OK, trading copyrighted stuff is wrong. If you’re pirating material for resale, you are a criminal. Even if you’re sharing tons and tons of music through Kazaa or what have you, you’re breaking the law, unfair as it may seem. I personally believe that file trading actually helps copyright holders, since I don’t like to buy a CD or anything unless I’ve had a chance to actually hear it, but I can understand the RIAA wanting to defend their intellectual property rights, no matter how draconian their methods seem.

But what if the person they’re prosecuting isn’t the one doing the trading?

What if that person had no idea how any of this stuff even worked until they were served by the RIAA?

And what if they find themselves in court, just a few days after being served, having looked for lawyers to defend them but not finding anyone who really wants to go toe to toe with the RIAA’s legal sharks?

Well, you hope to God that defendant winds up with an understanding judge. I read a ton of legal transcripts in my days as a reporter, but none were as entertaining as this. Judge Colleen McMahon really understands the issue at hand, even expressing her own fears about potentially winding up in the defendant’s place. “[T]he difference between you and me,” she tells the defendant, “if it happens to me, it will be in the headlines of the New York Post.”

I also find it fascinating that the RIAA lawyer seems to be using the court as leverage to force the defendant, Ms. Patricia Santangelo, into settling. The lawyer basically tells her that she can avoid having to find and pay for a lawyer and go through all of the court stuff if she just settles with what he calls “the conference center”. The judge was not digging that:

“If you are here, you are here as an officer of the court. You’re taking up my time and cluttering up my calendar, so you will do it in the context of the Court. Maybe it will be with a magistrate judge, but you will be representing your client, not some conference center. And if your people want things to be done through the conference center, tell them not to bring lawsuits.”

I believe the copyfighters have a new hero.

Were it not for all of the death and destruction, natural disasters would be totally awesome. I’m glued to CNN.com watching the coverage of hurricane Katrina as it bears down on poor ol’ New Orleans. While reading, I’m struck hard by the second-deck headline (emphasis mine):

Louisiana evacuees should stay away for at least a week to avoid “a wilderness” without power or drinking water that will be infested with poisonous snakes and fire ants, state officials warned Monday.

After visiting Louisiana a few years ago, Dani and I gave serious thought to moving there permanently. Fire ants and poisonous snakes (and they didn’t even mention the gators) are plenty to make us glad we stayed in good ol’ California. When we were there, a different hurricane had just blown by (I think it was Dennis) and the waters were still receding. I had never seen gator roadkill before, but there was TONS of it on the highway between Lafayette and New Orleans, and not just the baby gators either. We saw some serious six-footers out there as well. That’s some seriously messed up stuff right there.

The recent flood of Pastafarian devotion has me at once amused, disturbed and more than a little frightened over the potential of being handed a pamphlet and some elbow macaroni the next time I go to the airport.

Y’know, back in the good ol’ days people respected each other. They were civil, courteous and pleasant. And, certainly, violence was never an issue. This culture of violence we live in today, where homicide and bludgeonings are deemed entertainment, is deplorable. Just a shame.

If you agree with me, you should sit down, relax, grab your pipe and enjoy life in the good ol’ days with Mr. Everett True, all drawn in the early 1900s.

I’m posting this here because I have now fielded this question at least half a dozen times, and I’m pretty frustrated with ISPs not taking responsibility for it.

If you have recently switched your internet provider (usually to SBC Global or Yahoo DSL, though I’ve heard of this happening elsewhere as well) and find that you can receive email just fine but can no longer send email, here’s the fix:

1. In your email program, go to your email account properties (in Outlook, this is under Tools -> E-Mail Accounts)
2. Change the entry for your outgoing mail/SMTP server to whatever the outgoing mail server is for your new ISP (for SBC/Yahoo it’s usually smtp.sbcglobal.net)
3. Save your settings and try sending an email message. Everything should work fine.

Here’s why this is happening: Many email worms replicate by going into your mailbox, finding anything that looks like an email address and sending itself to that address using either a built-in mail server or by using some other mail server out on the Internet. What SBC/Yahoo has done to stem this is shut off all outgoing email access to any servers other than their own. If a worm tries to use their server to replicate itself, they theorietically have some checks in place to prevent it from happening. Basically, it’s a “we trust ourselves more than we trust you” situation.

There are some caveats to this, however. First off, as more folks begin using systems that attempt to confirm the source of an email to ensure it has permission to send from the domain the email purportedly came from (i.e. to make sure that sbcglobal.net is allowed to send email on behalf of, say, robzazueta.com), more and more of the emails coming out of these ISPs may be marked as spam, unless the owners of the secondary domains (in my example, robzazueta.com) explicitly give permission to the ISP to send on their behalf. There is a slight security risk there, though. If I give SBC Global’s server carte blanche permission to send email from robzazueta.com, what’s to stop a spammer or some other scammer from using their SBC Global account to send email pretending it’s coming from me? Granted, that’s actually the status quo right now, but this is something email admins are struggling to fix.

The other more immediate, and more annoying, problem is the fact that SBC Global blocks these outgoing mail servers without telling their clients. They just assume that, if you’re using SBC Global, you must be using your SBC Global email account using their servers. This is a lame assumption. Since the ISP market is so competitive, fewer people are using the email accounts that come with their ISPs so that they won’t have to deal with telling everyone their email address changed if they switch to another provider. More technically savvy folks are getting their own domains to use for sending and receiving email. So, when folks make the switch to SBC Global, no one tells them that their email may break. This creates frustration for end users as well as tech support folks like myself who daily field angry calls asking why the server is down. The server is fine. SBC just has lousy customer service.

I’m not on the sooper-dooper cool short list of beta testers looking at Vista (not sure where I’d even install it – not on my main machine, that’s for sure) so I have no personal experience with it. However, I have been watching the news trickling out about Microsoft’s new replacement for Windows XP. I gotta tell ya, I’m unimpressed. When the biggest new feature C|Net can tout about it is “improved graphics handling capability”, I pretty much have to take a pass. The only security improvement I’ve heard mentioned is their elimination of the Administrator account as the default. I thought the problem of having machines ship with a default root had gone out with mainframes.

So, like every version of Windows to come out since ME (which completely soiled me on Microsoft – I’ve been pretty savagely anti-Bill ever since, even though I’m still required to use Windows) it looks like I’ll be waiting quite some time before I upgrade.

Yet another example of tech jargon gone wild: It looks like I’ll be building a new server for our small office. We’ve been using a Net Integrator box here for a while and, well, I have more than a few issues with it (understatement – I want to burn it to cinders). With our recent problems, we’re faced with either spending another $1200 or so for software support (which sucks – both the software and the support) or putting that money toward something that will give us a bit more freedom. I’m opting for the latter.

So, in my research for what’s needed to build this new box I’ve been looking at RAID controller cards. My box at home uses Linux software RAID 1, which is fantastic but a little risky since it’s my understanding that it doesn’t always recover from a fatal crash all that well. So, in looking for a card, I’ve seen a number that, as usual, support RAID 0 and RAID 1. Then I saw quite a few that also support JBOD, which I had never heard of before. Very interesting! Perhaps this is some new, much better version of RAID that easily offers the best of both RAID 5 and RAID 1? Maybe it’s a completely new scheme altogether that’s better than RAID in general.

Now, RAID stands for “Redundant Array of Independant Disks” – it’s a bunch of disks wired together in different ways to improve either speed, reliability or, in the case of RAID 5, both. So my first inclination upon seeing this new JBOD designation was to hit Google and enter “Define: JBOD“. JBOD – brand new fancy computer term that it is – stands for this:

Just a Bunch Of Disks

I shit you not. Rather than use any fancy RAID stuff, it just let’s you throw a bunch of disks at a problem to increase storage. This is an acronym that is actually being used as a marketing sell point. JBOD? BFD. But it did make me LOL when I read the definition.

I keep hearing alot about how AJAX is the next big thing in web development. Not knowing what AJAX was and assuming it was yet another programming language (like Python, Ruby on Rails, Flavor of the Week, etc.) I’ve sort of just let it go. I mean, I know PHP, Java, Perl, C/C++, Pascal, JavaScript, HTML, XML, ActiveScript, VBScript, PeopleCode, SQR etc. If I can’t do what I need to do in one language, I have several others that I can already choose from. I typically like to wait until I *have* to learn a new language before I actually sit down and do it. These days, that’s a rare scenario.

So I recently decided to begin working on a project that’s been percolating in the back of my brain for some time. I want it to be as totallyuser friendly as possible since my target audience is not all that tech savvy. I’ve been playing around lately with Google’s newer functionality (i.e. Google Maps, Google Suggest, etc.) and have been really impressed with their ease of use. I know from reading an article somewhere that they use the JavaScript XMLHttpRequest object. So I did a little research into it and figured out how to use it. And, man, is this baby cool. It basically lets developers grab dynamic data for a web page without having to reload the page. This is *always* a huge headache. Let’s say, for example, that you have a list of states and a list of cities. If you show all of the data in both, it gets hopelessly confusing. Plus, you don’t want people selecting, say, “California” and “Detroit”. So you want the city list to change according to what state the user selected. In the past, you’d either have to reload the page every time the user selected a new state or you’d have to include every possible city in a series of state-specific arrays. For 50 states, you can easily wind up with 5000 lines of code just for those dropdowns – a totally unwieldly number that affects download times.

Withe the XMLHttpRequest object, the user can select a state and, on the fly, the browser can hit another web page, grab the list of cities for the chosen state and load them into the city dropdown WITHOUT needing to reload the page or preload every possible city. This not only eases page load times, but it also makes code maointenance easier and actually helps the server load (I’d much rather have two hits to the server generating a small amount of data than one hit generating a ton of useless data). So now I’m a total convert on this baby. I figured it out, implemented it into my project and am happy as a clam.

When I was figuring it out, though, I kept coming across sites talking about AJAX. So I looked into it to see what the connection was. Lo and behold:

The XMLHttpRequest Object is AJAX

That’s right. All of the high-falutin’ marketing and crap surrounding AJAX is really nothing more than yet another buzzword being touted to describe the confluence of technologies that already exist. DHTML, JavaScript, StyleSheets and all the other buzzwords – all of which apply to the exact same stuff – apparently weren’t enough to describe it. And herein lies the fundamental flaw in all technology – the need to give everything some unique name as if it’s brand new and oh cool even if it’s just a minor feature release.

AJAX alienated me initially. I’m clearly getting old since I really don’t want to learn new languages unless I absolutely have to. So thinking that AJAX was some new thing with its own syntax, grammar, etc., I avoided it. Come to find out, I already knew it. Why someone couldn’t just say, “Hey, check out what we can do in JavaScript now” rather than trying to brand it as the next hot thing I just don’t get.

Or maybe I do.

Searching for AJAX at Amazon returns 117 books, most of them referring to AJAX coding. By branding it as something new and unique – a whole new paradigm! – technical authors are able to sucker a whole new generation of coders into buying their heavy and overpriced tomes. I mean, which would you rather buy: the Revised Essential DHTML book (which, if it’s truly essential and revised, will have all of the necessary AJAX components in it) or New Essential AJAX? DHTML is soooo 90s. AJAX is totally hip and now.

When technology and marketing collide, consumers take it in the pants. It happens at the lower tech levels (I.e. “Buy Windows ME – it’s so NOT Windows 98! But make sur you buy XP when it comes out or you’ll be left in the dust!”) just as often as it does at the higher levels. In the end, we’re all left with an entirely unsatisfied feeling of not being given what we were promised. No wonder so many folks are frustrated with technology.

When I was in college, my buddy Jason and I would talk of someday forming a band which, for reasons that are lost to a drunken, pot-filled haze, was to be called “Purple Schmultz” (he would don the moniker of “Purple”, I would be known as “Leon Schmultz”. Seemed right at the time). I abandoned those dreams, chasing instead the dream of being a suburbanite web geek.

Jason, on the other hand, kept the dream alive and joined his brothers, who make far more fitting bandmates. This is, by the way, the coolest thing I’ve found on the Internet to date, even if it’s for strictly inside-joke reasons.

Fucking metal.

To me, the only thing more disturbing than the explicit marketing of fake, non-alcoholic beer to kids (which, if I’m being honest, doesn’t *really* bother me that much, except I made a New Years resolution to “think of the children”) is the advertising slogan:

“Even kids cannot stand life unless they have a drink”

Umm… disconcerting. What in the world is going on in Japan that they need beer to “stand life”? Aren’t soiled panty vending machines enough for these people?

[via Boing Boing]