that shows you random photos off the net.

Well, I’ve had conversations with several people about how long it would take before someone I knew cropped up. We all said haha, forever.

http://crazney.net/pics/personal/20031214/original/DSCN1102.JPG

I’ve been using it only a month, and I think I’ve only had to download about 500 photos. Does the fact that I know 3 people in this photo get me any further points?

This must prove something regarding the connectedness of all people and things.

 › technology     2004-11-20 08:53   ...5 comments

Finally decided to break down and make a half-decent looking NSBezierPath for SlimBatteryMonitor’s icon. Thus, earlier released SlimBatteryMonitor 1.2. It has the new icon shape, some options for 2 battery powerbooks, and takes away a misfeature that was causing problems on recent powerbooks.

It is getting good reviews on VersionTracker and MacUpdate. It has been downloaded about 2000 times today… not too shabby!

 › technology     2004-11-17 00:32   ...0 comments

Well, (crosses fingers) I hope I’ve solved a long standing AirPort issue tonight. I had this problem where a “The password you entered is not correct for the preferred AirPort network” came up every time one of our laptops woke from sleep or was powered on.

For a while this went away on my laptop, but I changed the encryption key tonight, and then it started happening again.

Through trial and error I have got it working again, and it works now on Jen’s mac too. For the record, here is what I had to do to get things working right again.

1. Configure the wireless access point to broadcast the SSID (network name)
2. Open the Keychain Access application in /Application/Utilities
3. Delete the Keychain entry corresponding to the SSID in question
4. Select a different network (or turn AirPort off)
5. Select the SSID from the menu bar
6. You’ll be prompted for the network password. Select the hex key option and enter it with no ‘$’ at the front. Add it to the keychain too.
7. Open the Location system preference pane
8. Select Join a specific network if not already selected, and select SSID from the combo box
9. Paste or type in the network password. THERE IS NO LONGER A NEED TO PRECEDE IT WITH A $ CHARACTER ANYMORE.
10. Apply changes
11. Reconfigure access point to hide the SSID
12. Test with a sleep-wake cycle. You should be good.

This has taken me numerous hours to do. #@*@*&*$#@ apple for putting controls in too many places with poor documentation

 › technology     2004-08-18 20:37   ...2 comments