Live from Austin!

What’s slightly worse than working with whale feces?

Working on security at Microsoft, according to Popular Science.

The Guardian:

In recent years networking sites like MySpace and Facebook have seen remarkable growth and become some of the most heavily trafficked destinations on the internet. But Danah Boyd, a researcher at the University of California and internet sociologist, says populations of different networks are now divided on a rough class basis.

Her evidence, collected through a series of interviews with US teenagers using MySpace and Facebook over the past nine months, shows there is a clear gap between the populations of each site.

“MySpace was the cool thing for high school teens and Facebook was the cool thing for college students,” she wrote in a paper available online. “The picture is now being blurred … it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.”Typical Facebook users, she said, “tend to come from families who emphasise education and going to college. They are primarily white, but not exclusively”. MySpace, on the other hand, “is still home for Latino and Hispanic teens, immigrant teens” as well as “other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm”.
[...]
“A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was a very interesting move because there’s a division, even in the military. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook.”

According to Ms Boyd, Facebook is not used by young soldiers, who are generally less well-educated and from poorer backgrounds, and there is an element of social conflict in the ban.

So, MySpace is Facebook for the uneducated?

Getting a Second Life

Imagine a world where you could create literally anything you could imagine, and explore it in 3D. What would you make?

If your answer was “strip malls and casinos”, I know a place you’ll love.

◊ ◊ ◊

A while back I had the unusual experience of having my employer suggest that I spend some time trying out Second Life. IBM is quite interested in the commercial possibilities of 3D shared environments, and has even set up some experimental conference spaces.

I managed to get into Second Life via the experimental Linux client build. It was slow, but did the job. It was also very good at making ATI’s buggy video drivers crash. But between crashes and bouts of net lag, I managed to explore a little.

What I found was mostly depressing.

When Linden Labs set up Second Life, they had a vision of a William Gibson style cyberspace, with people flying around in 3D conducting business. So they set up their digital world as a free market, with its own currency, exchangeable for real money. Unlike the real world, however, land in Second Life isn’t purchasable; instead, you have to rent it.

This has had an unfortunate effect on the virtual world. If you want to build any kind of building, you need land. If you want land, you need to pay for it with Linden dollars. So you need an ongoing source of Linden dollars, or you need to spend real money. Hence, about half the buildings in Second Life seem to be either strip malls or casinos.

The strip malls mostly sell clothing and other accoutrements for your virtual body. If you buy a building you need land to put it on, and most people don’t have land, so there’s not much point selling buildings.

The space not taken up by casinos and strip malls is taken up by nightclubs. My guess is that they’re mostly owned by the same people who own the adjacent strip malls, and are used as a tool to stimulate the sale of fashionable clothing.

◊ ◊ ◊

I don’t want to give you the impression that it’s all commercial trash, though. There are some great places in Second Life. My favorite is the International Spaceflight Museum, which has scale models of an enormous selection of real life spacecraft. There are some nice Zen Gardens in Achemon. Braunworth has a reimplementation of the town of the first Silent Hill video game which I quite like wandering around.

Sadly, the quality of 3D objects is additionally limited by the fact that everything has to be built inside the game; there are no proper 3D tools, and you can’t (say) construct something with Google’s SketchUp and import it into Second Life.

So, if 95% of the population can’t afford land, can’t work out how to make things, and eventually get bored with watching pixels dance in a nightclub, what does everyone do? Well, mostly Second Life is a giant chat system. It’s IRC with 3D graphics. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it seems such a waste of a 3D rendering engine. And in practice, the 3D doesn’t really add much to the IRC experience.

There are also technical issues. Each patch of land has a limit on how many people can be in it, and the limit gets hit fairly regularly. IBM has resorted to buying a square of 4 patches of land, and building the conference hall where the corners meet. The client is also slow and chews CPU. Even on my brand new MacBook Pro, the frame rate drops rapidly as soon as ten people turn up in the same place.

So, is Second Life the future of the Internet? I’m going to say no, not without some pretty radical improvements. It’s an amusing place to spend a few minutes every now and again, but so far, that’s about all.

Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity.—Werner Herzog

Next door’s chicken didn’t get the memo. Not only does it run from me when I try to catch it and return it to their yard, it has now taken to hiding under their car so I can’t get at it.

It has also developed its flying skills to the point where it can fly over the fence and into our back yard. I don’t bother returning it from the back yard any more, it’s safe enough there and only comes back if I take it home.

I’ve heard that you’re supposed to wash your hands after handling chicken. I’m assuming that’s even more true if it’s ambulatory.

On average, computers last me for about 4 years. Last week, I was still using an 800MHz iMac.

Partly this is down to my being frugal. It’s like the TV situation, where I didn’t buy the HDTV until my family visited and laughed at the 20″ TV, and seemingly made it die of shame shortly afterwards.

Partly it’s because Macs remain usable longer than PCs. A PC Magazine survey found that Macs tend to last 3.9 years on average, compared to 2.4 years for Windows PCs. (Of course, with Linux you can keep an old machine usable for even longer.)

Partly, though, it was because I wasn’t wild about any of Apple’s offerings. The Mac Pro is too big and expensive. The current iMac is unergonomic and (in my view) ugly. The Mac Mini is too limited. The MacBook Pro series used ATI graphics. I was going to wait, and maybe get a plain MacBook as a kind of stopgap, more by a process of elimination than as a matter of choice.

Then Apple revved the MacBook Pro. They ditched the ATI graphics, and put in an LED backlit display in the 15″. I was sold. So, I have a shiny new Mac.

One advantage of making computers last 4 years is you really notice the upgrade when it comes. Going from a 16MHz B&W Mac to a 180MHz PowerPC color Mac was awesome. The switch to a wide screen and dual core CPU is almost as good. I can leave GraphicConverter optimizing PNG files, and the machine stays totally usable. Mail also flies with multiple threads able to run in parallel.

I use each upgrade as a cue to go through my files and clear up. I move old stuff to CDs, make my folder structure more consistent, get rid of cruft, and so on. This time there’s a lot to throw away, because any PowerPC Mac software I was keeping around is now obsolete. One problem area is PhotoShop Elements, because Adobe still haven’t got an Intel native version. The PowerPC one will run under emulation, but I’d rather wait for Adobe to get their act together.

On the plus side, now I can go try all the cool stuff that has appeared in the last year or so, that was too CPU-intensive for my old machine. And maybe do an official Red Pill Intel release.

Yesterday, a server died. Turned out it had bad RAM too.

Today, someone deleted 100MB of files from an important database, and I had to do another restore on the System i.

This afternoon, it was noticed that some config documents were mysteriously not restored by my previous efforts. After investigation, I discovered that someone had helpfully copy-protected a random assortment of configuration documents. I have no idea why.

I’m an iPhone skeptic. While I appreciate good UI design considerably more than the average person, a good UI alone is not enough to make me accept a crippled and overpriced product.

At WWDC today, Steve Jobs has announced that the third party SDK for the iPhone is…make all your applications web applications, and access them from the Safari browser. Which means the user has to pay network bandwidth charges to run the application, and can’t make or receive any calls while it’s running. And of course, no service means your applications all stop working.

So basically, the iPhone is a closed platform, a very pretty but underpowered cellphone. It’s not a smartphone. It lacks even the capabilities of many low-end handsets offered by GSM networks, but it’s going to be sold at a premium price.

Let’s see how it compares with my current 2-year-old phone, for example:

To me, that’s a hell of a tough sell.

You may point out that my tiny phone’s screen isn’t great for browsing the web, but that’s just tradeoff I made because I like a phone that’s truly pocketable. If you prefer a big screen, you can get a Blackberry or Treo for $150 or less. Right now, Cingular has refurb 8525 devices for $99.

I prefer the hybrid solution: pair a small phone with my Nokia N800, and browse the web at triple the resolution of the iPhone. You can get an N800 plus a small Bluetooth phone and you’ve still saved $200 over buying an iPhone.

In addition, most of today’s phones take SD cards for memory expansion. I can dump movies onto a 4GB SD card and stick it in the Nokia. If I need more space, I’ve got a couple of extra 1GB cards floating around. What happens when you use up all the memory in your iPhone? You’re stuck, there’s no expansion option.

If the iPhone was $99, or even $199 at the most, I might be interested. At $599, it ought to sell like the similarly-priced PlayStation 3. It’s the most overpriced Apple product since the Mac Cube. (Which I loved the design of, but didn’t buy because it was overpriced.) It’s the most overhyped since the first Newton.

Oh, I’m sure Apple will sell some. I mean, the Motorola RAZR sucked, but plenty of people had to have it because it looked so cool. But then, the RAZR wasn’t $600…

Friday was definitely the worst Friday ever.

I wandered in to the office with my coffee, and discovered that my main work laptop—an IBM ThinkPad, obviously—had mysteriously powered itself off overnight, instead of merely going to sleep. I booted it, only to get the dreaded Fan error message.

(If you’re falling asleep already, skip down to the moral of the story.)

A fan error is pretty much the kiss of death for a recent laptop. The quest for ever faster and slimmer portable computers means that today’s portables are designed with fans that suck cooling air through their innards. No fan means the machine overheats as soon as you do anything that strains it a bit; and that could be something as trivial as leaving a web browser running on a Flash-heavy web site, especially if you have Eclipse running in the background.

Still, I have a backup laptop, for exactly this eventuality. I keep it mostly synched up with the main one. I started transferring my recent data across. Before long I was logged in to work via the VPN.

I’d just gotten my first batch of e-mail when I discovered that a clever user had found a way to bypass ACL security and replicate an old, shut down database with a new, in production database. This had wiped a chunk of important configuration data.

I found the backup I could get at most quickly, and did a temporary restore. Then I asked a colleague to pull a more recent backup onto a spare partition of the System i server (aka AS/400), which I then used to do a proper restoration.

I had just about finished documenting what had happened and putting new precautions in place to stop it happening again, when my laptop locked up solid. I suspected the ATI video drivers, so I switched back to the open source ones (which are less buggy) and continued.

Overnight, it locked up again. This was very suspicious. To have Linux lock up once, well, that’s not unheard of when proprietary drivers are involved. But to have it lock up twice, the second time with no closed source software running in the kernel—that smelled fishy.

I ran a Memtest86 diagnostic, and sure enough: bad RAM in my backup laptop. Oh joy. I flipped the machine over and swapped the RAM with the DIMM from the machine with a dead fan. The errors continued. So, it looked like an error in the internal RAM. I took the DIMM out of the RAM slot and ran Memtest86 again. Hypothesis confirmed.

I consulted the handy Hardware Maintenance Manual. It turns out the internal RAM can be replaced too, but you have to remove the keyboard to do it. So, I did that and swapped the internal DIMM. This time Memtest86 still looked good after a couple of minutes, so I powered off, put the second stick of RAM back in, screwed everything back together, and now I have it running an exhaustive test.

Monday, I’ll get the dead laptop and bad RAM shipped to the service department.

The moral of the story: Always buy the extended warranty on a laptop. Even the best ones are significantly less reliable than desktop systems; they are more prone to overheating, and their tiny fans tend to get clogged easily or simply burn out. When something does go wrong, laptop parts are significantly more expensive than desktop parts. Repairs frequently involve motherboard or display module replacement, and can easily cost as much as the machine is worth.

Mean annual wage of someone who looks after your children: $18,820.

Mean annual wage of someone who does your dry cleaning: $18,890.

Source: Forbes, via Consumerist.

Experience how much Blu-ray sucks, without spending $1,000 to do so.

And that’s after installing the mandatory firmware upgrade to reinforce the DRM.