Breaking Windows

By Ken Edwards

Can you believe it? I have been blogging for 2 years now. I must say that the blogging community is a great place to be part of, I have met really great people just through blogging.

So much for this site being about "A Mac User in a Windows World!" From here on we are "Rants & Raves by Ken Edwards & Matt Paprocki." Since rantsandravesbykenandmatt.com is a rather long URL, we will keep this domain, its catchy, and its been here for 2 yrs!

The other night I was adding new games to my Delicious Library (Library) when I found a game that was indeed in the Amazon.com library, but was not showing up within Library (which uses Amazon.com). I thought it would be great if I could do a lookup in the Title field of Library of the ASIN number. This would undoubtedly pull in the correct info.

I sent out an email to the Delicious Monster folks at 8 PM. By 11 PM I got this reply:

Voila, it is so. You can type in an ISBN or UPC or ASIN into the field under Title and Creator.

That was quick service, if you ask me. And one more reason I just love this app.

(CNN) -- A photograph posted on an Islamist Web site appears to be that of an action figure and not a U.S. soldier being held hostage.

A Real American Hero!

I really feel sad for the AP here. No, no I don't.

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) -- Some of the most interesting shots of next Sunday's big Super Bowl game could come from a small camera.

A very small camera.

Fox Sports has planted so-called Turf Cams around Alltel Stadium in Jacksonville, Florida -- including four on the field where the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles will play Super Bowl XXXIX. Eight more of the Turf Cams aren't in the turf at all -- they'll be mounted at the end zones.

No breast shots please.

Is it just me or has the real game on TV started to look more like a video game then the video games themselves? Why is it that the TV broadcasts have to mimic what the video games like the Sega/Visual Concepts 2K series. I liked my football games without all the wild 3D motion graphics and without the SkyCam (I just love it when you see that SkyCam zipping accross the fields right above the players, the camera man cannot get the damn thing out of the picture). Give me a few camera angles of the field, the blimp shot, nice looking stat overlays on the screen, a camera on the end zone so I can see Randy Moss moon the crowd, and we'll call it a football game.

No one understands 'simple' anymore.

But really folks: let video games be video games and let TV broadcasts be TV broadcasts.

Remember that "Diamond Cam" or whatever the heck they called it during the World Series. It was right in front Home Plate in the dirt. Those shots sure looked great, and added so much more to the telecast, let me tell ya'.

I want to thank Rob for pointing this out. You do not even have to compile it. Which is great. Memtest does a exhaustive test of your RAM. The readme says you should run it multiple times. And as it tests available RAM, I would restart first, and don't load anything. That or run it in Single User Mode, that is really the best way to run it.

Now this is what you call an info-graphic! See the larger version, as well as some concept sketches.

The Sweet Spot. Until January 2005, Apple had no iPod or PC products that served the mass market. With the launch of iPod Shuffle and Mac mini they have finally converged two product paths with the mass market in mind....

There is some great information here, and man is this a good looking info-graphic!

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says he twice offered President Bush his resignation during the height of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, but the president refused to accept it.

*grumble*

A telephone-based survey of adults who use the Internet found that more than three-quarters receive spam daily. The average spam messages per day is 18.5 and the average time spent per day deleting them is 2.8 minutes.

The loss in productivity is equivalent to $21.6 billion per year at average U.S. wages, according to the National Technology Readiness Survey produced by Rockbridge Associates, Inc., and the Center for Excellence in Service at Maryland's business school.

I don't know about you, but I get exponentially more then 18.5 SPAM emails a day. Because of my SPAM filter I do however keep the time it takes to take care of that SPAM to under 5 minutes though, thank god!

What I would really like to see in one of these studies is more then 1000 people surveyed. Another wonderful fact they pulled out of this: 4 percent of the recipients have bought something advertised through spam within the past year.

Thanks people! You are the reason this "business model" works.

"About 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a portable music player have an iPod," said one source, a high-level manager who asked to remain anonymous. "It's pretty staggering."

The source estimated 80 percent of Microsoft employees have a music player -- that translates to 16,000 iPod users among the 25,000 who work at or near Microsoft's corporate campus. "This irks the management team no end," said the source.

So popular is the iPod, executives are increasingly sending out memos frowning on its use.

Now this is just funny. Microsoft's offices have more iPod users then Apple has employees. I bet that really does irk the brass at Microsoft. Sweet revenge?

Here is your brand new car, sir. Drive it off the lot. Yay yay new car. Suddenly, new car shuts off. New car barely starts again and then only goes about 6 miles per hour and it belches smoke and every warning light on the dashboard is blinking on and off and the tires are screaming and the heater is blasting your feet and something smells like burned hair. You hobble back to the dealer, who only says, gosh, sorry, we thought you knew -- that's they way they all run. Enjoy!

Would you not be, like, that is the goddamn last time I buy a Ford?

He has a point, but a lot of people in the PC (and I mean personal computer) world are a glutton for punishment. But that is their fault, not mine. I'll use my Mac, and you can go deal with adware and malware and viruses and Windows Update and...

Amazon.com on Wednesday launched a flat-fee shipping program, in a move to offer an alternative to its minimum purchase requirement for low-cost delivery.

You can read the introductory letter from Jeff Bezos himself.

So what is this Amazon Prime? Free 2 day shipping and $4 overnight shipping. You can share this benefit with up to 4 family members. I will admit that I order a lot from Amazon, but I am not in such a hurry that I cannot wait for the free shipping I already elect to use.

I wonder if this program will work. It will be interesting to see how many people buy into it.

Ahhh, what would we do without The Joy of Tech?

I don't know which I like better - the Gwen Stefani 2005 iTunes Ad or the 2005 Pepsi/iTunes Ad. Incidently, if you did not know, Different District has most all the Apple movies online in QuickTime format. They even have a DVD you can buy.

"Chupacabra: Dark Seas" is the type or movie reviewers hate to review. No, it's not that the title is a pain to spell out. It's that no thesaurus has enough adjectives for the word "awful" in it to cover an entire review. This is more pitiful dredge from the Sci-Fi Channel, plain and simple, and there's hardly an explanation for its existence.

Since Electronic Arts decided to be cowards and rob football fans of another year (five, actually) of video game football competition, gamers need to start exploring other options. Enter Tecmo Bowl. No, not just the classic version on cartridge. We're talking the hacked ones available on the internet with fully updated stats, rosters, schedules, and logos. Life is good.

Hardly any other company catches more flack for their sequels than EA. Their sports line is constantly under fire for not providing enough new content with each release. For once, that doesn't apply. "Tiger Woods 2004" is a remarkable improvement in every area from the huge disappointment that was the first installment on the GBA. There's still work to be done with plenty of room for improvement.

Ask anyone back in the mid-80's about the length of their video games and you would probably get a strange look. It was never an issue, one that was hardly even thought of. Now, people complain if they don't get 10 hours of gameplay. What happened?

Xbox Millennium Falcon PAL XBox mod. Pretty impressive mod! Not only is it a nice mod, its modded with EvolutionX too.

This is really bad. We could all do better on the fly

Harris & Baseview on Friday released IQue Server 4.0, an editorial solution that includes a MySQL database, a JBoss application server and a cross-platform NewsEditPro IQue client.

We do not use IQue at The BG News, it simply costs to much. We use the non-IQue version of their NewsEdit Pro editorial software. It is great that they finally ported IQue over to MySQL and JBoss though. The previous version uses FoxPro and I have, unfortunately, had *fun* experiences with that. It should also be a lot more stable under MySQL and JBoss, though if you know how stable NEP and iQue are, you are not holding your breath. We can all hope, right?

The more important change here is that you can run MySQL and Java under Mac OS X very well. This will allow a lot of small and medium sized newspapers that use Harris/Baseview's workflow to upgrade to OS X. I know if I was running IQue Server, I would not want to be running them under Mac OS 9.

Chances are if you work anywhere that sells TV's, you've been busy for the past few weeks with the Super Bowl being such a huge selling point. Fox did a fine job presenting the game in Hi-Def to all those who bought new sets and to those who have one for a while. Toss in Dolby 5.1 support and it seems like Fox lives up to their claims of being the worlds best standard, but misfires were noticeable.

The internet isn't the only place to get gaming info. Plenty of magazines line the racks in the grocery stores. Which ones are worthy of your cash, or better yet, a subscription? In no particular order, here you go:

Researchers from IBM Corp., Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. and Toshiba Corp. unveiled the long-awaited Cell microprocessor Monday, revealing a multicore, multithreaded gaming engine described as "a supercomputer on a chip..."

The prototype chip discussed Monday is comprised of one 64-bit PowerPC processor core and eight separate processing cores that the companies call "synergistic processing elements," or SPEs. The cores can support multiple operating systems and programming models through the use of virtualization technologies, said Jim Kahle, director of technology at the Design Center for Cell Technology, and an IBM fellow.

Not only is this great Playstation 3 news, this is great news for IBM. The next X Box, Playstation, and probably Nintendo console will all be using IBM CPU's and ATI GPU's. Thats really great news for IBM and ATI.

It is great for IBM because it means there are more uses for the PowerPC processor then just Macs. Who would have thought the next X Box, from Microsoft, was based on the Apple G5 processor. Its not exactly a G5, of course, but all these next generation gaming consoles are using PowerPC derived chips.

Its fixed, its fixed! Thanks to Arno Bosse on the Apple Discussions forums and ultimately the MacFixIt posting for the solution to this problem.

To recap: a number of people could not use the new Web View feature of Keynote 2. The simple solution is to delete com.apple.internetconfig.plist from ~/Library/Preferences. Deleting this file does not seem to have any other ill effects. Someone earlier suggested deleting a different plist file, but that did not work. This did!

I can now use the Web View feature on my G5 without switching to a "clean" user account. Thanks a bunch!

Pablos sez, "Shmoocon ended today. And just to prove The Shmoo Group wasn't sitting on their asses for the entire time while planning the con - A new exploit was demo'd by EricJ that left all jaws our on the floor. Want to own ANY domain? Want a trusted SSL cert for it? Check it out here. We 0wnz0rd PayPal, but left the rest for you. We have no idea how to fix this and neither do the browser developers. Official advisory here. Phishing attacks of doom coming soon."

Oh lord, this is just another fold in the phishing debacle. I found this interesting from the advisory:

VI. Vendor Responses

Verisign: No response yet.
Apple: No response yet.
Opera: They believe they have correctly implemented IDN, and will not be making any changes.
Mozilla: Working on finding a good long-term solution; provided clear workaround for disabling IDN.

You can read the full advisory for how to turn IDN off in Mozilla based browsers, as well as how exactly they have spoofed PayPal.com. And by all means, try out the proof of concept.

Thanks to Rob Griffiths for the link.

The Bush administration's budget for 2006, due out on Monday, could mean the end of the Perkins loan program.

In that budget, the president will ask Congress to recall the federal share of institutions' revolving loan funds, according to a top Education Department official. The funds, which are made up of federal "capital contributions," institutional matches, and repaid Perkins loans, are used to make new loans to students from low-income and middle-income families.

No child left behind!

Here is something for your valentine this year.

Thanks to Ian for the link.

Why is it that all recent updates to iTunes (on the Mac at least) have to come with an asterisk. Every time something goes wrong. It is starting to really annoy me. This time after the 4.7.1 update, part of iLife '05, killed all the album artwork on my iPod photo. And look, there is a tech note for it. Here is the abridged version.

5. Deselect the "Display album artwork on your iPod" checkbox.
9. Select the "Display album artwork on your iPod" checkbox.

I have not done one of these in a while. This one found by way of Neil, he found it from Dave who got it from Chris. Hopefully more people will fill this out. Its always nice to get legit trackbacks.

I had to, I just had to. Sure I have a 60 GB iPod photo, but I had to get a Shuffle. This iPod shuffle is a 2-in-1. I can now get rid of my aging USB thumb drive, and have a super small iPod with me at all times.

This thing is tiny. You can fit it inside the coin pocket of a pair of jeans.

Guest submission by Max Hostetler

You used to be able to check your Hotmail account via Entourage or Outlook. Well now to do the same thing, Microsoft is requiring you to have the Hotmail subscription which is $20 a year. It gives you increased e-mail storage and some other features along with remote checking, but I don’t want to pay that. Now I can’t even type e-mails and send them via Outlook, they’ve totally screwed me. WHAT THE CRAP? Now I have a hotmail account I’ll probably never use, who the hell uses webmail anyway?

Ken interjects:

I use webmail a lot. I use GMail and my own Meancode webmail when I am not sitting at my own computer. I know some people who live on webmail only, I could never do that myself.

I once had a Hotmail account too, a while ago. I didn't login to the account regularly enough, so they deleted it. Yahoo did the exact same thing. GMail has done the right thing in allowing you have access to their POP server for FREE. That 1 GB of storage doesn't hurt either.

I constantly hear about problems from people who use Hotmail. It usually goes like this "I can never receive emails from the (fill in blank) mailing list."

But I was not aware of not being able to check your email in Entourage or Outlook. I am sort of surprised too, since Microsoft is competing with so many businesses, not just Google.

By the way, if you need any more reasons, you should check out the Hotmail Sucks Web site.

Virus writers have created a malicious program that can disable Microsoft's new anti-spyware application, security experts warned on Wednesday.

I guess it really is a good idea to stick with Spybot Search & Destroy!

Would this compromise happened if AntiSpyware was still by GIANT and not Microsoft?

The purchase, Microsoft's second in three months, underscores the company's urgency to release its own anti-virus products to protect its Windows and Internet programs. Virus attacks rose more than sixfold from 2000 to 2003, and some Microsoft customers are considering competing software such as Linux. The company wants its own security products to challenge Symantec Corp. and McAfee Inc.

If people have already figured out how to disable AntiSpyware...

So when will we see Microsoft AntiVirus, and will it be free? Will it protect Outlook? Will its technology be built in to Outlook?

Joel Webber analyzed the DHTML behind the new Google Maps. It's nice to see a clean XHTML + CSS approach with absolute positioning and "console game" style, tile-based scrolling. Instead of using XMLHttp requests like in Google Suggest, there's a hidden Iframe which fires the parent's "load" function.

Joel's overview is a bit technical, but it and the over 100 comments to his post have some great info in them. Its pretty cool to understand how Google Maps works, or at least begin to understand. The coding behind it all seems pretty involved, I wonder if it will ever support KHTML/WebKit?

This offbeat entry in the Godzilla series falls almost squarely in the middle of the original series. Gone is famed director Ishiro Honda, now replaced with Jun Fukuda who would "treat" fans to some of the worst entries in the series. Whether or not it was his directorial skills or the limited budgets he faced, Fukuda started off with a very hit or miss entry, "Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster."

For those not in the know, Eternal Champions was Sega's answer to the Street Fighter phenomenon. It came out on the Sega Genesis and got a semi-sequel on the Sega CD. That sequel was the only game for the system to use the extended color mode for 256-colors on screen at once. That means all of the fatalities, easily the best in the history of video games, came through with a gorgeous color palette. Now you can view them all in .gif form thanks to a dedicated gamer. Be warned that some of these are really brutal and parental discretion is advised.

First it was the NFL. Then came ESPN. And now, it appears Electronic Arts is very close to securing another license: NCAA Football. Sources tell us that the publishing powerhouse will soon announce an exclusivity deal with the NCAA, enabling only EA to make football games using university squads (thus shutting another football door in the face of rival 2K Games).

This is bad.... very bad.

Toho's idea to not only resurrect Godzilla but his foes as well was working. The previous two entries in the Hesei series were huge hits. Not one to miss a gold mine, Mechagodzilla was then brought back for his third attempt at demolishing Toho's icon. Many fans consider this to be the best of the second round of Godzilla films, though that's up for some serious debate.

Even with about 400 DVD's on my shelf, there's something about laserdiscs that makes them such a huge collectable. In a recent issue of Video Store Magazine, E-bay reported a significant increase in sales in their laserdisc category. That's not that surprising for a variety of reasons, notably "Star Wars." That's getting a bit ahead of the game though. There's a reason for this resurgence that goes a bit beyond one movie. Actually, there's quite a few:

British developer Zonic on Friday released SwapTop 2.0, a revival of the product that the company introduced in 2001 to fill the gap left by the demise of Webshots, which provided desktop images and screensavers from its servers on a rotating basis. Webshots was a casualty of the problems at Excite@Home, which laid off many employees in mid-2001 and simply killed the service. Zonic introduced the first version of SwapTop at that time, but at the end of 2002, Webshots returned as a CNET Networks product, which prompted Zonic to convert its software into a free download and cease development.

Source: MacCentral

I really do not understand this. The last version of SwapTop before this 2.0 release was an application that connected to Webshots and allowed you use their photo galleries. I have SwapTop 1.9.2 on both my PowerBook and my G5 to handle my Webshots photos. This is because the official Webshots OS X client a) is really bad, and b) doesn't work in the latest release of 10.3.

Webshots costs me $23.88 a year. I just renewed it on the 8th. SwapTop's rival service costs $24.95. With Webshots there is a web site with a huge library of photos, not to mention member libraries, such as my Dad's photos. With SwapTop you get no web site to search through, and a very limited amount of photos. You get no preview of the images. Unless the demo of SwapTop's service is nothing like the paid membership, I do not see how this is going to fly.

SwapTop 1.9.2 is free. It trys to be shareware with a Register listing in the SwapTop menu, but it never nags you, and does not prevent you from using the thousands of Webshots photos.

I just don't get it. If you are going to compete, I would think you would have to undercut Webshots, since they clearly have many more photos, and features over SwapTop 2.0. Am I missing something here?

I see that you can no longer get the old version of SwapTop from their site, but you can get it at VersionTracker. SwapTop 1.9.2 will also be available for years from anonymous FTP pubs.

But maybe I am missing the point with Zonic's reinvention of SwapTop.

Its funny you never saw that asterisk during the Super Bowl commercial. Would you rather own your 10,000 songs are rent them. Once you miss a month's $15 payment for whatever reason you entire music library goes 'poof.'

Lets do some match, based on $1 a song and $10 a CD. One full year of Napster To Go will cost you $180 a year. That is 18 CDs for one year, after that year those CDs are yours to do with whatever you want. At the end of the day (year) I would rather have 18 CDs then have to continue forking over $15 every month to continue listening to music.

Sure I have a biased opinion towards the iTunes Music Store and Apple, but forget the brand names and brand loyalty for a moment.

I do not see how people can equate digital music to satellite radio. It is the closest form of entertainment that I can compare Napster To Go with. The model works for satellite radio, it does not work for online music stores.

This will of course not prevent hordes of people to Napsters new “To Go” service. There will always be people who buy before they think.

15 is less then 10,000 after all.

Sometimes you have to wonder if certain actors ever sleep. Denzel Washington is one of those, seemingly in a new movie every week. That's certainly not a bad thing as he's one of the best currently in the industry. You just have to wish the guy wouldn't get burned out before his career is over. After his award-winning performance in "Training Day," he took on another great thriller with "Out of Time."

At first glance, it appears that The SCO Group's case against IBM for Linux/Unix intellectual property right violations is all but over, after the judge said Tuesday that the court hasn't seen any hard evidence to support SCO's claims.

"It is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO's alleged copyrights through IBM's Linux activities."

Those are pretty strong words from the judge.