Fragments of Life

Adobe Reader 9 installation finishes and suggests me to defrag my hard drive

How nice it is of Adobe to suggest me to defrag my hard drive.

I wonder how many people bothered to read it instead of immediately clicking “Finish”.

Google Wave Impression

So, Google Wave is live for beta testing and i received an invitation. I still have a couple of them left, feel free to ask. First come, first served.

I and all of my friends who tried it have a “what now” feeling as soon as we log in. And then loneliness. It is like improved email, but we already have email.

The scrollbars are weird. Terribly weird. Not the way to go. They already made this mistake with Picasa. Please not again. I love the stupid old-school scrollbars.

Waves don’t become read after i click them. Silly bug, they’ll probably fix it.

Unsubscribing From EFF

EFF is an organization for freedom and privacy on the internet. I am on EFF’s mailing list. I am too busy to follow the emails, however, and they seem too USA-centric for me anyway, so i wanted to cancel them.

But what do you know, the unsubscribe link in the bottom of the email is invalid.

On the website i only found a place to subscribe to the mailing list, not to unsubscribe. And they ask for a ZIP code! It’s a privacy organization, i remind you.

Oh, and the Privacy Policy link on the website is 404.

I don’t like filters that delete unwanted emails. I like clean unsubscribing. And of all the organizations, the EFF proves to be the hardest to unsubscribe from.

Debug

“My bike is making a noise I haven’t debugged yet.” (Gaal Yahas)

Conspiracy

The question is not whether Iran is a dictatorship or a democracy.

The question is whether the civil unrest there is a Google conspiracy or a Twitter conspiracy.

Wave

1998: I was working on the final project in the programming course. We were a team of seven people. Thanks to my famous Microsoft Word prowess i was in charge of writing the documents that were part of the project, but the other team members also had to update them and it was quite troublesome. So i told my friend El’ad an idea i had: “How nice would be it be if i could collaborate with my team members – if we could write the same document simultaneously. It would be a nice startup!” El’ad told me that it seemed rather useless to him.

Some time later El’ad told me about his own idea for a startup: “Let’s say that you have some files on your computer, for example music or images, and these files may be interesting to other people on the web that you don’t even know, and you want to share them and help people find them…”

To which i replied: “Who on Earth would want to do such a thing? That’s what websites and FTP are for.”

A few months later all the websites were buzzing about Napster’s fucking up the music business and El’ad told me that they implemented that idea of his.

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2007: I went to Catalonia for a week and didn’t go online for all that time. When i came back, all the websites were buzzing about Radiohead’s fucking up the music business further with “In Rainbows”.

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2009: I haven’t used the web since Thursday morning. Today i went online and every website was buzzing about Google Wave.

Google Wave is a combination of a word processor, an email program and an instant messaging program that is written in HTML. We’ll have to wait and see whether this will fuck up Microsoft’s business model, but the important parts for me are that it has a very cool spell checker, and more importantly – that it allows several people to edit the same document simultaneously.

Take a look at the video: Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009. At 00:35 you’ll see exactly the thing i envisioned in 1998. It even has Hebrew there.

So, El’ad, you can say that you had your revenge on me. But i’m still quite proud – i envisioned an idea that took many more years to implement.

Inside

Click to enlarge

I’ve been seeing ads for Scientology for a few weeks already on Slashdot, and this is the icing.

WTF, i mean WTF. Eitan said, “wtf/minute rate is high today” – but my wtf/minute rate is very high for many months, especially since the riots in Poland.

Social networking

“Facebook sells a 1.96% stake to a Russian internet firm, a move that values the social networking website at $10bn.”

In Soviet Russia the book faces you.

Hmm, actually it’s a good thing.

Eight Taking a Rest

I was reading Time Magazine’s list of 100 most influential people and then time.com asked me to fill out “a short online survey”.

I love filling out short online surveys. They usually have silly questions about the experience with the website – “Did you find the information you were looking for?”, “Was the information easy to find?”, “How often do you visit ourstupidsite.com?”, etc. The kind of questions that clueless marketing departments and web design studios live by. In the end i am usually presented with a field where i can add personal comments. I always add personal comments and get the warm fuzzy feeling that nobody will read them. I only received a reply to a personal comment once. Guess from which site (the answer is at the end of this post).

Well, i was wrong. This survey is not about time.com. It’s about the financial crisis:

• Please write three brands of car brands, in particular luxury car brands. (I wrote Lexus, Lincoln and Mercedes. How do you know that this survey was written by an idiot? Any website style guide will tell you to use underlining only for links.)
• Next time you are looking to lease or purchase a vehicle, how likely are you to consider each of the following luxury automotive brands? [ ] Infiniti [ ] BMW [ ] Mercedes Benz
• Please indicate how strongly you agree or disagree with the following statements about Infiniti:
1. Makes vehicles with inspiring performance
2. Makes vehicles people feel inspired by
3. Makes vehicles with exhilarating performance
4. Is inspired about the way they design and engineer their vehicles
5. Is for people who enjoy doing their own thing
6. Is a brand I aspire to own
7. (Well, none of the above, but it inspired me to do my own thing and write this blog post, and i sure hope that it’s exhilarating!)

• Which of the following websites have you visited in the last 4 weeks? Partial list: Amex.com, CNN.com, Food&Wine.com, MyRecipes.com, SI.com, SouthernAccents.com. (I totally had to visit SouthernAccents.com after i saw its URL, but was disappointed to find that it’s not a linguistics site. Plus, how do you know that this survey was written by an idiot, part II? Food&Wine.com cannot be a URL.)

And, damn it, they didn’t have a field in which i could put a personal comment in the end. This puts them at the bad end on the scale of websites that care about their visitors. On the good end there is scientology.com – the only website that ever sent me a reply to my personal comment at the end of a “short online survey”. What’s even stranger is that they didn’t offer me to take a personality test. They just said: “Thank you for your comments, they were very well-received!”. And i had a feeling that it was written by a human being. That was scary thought number 1.

Scary thought number 2: A degree in Sociology was probably required to get a job writing these surveys.

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A friend of mine told me that he came from a small-town Yemenite family. “They didn’t teach us a lot in the school there,” he said, “the math teacher, for example, called the infinity symbol ‘Eight Taking a Rest’”.

Now we are six

I’ve been blogging in English for six years.

Shark?

A couple of weeks ago i read the whole xkcd back catalog over a few days. A lot of laughs and insights. And since then most of the new strips don’t seem so funny anymore.

I

I don’t give a fuck about iPhone.

All lost in the tide

What do you get if you search for Soundgarden’s “Pretty Noose” video? The “Alternate Version” – the one where the band just performs. So the song is awesome, but the interesting original video is not on YouTube.

But what’s interesting is what appears in “Related Videos”. After a bunch of Soundgarden videos you get: Radiohead – Creep; Weezer – Say it Ain’t So; Roxette – Listen to Your Heart.

At this point i am supposed to write a Russian cuss word, but actually i can’t deny that Marie Fredriksson looks a lot like Thom Yorke. I’d love to say that it ain’t so, but it is too.

You

YouTube may be a competitor to Wikipedia as one of the most massively multilingual sites on the web.

Many people who comment there don’t seem to care that English is the lingua franca of the web. They just write in Russian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Catalan and Croatian and it creates a soup of languages. And that is a Very Good Thing. It makes languages seen and promotes tolerance. Variety and tolerance are mighty good.

Sex

Have i ever told you how much i love some BBC headlines? For example: Sex smell lures ‘vampire’ to doom.

Rock musician Moore dies

If i would see such a headline, i would immediately read it, ‘cuz i would have thought about Thurston.

Now if i see on BBC the headline “Dave Matthews Band founder dies”, what am i supposed to think? Who would be the founder of, eh, Dave Matthews Band? Dave Matthews, maybe?

Well, no—it’s LeRoi Moore, a founding member of the Dave Matthews Band.

Such headlines are very common on Russian news websites. They would say something like “Shocking: Super-Model Larisa Kuznetsova is no more!!!” to make people click the link expecting to read a yellowish report about the death of a super-model, but the article would actually tell that she decided to pursue a career in accounting. Or: “Alla Pugacheva burned alive!!!”. And indeed, some woman whose name is Alla Pugacheva, but not the famous singer, was burned alive in a fire in her house. (Sadly, that’s a true story.)

Well of course, when the band saxophonist dies and not the singer, it’s still a tragedy for his family, but such headlines do mislead (human) news readers. This is not cynicism, this is media commentary. Russian news websites are crap; but the BBC followed them.

EMEA

Toshiba website. To fulfill your identification, please enter your gene sequence (with control digit).

Hadar bought a Toshiba laptop a year ago. Approximately. I don’t know exactly when. Why would i want to know such a useless thing? For warranty? Thank God, no. The laptop works, although Windows Vista makes it work about 20 times slower than it is supposed to, which doesn’t stop Toshiba from recommending it.

No, i am supposed to want to know the date that i purchased this laptop in order to log in to the Toshiba website. Why would i want to log in to the Toshiba website? That i don’t know, actually, but they sent me an email asking me to renew my membership, and i’m nice, so i usually do things that people ask from me if i don’t have to bother too much.

So anyway, this website asks me for the user name. OK, i enter my usual amire80 and my usual password and it doesn’t work. So i enter my second option, amir_e_a, and it doesn’t work. So i enter my email amir.aharoni@gmail.com as the user name, which is actually a reasonable thing to use as a user name. But it doesn’t work.

So i looked at the email, where i saw the string amir.aharoni@gmail.com_IL somewhere. So i tried that as the user name and it didn’t work. I didn’t give up and entered it as the user name in the password reminder form. And it worked.

And then it asked me for the date when i purchased the laptop with that serial number (see the image).

How could it be stupider? I mean, this question is a bit less ridiculous than my mother’s last name, but how the fuck am i supposed to remember the exact date when i purchased? Do you actually expect me to dig up the receipt to find that date? Asking me for the serial number would be reasonable—i can look it up on the laptop itself. But the date?

And oh—does it mean that anyone can enter any email address, schlep an “_IL” (or “_US” or “_RU” or “_IQ”) at the end and find out whether that email’s owner has a Toshiba laptop, and its serial number, too? That’s a direct violation of their privacy policy.

Now, check out this part of their email. Read this slowly: “If you don’t activate your profile for our personalised website experience we will delete it after one month. That also means you will not receive any alerts anymore. We would like to make you aware that with this process you do not withdraw from your permission to allow Toshiba to contact you.”

What idiot wrote that? That same idiot that put “EMEA” on that website. “EMEA” means “Europe, Middle East and Africa”. It’s a term commonly used in marketing departments. It is supposed to be internal. I am a customer, Toshiba; i am not supposed to give a damn about how you run your marketing department.

And Ubuntu doesn’t work so well on that laptop, too. (Although when it does work, it works 20 times faster than Windows Vista.)

No more Toshiba laptops, then.

Wish, part 3

Hmm.

Someone left a comment on my post Wish, part 2. The comment was relevant, but it also included a spammish URL about Viagra.

What the hell is going on with the world?

Wish, part 2

Apparently what happened is that Amazon.* brought about more integration between their international sites, so i can login with my account from Amazon.co.uk to Amazon.com. It’s stupid, but that’s how it is.

They say that i can’t merge the accounts completely for security reasons. I can think of more security problems from having the two accounts separated, but whatever.

Wish

An open letter to Amazon.com:

Hi,

I’ve been shopping with Amazon.com since about 2002 and now i suddenly see that my order history and wish list are completely gone. My order history is empty and my wish list, which used to have about 20 pages of CD’s and books that i planned to buy now only has 3 CD’s that i added to it today. (Dengue Fever, a superb band i discovered today.)

Can you please restore it? I guess that i can live without the history of spending my hard-earned money, but that wish list was a work of art on which i worked for years and i am shocked to see it disappearing into the limbo without any warning.

Thanks.

Mentiras

What do you know—my persona is being discussed and lied about in Spanish. And it doesn’t even have anything to do with my Catalan studies, but with my being an “Ashkenazi Jew”. It’s been a long time since anybody called me an “Ashkenazi Jew”, so it’s quite funny.

Small Blue Thing, i really welcome you to be my friend —and even sister if you want—, because i am happy about having friends around the world—i have friends from Belarus, USA, Serbia, UAE, Iran, Lebanon, Argentina, Catalonia, Valencia, Mallorca and a whole lot of other places. I am especially happy about any opportunity to practice my very poor Spanish. But please don’t quote me incorrectly.

Dogs

The highlights of the chart of the most downloaded Classic Rock tracks on Amazon.com:

• Number 01: The Wall by Pink Floyd. Go on, listen to them on your stupid iPod Shuffle, mixing Vera Lynn with One of My Turns with In the Flesh, when what you really wanted was Another Brick. And that’s if you put nothing but The Wall on your iPod, but you probably put 5000 other songs there, so you get those songs in between others, which have totally nothing to do with The Wall. Congratulations—you are an iAsshole. Of course, you could also listen to it in your stupid Windows Media Player, which is very helpful at showing you where The Happiest Days of Our Lives ends and Another Brick part II begins. If you don’t understand what i mean, you are lucky.
• Number 02: Pop Up by Yelle. What by what?
• Number 10: Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd ($7.99); Number 23: Dark Side of the Moon (2003 Remaster) by Pink Floyd ($8.99). If you downloaded number 10, see what i wrote above about The Wall. If you downloaded number 23 and payed one dollar more for it, the you are a truly unbelievable idiot, because you paid extra for an album that was in the first place one of the most meticulously recorded pieces of music ever, and in 2003 was remastered for playing on special high definition players, and then was converted to a lossy format, which pretty much throws all that sound quality out the window. But you are a part of a rather big group, because 23 is still a pretty high ranking. A study should be conducted on this group, trying to understand—what the fuck causes people to do such stupid things. It will surely win an Ig Nobel.
• Number 19: Communism Is Fascism by Undercover Slut. See number 02.
• Number 39: August & Everything After by Counting Crows. Classic Rock, anyone?
• Number 42: 1984 by Van Halen. I ain’t the worst that you’ve seen. Oh can’t you see what I mean? Might as well jump. Jump! Go ahead, jump. Jump!

Who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
Who thought they were growing old and cried,
Who sang out of their windows in despair,
Who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey,
Who conversed about America and Eternity, a hopeless task.

Reality – Which one’s Pink?

There’s no business like show business.

Some salesman put Pink Floyd and Sarit Hadad on one banner, which advertises a DVD sale.

In Wikipedia there are articles in eight languages about Sarit Hadad. This seemed weird at first, but the reason for that is probably that she appeared in the Eurovision song contest. Reading about Hadad in German and Hungarian is very sobering, even though i don’t understand either of those languages.

On Microsoft Internet Explorer

There is no Microsoft Internet Explorer.

On Instant Messaging

I don’t like instant messaging.

Punctuation With a Smiley

… And Artemy Lebedev again. He finally raised an important question – how to write punctuation marks near the smiley emoticon?

His proposal:

• A smiley is separated from a word with a space – i agree.
• If there’s a punctuation mark after the smiley, it is not separated from the smiley by a space – i don’t agree. I think that Are you ghey or what? :-) looks better than Are you ghey or what :-)?
• A period never comes after a smiley – i totally agree :-)
• A smiley can be combined with a closing brace (in the case that it was opened somewhere :-) – i agree. (Although i used to write like this in the past :) )

People who don’t think that this question is important shouldn’t be allowed to use email.

People Speaking – They call it

— “I would like to offer you a job in a young Internet-centric company, that develops tools for searching text in environments such as BitTorrent and eMule … It’s a pretty hot area these days … they call it P2P …“

The Future

Where does the computing world go? I’m not talking just about Free Software, but about the whole industry. Even Microsoft is in trouble here.

What more can we do with computers? What will computers do five years from now that they can’t do today?

Writing documents and university papers can’t get much better than MS-Office, OpenOffice, TeX and DocBook. Each of them caters rather well to their respective markets (except some interoperability issues, which are really rather minor if you put the bizness bullshit aside.)

Music, Movies, Animation? You can’t improve this field much more in the home market, and the high-end market of professional artists and studios is rather narrow. (Although ideas expressed in Lessig’s Free Culture can make it wider …)

Business v1.0 software – databases, billing, CRM, ERP? It is a market of reliability, not innovation.

Websites, communications and social networks? True innovation in that area hit a glass wall long ago, if you ask me. Some websites make up nicer AJAX tricks, but that’s about it.

So i thought that the really innovative thing that can useful on a major scale may lie in the field of Linguistics (disclaimer: I am studying for a B.A. in Linguistics). Speech recognition, text-to-speech and automated translation – all of them are related to Linguistics; none of them can be done right without proper scientific Linguistic preparation.

Microsoft puts “improved” speech recognition into every version of MS-Office, but it is very far from doing it right. Xerox and IBM tried something in their respective (and respected) research labs, but it didn’t see the light of day (at least yet). Google are rumored to be doing something with statistics-based automated translation.

But no-one has anything finalized.

The first one who does it right will rule the whole market for years to come. Of the current players, Google seems to have the best chances to succeed, but it can also be a startup company created by an anonymous undergraduate Liberal Arts student in India, Nigeria or Ukraine. Or Israel?

(Originally published in Bug #1.)

It’s decreed the people rule

What do you know – my little campaign for free-as-in-freedom hardware bears its first fruits.

I sent a few messages similar to the one that i posted here recently to forums concerning Linux, gNewSense, Ubuntu etc. I have also posted a few comments^* to the post on Mark Shuttleworth’s blog, where he announces the first developer release of Gobuntu, the “radically free” version of Ubuntu.

Surprisingly Mark himself replied to me in the comments of Bug #1. That’s nice, but not too notable on a global level.

But today something bigger happened: Mark announced that he sets up an initiative to pressure laptop manufacturers into building the perfect free-as-in-freedom GNU/Linux latpop – one that can be used with only purely Free Software drivers. He didn’t mention me by name, but i really don’t need this.

So there you go: One of the good things about Free Software projects is the openness of the development and the project management.

Most Free Software projects have open access to their mailing lists and bug tracking tools. Every user of the program can, nearly anonymously, enter a bug or a feature request into the database (Bugzilla, RT, Launchpad, SF.net etc.) and then track its investigation and fix.

It is not a requirement of any license; it just makes sense! For most users this is even more important than being able to read or modify the source code. Even a reply like “Duplicate bug” or “Works for me” is far better than nothing.

I’ve never seen anything like this in the proprietary software world.

Sure – you can send an email with a bug report to Microsoft, Oracle, CA, HP etc., but it is unlikely that you will know where did it go, unless you have a personal service agreement. It’s just “fire and forget”. And you surely won’t get a personal reply from Mr. Gates.

Yet in the Free Software community the user has the full power to influence the project planning of the core development team.

So – thank you, Mark, for this initiative.

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^* Some people that read them badly misundestood what i was trying to say. I have made some mistakes too; i really should have known that being sarcastic in writing is much harder and more dangerous than when speaking in person. Joshua Gay, Andrew Fenn, if you are reading this – please accept my apologies again for any misunderstandings.

An open letter to Richard M. Stallman

Hello,

I am shopping for a laptop computer and i would like to buy one that is truly free – one that is able to run GNU/Linux without any restricted drivers, binary blobs and proprietary firmware.

I’ve been looking for such a laptop for almost a week now, and unfortunately couldn’t find it. I’ve tried asking about it on Ubuntu and gNewSense forums and local (Israeli) forums of GNU/Linux and Free Software experts, but the best reply i could get was that finding a perfectly Free laptop is just too hard and that at this time i should just give up! That is what Mark Shuttleworth himself said, even though he claims that he is also concerned about the issue of “radical” hardware freedom (see discussion at the bottom of Bug #1).

Why is it so hard?

For example: The hardware database at the FSF website has a list of network cards that support Free Software; This is informative, but in practice i couldn’t find anywhere on the Internet a way to search for laptops that have these cards. A lot of laptop vendors don’t even bother to list the manufacturer and model of the network card in the details of their laptops’ components, because in Windows they all just work and Ubuntu makes it relatively easy to install restricted drivers.

The above is also correct for video cards, DVD burners, etc.

So, apparently, most people – even Linux users! – don’t care about free firmware. I do care, and i tried my best to do something about it, but my wife urgently needs a laptop to write her thesis, so unfortunately it seems that i’ll have to buy a (partially) restricted system after all.

I thought that you would like to know that there are people that care about this issue, but find it hard to do something about it in practice.

If you do know about a laptop that is fully usable with purely free drivers, please tell me.

Thanks!

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N.B.: I have great respect towards Mark Shuttleworth and i believe that he is doing his best to help and fix this issue. I regret using the word “claim”, but i already sent the letter to RMS and wanted to post it here without changes.