Is something wrong with Google's spam filter, or is there a new spammer on the block, even more vicious than the last? I noticed for several months that the spam count was going down, but now it's going back up, fast.

that's cool, actually

Robo-Babe

via MetaFilter

Smart Skaters: “We had some pretty damn smart skaters who perfectly understood the mechanics and converted them to math - right down to the mile-long algorithm written just for pumping alone.” Blackwood adds. “The whole physics team spent half a day at a local old-school snake-run to come up with that.”

AT&T finally offers Text Accessibility Plan for the deaf and hard of hearing users who want to use the iPhone for unlimited text messaging and have no use for the voice option.

CSUEB Bandwidth Speed Test

Download Speed: 22907 kbps (2863.4 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 16717 kbps (2089.6 KB/sec transfer rate)

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Captioning Sucks

Courtesy of Captioning Sucks.
The Open and Closed Project is trying to establish a set of standards for captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing. Right now, there is no standard. Each company is choosing its own way of providing accessibility to video, which is why quality can vary so widely because people don't have an idea of the minimum threshold of what is accessible. Is subtitle enough compared to closed captioning, for example? Subtitles do not capture anything other than dialog, such as explosion, music playing, word mouthing, et cetera, while captioning does focus on capturing everything that is heard.

Censorship watch

Something to keep track of. Wikileaks leaked many sensitive documents, some of which angered the Chinese government enough to try to censor it. Now, the California court is censoring it by ordering it to shut down. Thus far, www.wikileaks.org no longer has a DNS, preventing people from seeing the website. However, there are a lot of "cover names" for occasions just like these.

The DNS is http://88.80.13.160/.

The list of cover names can be found at http://wikileaks.cx/wiki/Wikileaks:Cover_Names.

MacBook Air truly explains why Apple went with Intel and not AMD. Only Intel has the almost limitless resources to do anything Apple demands, simultaneously. It shrunk the Core 2 Duo to the size of a dime and the thickness of a nickel, it transitioned to 45 nm in the Penryn, and it is raising the clock speed as well. Only Intel can do that.

AMD doesn't have the resources to change gears so dramatically. Steve Jobs would have lost patience, regardless of what people tout as AMD's "cleaner design."

my opinion on iphone bricking

I love it. On one hand, yes, it's not a good thing to do to people who want their iPhone to do more and it has hurt people who haven't even installed any third-party applications. This is Apple's attempt to help protect its ally AT&T by taking some flacks.

And well they should.

On the other hand, I know hackers love challenges. And the iPhone's upgraded software presents a brand-new challenge for them. After so many different ways to break into the iPhone have been offered, the hackers must have been bored. Now, they will not be bored.

This tug of war may continue until after AT&T and Apple's contract expires, or indefinitely.

sudo kill -KILL

I do enjoy killing a runaway process. Or even if it isn't running away, like Firefox.

I am annoyed when someone leaves Firefox running with 15 tabs, nine of which are looking coupons and discounts for Fry's or some online outlet. I don't mind that, but I do mind those sites using process-intensive Flash advertisements. Orbitz is among the worst offenders.

It's probably the reason why the iPhone Safari doesn't run Flash, not only is there no need for it, but if there was, its usefulness decreases exponentially with every flashing banner telling me to shoot the duck.

So, I kill the process on Mac using "sudo kill -KILL" and its PID number.

I could also have used "sudo kill -STOP" to stop/suspend the process rather than kill it, and resume it later with "sudo kill -CONT".

Or maybe I'll install a Flash blocker, which gives you the freedom to choose when to enable it (such as when you want to play a game).

less reason to trust apple

Amazing. The iPhone price dropped by $200 with no compensation (as yet) to the early adopter. What I find disturbing is someone who saved two paychecks to buy an iPhone. What? If you can't afford it, why would you buy one, and then complain about it? It's similar to the idea of finding a nice, big-screen TV in a house owned by those "below the poverty level."

We really should teach children how to resist advertising messages that are designed to distort reality. So when they grow up, they will avoid being so easily seduced.

Two paychecks!? And as I said, Apple is fundamentally a proprietary company that, as I recall, support Microsoft Office Open XML over the OpenDocument Format. This price drop could also be regarded as a way to screw the hackers that cracked the iPhone. It could also be a response to China's distribution of an iPhone clone.

It's a splendid business move for Apple, admirable in its scope, suddenness and perhaps greed. It gives one more reason for me to remain attached to free-software and/or open-source cause. You never have to worry about buyer's remorse because there are no secrets. Milestones are acknowledged with little steps taken along the way, not announced dramatically or teased. Everything is open. You can read about Ubuntu's newest version (Gutsy Gibbons) to be released in October, and know which features are successfully completed, and which are not.

I would rather be a rebel than a soldier fighting for an emperor with Force Reality Distortion Field and Force Lightning. Bill Gates was vilified as "The Borg," assimilating everything in its path, trying to achieve "perfection." If Apple does compensate for the early adopters, then maybe all is forgiven. Maybe.

That doesn't mean, of course, I don't want an iPhone or an iPod Touch. There's something to be said about Jobs' penchant for beautiful design of software and hardware.

Subscription required for China Makes, The World Takes: "One engineer pointed out that because [Windows] Vista requires up to 10 times as much disk space as Windows XP, the assembly line had to be altered to allow a much longer, slower passage through the burn-in station."

Intriguing. Apple's Leopard has increased in size from Tiger, but not by ten times.

Further in the article: "The woman from the hinterland working in Shenzhen [in China] is arguably better off economically than an American in Chicago living on minimum wage. She can save most of what she makes and feel she is on the way up, the American can't and doesn't. Over the next two years, the minimum wage in the United States is expected to rise to $7.25 an hour. Assuming a 40-hour week, that's just under $1,200 per month, or about 10 times the Chinese factory wage. But that's before payroll deductions and the cost of food and housing, which are free or subsidized in China's factory towns."

Provocative. It is something to think about, and can be argued against. In some houses bound up by poverty, you can find a nice, apparently affordable 30" HDTV, which says something about priority of the families. People need entertainment. On the other hand, there may be a culture of low expectation and aversion to challenged. Racism is a complex, but contributing part. A classroom in San Francisco can have a diverse number of students, yet a pattern always emerges with people of Latin- or African-American descents doing worse than white or Asian-American peers.

The question is why? It is the same classroom. We can reasonably expect some students to be "misfits." But why do we see such demarcation of scores parallel the racial boundaries? Needless to say, racial boundaries are superficial. They are also indifferent to the underlying similarities in personality, intelligence, and empathy that tie the human race together. How does and why should historical and socioeconomic factors play a huge role in American achievements?

Could there indeed by some flaws in the American system of individualism? Could individualism benefit immigrants more because they usually have support of their families, heritage and culture, and ironically hurt the American-born most because the fixation on mobility and the belief in self-reliance lead them to live a life of fruitless myth-making? In other words, could the American Dream of a nuclear family in a nuclear house in an exurbia, livable only by freedom of access to a car be hurting the American potentials?

Anyone who wants to read the article can email me. I can send the article by email, which will contain a link allowing access for up to 3 days. (Sorry, that's the Atlantic's own policy.)

document format wars

Office Open XML was shot down by practical tie. The OpenXML format was created to compete with OpenDocument Format, and to permit a supposedly lossless conversion from .DOC format.

What I found interesting was Apple voted in favor of the Office Open XML. It shows the extent of which Apple and Microsoft rely on each other as a David-and-Goliath relationship. Apple has beated Microsoft by releasing iWork '08, which implements the Office Open XML format, before it could release another Office for Mac. Unfortunately, iWork '08 doesn't support OpenDocument Format.

But, there is a post about TextEdit in Leopard (10.5) release that might handle OpenDocument, regardless of the poster's boredom at the ODF.

Slashdot comments: Summary of history and economic cost.

Google, Star Office, and Mac

I caught the new Google Maps feature, which is that you can drag the route to change it. Now it's possible to create your own tour. Let's say you want to go to the Yellowstone National Park. It is now possible for you to designate stops at other famous places along the way.

I noticed that Google Pack (for PC) now offers an option to download a free copy of Star Office 8. Aside from the fruitfulness of this alliance, the promotion of Star Office is also the promotion of the OpenDocument format, accepted as a United Nations standard, ISO/IEC 26300 to permit flow of information regardless of which software is used.

Similarly with the metric system (known as ISO 31, from which the Imperial inch is defined as 2.54 cm) and paper size (known as ISO 216, from which you see A4 paper option in many printers), both of which are adopted around the world, the OpenDocument format will join them in precisely not being well-adopted in the United States.

Microsoft Office and its .doc format is too rooted here to be easily changed. If you receive an OpenDocument file and do not have Star or Open Office, you can download the Sun ODF Plugin. Currently it only supports ODT, for text document, but Calc (like Excel) and Impress (like PowerPoint) are being developed. You are encouraged, however, to install OpenOffice.org. It is superbly stable, and similar enough to Microsoft Word. This may be more ubiquitous if Google's plans for world domination succeed.

Alas, there is no Google Pack for the Apple Mac.

If you want to run OpenOffice on the Mac, you will need to have X11 installed. X11 is known as a "windowing system" like Mac Aqua and Vista Aero, that allows programmers to build the GUI, placing windows and menus just so for people to use. It has been ported to Windows but not the Mac. The Macintosh system is getting popular as people start getting seduced by the iPhone and the iPod, they are beginning to see the power of the Unix-like, BSD-derived Mac OS X. The OS X is the operating system that runs on the iPhone, and is rumored to run on a future generation of iPod. Due to the increasing popularity of the Mac, a version of OpenOffice for the Aqua interface is being developed. It is currently at the alpha stage, meaning that it runs, but is unstable and is not be used except for testing.

google desktop for linux

Without much fanfare apparent, Google Desktop is now available for Linux. There are two packages you can download, one for Red Hat Linux and its derivatives, and the other for Debian-based distributions, including Ubuntu.

I recommend following the instruction for installing Google Desktop from their Linux Software Repositories instead. Once you have added the repository, an update manager for your distribution should automatically notify you of updates to Google Desktop, without your needing to check it manually.

Although Google Desktop is non-free software, I couldn't care less as long as it is good software. I am not a pure-free software advocate. I can't wait to see gadget features and sidebar that I hope will be developed. I love the history that it keeps, even though it can feel like you lost your privacy, but you can find anything you had read just days ago that you thought were lost forever.

An example is Craig's List. As you know, listings expire after seven days. What if you have seen a memorable post that you forgot to save and want to find again? Google Desktop most likely already saved it for you. So, all you need to do is try to remember a key word, a phrase, and look for it in Google Desktop. It saves a history of what you have done, except for https:// sites, which is disabled (unless you choose to enable it).

I hope Google Desktop won't break with each upgrade to a new version of Ubuntu.

wireless networking

Regarding Apple AirPort Extreme and third-party devices. The short answer: It's possible, but probably painful. Link

After looking online, I find that the support for 802.11n in the Linux world to be just starting, i.e. it sucks. There are two or three main projects involved in helping to provide wireless card compatibility. The first is reverse-engineering; the second is following only the IEEE 802.11 standards, and we know that 802.11n will not be standardized until September 2008; the third is using a wrapper software around a Windows driver.

I am not sure Ubuntu will support the 802.11n draft 2.0 card well, but I will keep looking online for more info.

democracy on the net

A problem with Democracy in TV is the Roman saying: De minimis non curat lex. The law does not care for trivial matters.

With concentration of media conglomerates, it's easier for the federal government--the FCC in this case--to enforce a closed-captioning requirements, which benefit all deaf people who may not have access to contents.

With the rise of independent and amateur developers, more and more contents will be made unavailable to the deaf. There was a recent fight against the FCC's creation of a new category of TV programs that does not need closed captioning. The organizations that don't want to caption their video could easily move their contents to YouTube or other video-sharing sites, allowing them to circumvent the FCC laws.

Democracy is blurring the lines between amateur production and business production. It will result in many more people getting cochlear implants because they will need one to participate. Achieving human homogeneity is merely an asymptotic endeavor, we are getting closer.

sdb bombed

I am writing to say that the secondary hard drive of my Ubuntu system, the one in which I stored my /home partition, has given up the ghost. Last night, upon doing a routine fsck check, it brought up the error "Attempt to read from block from filesystem resulted in short read reading block 1547"

This is one of the more "chilling message" you can read on a Unix-like system. From what I've seen online, this is simply the state of a dead hard drive. I have already backed up from several weeks ago, so not all are lost, but of course, it does not have account of the things I had done since then.

Ah, well. That's a problem with being on a cutting-edge. You bleed, then you terrify the mortals with your scars and stories of pestilence, as if you were some silent shaman in contact with the blackest magic.

This, though, was not the fault of Ubuntu. As ever, the fault lies on me, for making such a journey.

Things I read today

From 2006:
When the boughs break
And oranges
Juggling Oranges

microsoft patents

All the years of patenting have built up to this: Pharoah against Moses, the Bald against the Stalling.

There are repeated references to Armageddon. I think all this money could be used for other things. The expenditure for self-preservation is a reality of capitalism, where companies shark on one another and swim against the current to stay in the same place.

This benefit the consumers, absolutely?