Jambalaya

Well: installing MT wasn't too bad after all. The instructions were clear and mostly accurate, but they could have spelt out the need to remove the commenting '#' at the beginning of the StaticWebPath line in the mt.cfg file!

My installation is on a Mac OS X 10.1.5 system. Fortunately Perl and all the important modules were there and waiting and I didn't need to install any of these. I can't remember though whether this version of OS X originally shipped with Perl, or I had to install it. I have vague memories that some time ago that's what I did.

Following my earlier rant about Radio and Userland, I shall comment here on any notable differences, pros and cons, etc of the two systems.

American record companies are reportedly financing the development of new computer software that would sabotage Internet connections of people downloading pirated music. The new tactic is the most aggressive yet by the record industry in combating the copying of songs over the Internet

Never mind its dubious legality, this strategy smacks of desperation. My intial reaction was to recall the George Santayana saying Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim. I fear, however, that the recording industry is very clear about its aim: to make money no matter who they trample on in the process.

Well, we could vote with our money - or rather keep it in our pockets. The trouble is, music is addictive and the recording industry is the dealer. What goes against the modern grain is its total inability to provide what users want, (though if they did, there would be no addiction to feed).

Think different
Apple's new music store might just be able to undo this particular bind by addressing two of the most frequently expressed needs: ability to aquire digital music on line easily, and ablilty to 'mix and match', that is to buy a selection of tracks from different albums rather than whole albums. The news that a million tracks have been sold in the first week is invigorating: that more than half of the songs were purchased as whole albums goes a long way to counter fears that selling music by the track would reduce album sales. Together, these show that consumer choice has been increased substantially. More importantly, they shows that we are not all pirates at heart! Not bad for a week's work.

There are some questions lurking: what exactly is the deal the Apple has struck with the industry, and where will it go from here? Are the obvious benefits to users sustainable? The industry's actions against bootleg downloads has worrisome Luddite charactersitics that do not augur well. Let's hope that the indiustry has at least a few doves.

My demo version of Brent Simmons's excellent NetNewsWire just expired, so over to Kagi for one of my happier on line payments.

Brent Simmons has shipped a new version of his excellent NetNewsWire news feed reader. This apparently fixes a number of crashing bugs, amongst other things, but I have to say it has never crashed on me. I am posting this to my Movable Type weblog from NetNewsWire's weblog editor. After a few moments frustration figuring out how to paste a URL into the URL box, I figured that this is a Movable Type restriction. Pity: one up to Radio/Manila, I should say.

Good to see Jambalaya in the 'Recent Additions' site drawer: thank you Brent!

My ISP's newsgroup was subjected to a lively barrage of discussion about data protection yesterday, that almost amounted to a DOS (or at least denial-of-productive worktime) attack.

In brief, a customer asked who the company's data protection officer was, so he could send him the ｣10 fee for full disclosure of all data held on him. Innocent enough, but the ensuing discussion raised an number of interesting questions and exposed a good deal of uncertainty and maybe ignorance about the whole area. As one correspondent pointed out, the area is ripe for test cases, and the lawyers are hanging around like vultures.

My interest was stimulated because patient confidentiality and data protection is partly my responsibility at work.

In general, ISPs hold customer information for accounting purposes (which is exempt from notification under the DPA, but they also hold and process data which could be construed as personal data. This includes IP addresses (the identity of the owner can be discerned from the RIPE database and also email addresses in mail transport logs.

Personally, I think this is a bit of a storm in a teacup. I don't think that an IP address is a personal identifier: it identifies a device on the network which may or may not be used by the owner of its domain. On the other hand, if it proved to be legally necessary it would not be very difficult for an ISP to have grep extract log records pertaining to an individual's email address. Having to do so may deter archiving of historical log information, but this may be a good thing. I would expect my ISP not to disclose any records identifying me to a third party without my prior consent. I suspect that any ISP who does this deviously would very likely not disclose the fact to me if I asked.

The general issue is of some concern to me as a 'secondary' ISP: I run mail and webservers for a small number of domains (most but not all of which I own) on a strictly informal non-commercial basis, for purposes largely if indirectly concerned with my work and mainly at my own expense. Perhaps I too should notify, but the annual charge of ｣35 for the privilege is off-putting.

And then there are weblogs: I run two weblogs which occasionally receive posts from others, such that my computers come to store 'personal data' about them. I may also identify others by name in my own posts. Does this mean that all UK weblogs should be covered by DPA notification?

I suspect I am not alone in having adopted Portable Document Format (pdf) as an easy and convenient way of publishing documents on the web, especially those that have been initially created in a word processor such as MS Word. The ease with which such documents can be translated to pdf and the resulting file uploded to (and downloaded from) a website are hard to beat. There is also the added advantage that the downloaded document can be almost guaranteed to print identically to the original.

Well, if distributing documents for printing is the aim, then pdf is ideal. But if making the content available to people to read on the Web, then it sucks.

Why? Several reasons come to mind:

1. PDF documents intended for printing will usually be in portrait orientation, whilst most computer screens are landscape
2. Printing font sizes are generally smaller than those commonly deployed on the web, so legibility may be a problem
3. it is unlikely that the 'look and feel' of the pdf document will match that of the website
4. PDF documents of more than a handful of pages will be very large & will take up bandwidth and load slowly
5. The server your site is located on may not be able to search pdf documents

Adobe was cleverly able to position Acrobat (pdf) as a nifty way of presenting documents on the web at a time when there were browser wars and before the Web Standards Project and CSS got underway. Now the challenge is to get word processor vendors to use XML creatively to describe document structure in an exportable fashion, allowing the serving site's style sheets to determine how that structure should be presented. Given that MSWord file structure is XML-based, this should not be technically difficult. Political will is another matter.

(Since writing this my attention has been drawn, via Lockergnome Bytes to an article by Jakob Nielsen entitled PDF: Unfit for human consumption which makes many of the same points.)

David Davies seems as bemused as I am at the recent spat of vituperative and at times childish discussion on the future of RSS. Thanks to his recent post, I now have a much clearer idea of the issues, and I have to say that I cannot get worked up about them. Through Brent Simmons's sterling efforts we have NetNewsWire, which has effortlessly handled all the feeds I have thrown at it, without my having to look under the bonnet to determine their provenance. Time to move on, I think.

Today I redesigned this site, mainly as an exercise in learning Web Standards, but also to cheer it up from its Movable Type blues.

The site actually validates as proper XHTML. I shouldn't take much credit for that as the original Movable Type template and style sheet ensured validation before I changed anything, which is more than be said for Radio or Manila. But at least I didn't mess it up.

I expect there will be a few more tweaks over the next few days.

Spam is not new: it is a symptom of society's tolerance of unsolicited communication generally rather than any fault with email per se, though its prominence (and thus nuisance value) owes something to email being the Internet's killer app. Put simply, it is an invasion of privacy conceptually no different to junk mail or unsolicited sales pitches by telephone. None of these unwanted intrusions can simply be ignored: all require active intervention just to get rid of them. In this way they differ significantly from advertisements on billboards or magazines (just look away or skip over them) or even on radio or TV (go and make a cup of tea, or just wait & it will soon be over).

So I find myself somewhat out of sympathy with a recent whine about email marketing being stopped by spam filters. "Now, after finally figuring out how to make e-mail work for them, marketers have found that the rules have changed. Their legitimate messages are being blocked by a new breed of super-aggressive spam filters; their good names are turning up on anti-spam blacklists; and they're being forced to devote time, energy, and in many cases, a good outlay of cash to keep their e-mail marketing efforts out of hot water."

Oh dear oh dear! It is the word legitimate I take exception to. What gives these folk the right to invade privacy in this way?

If society doesn't want spam it needs first to consider its attitude to privacy generally. Simply legislating against ISPs or attacking the technology won't help.

Richard Allan MP is looking for a net-based, secure diary system he can access when on the road. This must be a requirement for so many that its surprising that there is no obvious choice. Many such road warriors, like Richard, will be locked into corporate systems such as Exchange/Outlook, which are no help in this situation and which in any event are impossible to keep under one's own control.

Last year I posted some details on running the SquirrelMail (SM) webmail system under Mac OS X. These have been read by a great many — which is very gratifying — and I have had some very positive feedback via email: many thanks!

The instructions I gave were for SquirrelMail 1.2.7 running under OS X 10.1.x. Both SM and OS X have upgraded since then. This has introduced a major new issue (SSL) but has otherwise simplified installation. The notes below are intended to update my previous instructions, and are good for both Jaguar (10.2) and Panther (10.3). As before, they relate primarily to using the UW IMAP server, but using a different server (e.g. Cyrus) should not be a problem: just make sure the SM configuration knows which server you are using.

Most weblog software makes it easy enough to write simple plain text articles, but what if you want to add a bit of spice, some emphasis, or more complex formatting such as a list:—

1. Item 1
2. Item 2

etc.

Well, of course, you can resort to good old HTML tags. Not that difficult, but my experience of hosting a number of discussion group websites is that few users have the first idea about HTML (why on earth should they) and are plain put off by it, so a simpler, more intuitive form of markup could just fit the bill…

…enter Markdown and SmartyPants, two tiny plugins for MovableType from the Daring Fireball John Gruber which make basic HTML formatting a breeze — “Simply spectacular”.

…or is it the network?

This week I upgraded my trusty (but now falling apart) Siemens C35i to a Nokia 6600 smartphone in the expectation of achieving fast internet access via GPRS. The 6600 falls somewhere between a regular mobile phone and PDA-like phone (such as the Sony Ericsson P900). It has lots of nice features, but so far I have not been able to persuade Vodafone UK to give me anything other than WAP internet access. This is pretty limited, and what I need, I think, is to connect to their Internet Access point (not WAP).

The existence of the phone’s built-in Opera browser was hotly denied by Vodafone (you must have downloaded it - no, I didn’t; it must be a second-hand phone - no, it isn’t; you didn’t buy it from Vodafone - yes I did). Apparently, Vodafone UK only allow the Sony Ericsson P900 to run Opera: the Nokia 6600 is to slow and the ‘user experience’ apparently suboptimal. (But isn’t that for the user to decide?) I suspect it has more to do with inadquacies in the Vodafone network than the Nokia, though others may disagree.

One of the reasons I went for the Nokia 6600 was to use it to access my servers with the likes of puTTY and Pine, as trailed by Russell Beattie recently. these, and Opera, will not work through the WAP Access Point. :-( Still, the phone has some plus points. It takes pictures (but so do my cameras, rather better). It does bluetooth connections with my Mac PowerBook OK, and iSynch works though is a bit picky sometimes. And the screen is large enough to display the whole of a standard SMS text.

What else can one say? One day, perhaps, mobile phone operators will stop trying to be content providers and concentrate on connectivity.

Ever had the feeling you are drowning in spam? Over recent weeks the problem has been growing almost exponentially on some of my accounts. So over the Easter weekend I decided to do something about it. Inspired by some of the comments to Russell Beattie’s recent rant, I have installed Active Spam Killer (ASK) on my server, with very gratifying results. So far no spam has got through after three days’ running, and no real messages have been rejected. Now the bouncing mulberry in my dock no longer fills me with dread.

I have only had half an eye on my incoming newsfeeds this week but one that did catch said that SixApart was barely making a miserable 50 cents a copy on MovableType. So when they announced a new pricing structure it was no surprise. It seems to have caught others by surprise, judging by the whingeing response from users. What is it with thse guys?

In one of his best posts for a while, Dave Winer reminds us that things cost money —“When you drive to the gas station, try whining at the attendant, and see how much gas you get. Do it enough and they’ll call the cops”—and that it is miserable for software developers when users take them for granted in this way. In many ways I find this a more depressing portent for our civilization than what the situation over Iraq.

I use a lot of great, free software—and lots more for which I pay a trivial amount. (There is of course, some essential stuff that costs an awful lot, but that’s another story.) Some developers accept donations and I am happy to give back something to those who have given me real value. Movable Type is one such: I planned to make a donation when I read the 50 cent story. Now I shall simply purchase a licence and still think myself lucky.

The British Association of Medical Managers (BAMM) is holding its annual summer school and conference at Stratford-upon-Avon this week, with the theme Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…

As a distraction from the awfulness of the hotel I shall see if I can blog the highlights of the event. I have my trusty PowerBook, but alas no WiFi installed, which is pretty frustrating as the hotel has WiFi access. A conference exhibitor has set up an internet cafe, so if I can transfer this to one of their machines with my USB disk or figure something else, we will be in business…

The first day of the conference went smoothly, though as usual PowerPoint intruded heavily in most of the talks. We have all been guilty of it at some time: it is so easy just to write one’s talk directly into PP, format it with bullets, indents and more, and just simply read it off to the audience. It is easy too to forget that the kind of audience one is talking to can read and digest a whole slide before one has stuttered through the first bullet point: transition effects that delay each paragraph until the presenter has caught up simply frustrate. Content and delivery has to be seriously good to overcome the deadening effect of most presenters’ slides. Today we had a spectrum: some terrific, some stimulating and some, well, there you go.

Perhaps part of the problem was that Aidan Halligan (Deputy Chief Medical Officer) set such a high standard with the first presentation that following speakers were cast somewhat into the shade. Aidan is always an engaging, thought-provoking, original and entertaining presenter, and today was no exception. His slides illustrate rather than drive his talk.

Aidan’s brief was The Challenges Ahead. We all know that for him (and, as he would have it, for us as well) is implementation of the massive IT programme for the NHS. But he chose to preface this with a gentle reminder that the uniqueness of clinical encounter between doctor and patient has endured over a long period and that we should not forget the ‘unwritten’ contract patients’ and clinicians’ contracts. The IT programme will come to nothing if not fully embraced by clinical staff ‘with enthusiasm’. Aidan’s aim is to engender that enthusiasm:

• Communicate as if the whole programme depends on it. (It does: how often I should communicate is how often I should kiss my wife: before someone else does.)

• Identify an enable local leadership. (And train them, too)

• Match and exceed the expectations of patients and clinicians.

There is no doubting Aidan’s enthusiasm and commitment to this. If anyone can communicate it to the service, he will.

[More to follow]

Wired News reckons the time has come to stop capitalizing the word “Internet”. Well that is, of course, entirely their perogative, but in my simple and humble opinion it is a retrograde step that further reduces the precision with which we use the English language, and thereby the richness of meaning that we can convey.

Why?

An internet is simply an interconnected (computer) network—any such network. The Internet is, well, the internet.

To resolve practical matters of the use of English such as this I usually consult Fowler’s Modern English Usage. (‘Modern’, in this context, means sometime after the 18th century.) I have both the second and third editions of Fowler, but the former—edited by Sir Ernest Gowers—is for me the more insightful.

Neither edition directly sheds light on the internet/Internet issue, but Gowers’ essay on capitals is worthy of quotation:

The use of Capitals is largely governed by personal taste, and my own, while not favouring seventeenth-century excess, happens to favour even less the niggardliness now sometimes apparent. The printed page that is starved of capitals suffers not merely in appearance (to my eye at any rate) but also in function, for denial of capitals to well-known bodies, institutions, officials and the like militates against ready reference.

The rest of the entry makes it quite clear (to my mind at any rate) that Wired has done us a disservice. Nevertheless, it can take some consolation in Sir Ernest’s final words on the matter:

Let it be repeated, the employment of capitals is a matter not of rules but of taste; but consistency is at least not a mark of bad taste.

Several friends, family members and colleagues have told me of the torrid times they have had dealing with Apple Europe. By and large, my own dealings have been unremarkable—until now.

On 14th Sept I placed a web order for a new PowerBook via Apple Education. The email acknowledgement arrived promptly, and a confirmation email three hours later. I took that to mean that the order had been accepted and was being processed.

Yesterday, i.e. one week after placing the order, I received another email, saying:

Thank you for placing an order on the Apple Store.<BR>
<BR>
Unfortunately, we are unable to obtain an authorisation for this order with the credit/debit
card you have provided.<BR>
<BR>
It is often a simple administrative step taken by the bank or the credit card company
when the cardholder is not present to sign for a transaction. This could be due to the
following reasons:<BR>
<BR>
1. Your credit card company may have placed a credit limit on your account. Please
contact your credit card company to notify them of your order with Apple Computer.
The issuing bank's customer service phone number can be found on the back of
your credit card.<BR>
<BR>
2. If you are using a debit card, please contact your bank regarding your daily spending limit.
If your order total is more than the bank's daily limit, you may want to consider another payment
option.<BR>
<BR>
Once your bank/credit card company are aware of your order, please call the Apple Store
on 0800 039 10 10 and press option 1, an Apple Store sales representative will help you
process your order. You will need to quote your web order number W75667521.<BR>
<BR>
Thank you for placing your order with the Apple Store, we value your business and look forward
to hearing from you.<BR><BR>
Kind regards,<BR>

(Yes, note the extraordinary use of <BR> tags!)

Well, I didn't mind this. In fact I was quite pleased as this was an unusual transaction and I appreciated the bank (and Apple) being cautious.

So I called my bank and confirmed there was no problem. Interestingly they at first said they had no record of an attempt by Apple to draw the funds. I called Apple but missed their 'close' time of 6pm by one minute. A recorded message invited me to 'call again tomorrow', or send an email to an address they provided. I did the latter and asked them to try again to draw the funds.

This afternoon I noted that my email had been rejected by Apple. "Email support is not available at this time." No apologies. So I called them on the phone and was dumbfounded to learn that my order had been cancelled (by their finance department), because my credit card had not been cleared.

This is manifestly wrong, not to mention insulting. I have some questions for Apple:

1. Why wait a week after accepting my order before telling me there was a 'problem' with my credit card?
2. Why notify me by email yet not accept a response by email? (Why, indeed, is a premier technology company like Apple having problems handling email??)
3. Why bother asking me to contact my bank if you have cancelled the order anyway?
4. Why did the email not say that the order had been cancelled?

[Postscript: I have just received a very helpful call from Customer Service. It seems that business practice at AE is based on US models. :-( My suggestion that cancelling the order was unnecessary and inconsistent with the content of their email was well received and will apparently be passed on. I have placed a fresh order and we will see what happens.

To be fair, Customer Service has been very helpful: they didn't cancel the order, but I'd sure as hell like to meet up with the idiot who did.

It seems that the Government is in trouble with its IT again. Apparently an ‘upgrade’ to the Department of Work and Pensions’ network went awry at the weekend, such that it became impossible for many of its staff to login, and the Benefits system has been down for several days, at least for new claimants. The exact nature of the problem remains obscure to us mortals, so speculation is rife. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft and the nefarious EDS have both been implicated. Who knows?

My guess is that a massive exercise to upgrade hundreds of PCs with the latest Windows XP service pack changed network settings and installed firewalls on the target machines which then lost their way, requiring a laborious and costly manual intervention.

If that is the case, then serve them right for using Microsoft software in the first place.

So, the Prince of Pod is having problems getting BT Broadband in Guildford. Welcome to the UK, Adam! ;-)

I have until now resisted the temptation to rant here about BT’s general incompetence in delivering (or not delivering) broadband. My problem was not with getting connected, but with staying connected. From time to time my connection would suddenly drop—for anything between a few seconds and several minutes: not what you want when you are running several mailservers and websites. The first time was one night when I was asleep in a hotel outside Cologne at the start of a fortnight’s trip to Venice, and was awoken by an automatic SMS from my ISP. The problem persisted for several months. BT were completely hopeless, fielding staff who couldn’t tell a plug from a socket and it was only because of the dogged persistence of my excellent ISP, Andrews and Arnold and myself that we eventually persuaded BT to find someone who understood broadband to do what had obviously needed doing all along, namely change the equipment at the exchange end of the line.

Adam: if you are dealing with BT direct: forget it. Give Andrews and Arnold a call: they are a relatively small outfit and customer service is good. They know what they are doing and have oodles of experience dealing with BT, who they ultimately have to deal with as the UK’s monopoly supplier of local loops. The will also get you some fixed IP addresses which are more difficult to come by from BT.

Update 5/12/04: The saga has moved to the Ipodder weblog. It seems that wireless broadband may be available in Guildford (but at what cost?). This could turn out to be a high profile test case for Broadband Britain.

I don't see the problem here. If a site doesn't have an RSS feed, I probably will never visit it again again. Period. If it has, and it interests me, I will add its feed to my aggregator. I track about a hundred sites with varying degrees of enthusiasm (and precisely which hundred changes over time). Some are straight news sites, some are informative, some educational, some opinionated, and so on. I don't read everything: my aggregator allows me to cherry pick (so for goodness sake make your headlines seductive). When I need to know something that my RSS network hasn't told me, I try Google. That's surfing, as far as I'm concerned. Perhaps you think I don't count, but can you really afford to take the risk?

Today I discovered that a backup routine I thought existed was a figment of my imagination. Nothing was lost, nobody died, but it put a shiver up my spine around what might have been—or not been. The necessary script was quickly cobbled together and tested, so all is well. The gap was small and affected only my personal websites: those I run for others have been backing up nightly forever.

The episode gave me pause for thought. How many of us have lost important work through failing to save a file, or to back up important work? Murphy knows. Yet why is it so difficult: why do we fail to do it so often?

The truth is, it’s a chore, and the busier we are the more of a chore it is. Programs that do automatic file saves are a godsend, provided they do so without one having to set a preference first. Backing up whole filesystems, webservers, mailboxes and the like is another matter. Where are the operating systems that do this automatically, without one even having to think about it? For sure, there is (expensive) software that will do the trick, but it still takes time and effort to get it working.

One of the allures of Mac OS X is its Unix underpinning which should, in theory, make backing up a relatively easy and inexpensive business. After all, tape archiving (tar) is at least as old as Unix itself. But as it turns out, its not quite so straightforward: the Mac HFS filing system has quirks (resource forks and the like) which can behave badly with the traditional Unix routines such as cp and the like. Slowly, Apple is modifying these routines to behave more coherently with it’s filing system conventions, but its still a minefield. And to cap it all, the lovely LaCie mini firewire external hard drive that sits under the Mac mini on my network as a backup device is quirky about setting owner and permissions on its folders.

All said, backups are happening here nightly. So far, Murphy has been benign and I haven’t had to retrieve anything in anger. Testing a the restorability of a backup is something I suspect is rarely done until its too late. I can’t say I’m squeaky clean on that one either: it all takes time. The trouble with this risk management business is that it’s a never-ending story—even before you think about the precautionary principle.