These things can be had from PayPal for about five bucks. Or $7.50 if you’re an Aussie. Verisign will flog them off to you for $30, if you’d like, but basically PayPal rocks for this kinda stuff. It’s a one-time password token that effectively enhances your authentication by a massive degree. It’s cool because it works with PayPal and eBay. It’s cooler (and worthwhile) because you can potentially use it with OpenID.

Essentially, it’s a random number seeded with a unique key that gets appended to your regular password. This defeats keyloggers and pretty much all kinds of phishing currently out there. These kinds of devices have been used in corporate VPN/dial-in scenarios for years now (predominantly, in the situations I’m aware of, with technology by RSA SecureID), but this is the first I’ve seen of it from Verisign.

And, sure, it’s only as secure as physical security or the endpoints themselves are, but it’s a massive step up from “what’s your cat’s name?” two-factor auth (though, unfortunately, I think PayPal/eBay offer that as a backup).

I’ve ordered mine and will probably be having a play with OpenID implementations of it (backed by Verisign’s PIP service, but not overly tied to it because of OpenID’s identity-delegation ability) once it arrives (10 business days).

Can’t help but wonder what Verisign’s rates for these things are in a standalone sense. Normally on 5 year contracts, but in terms of cost-per-token. Seems like a great way to defeat the idiot users who insist on having passwords that are blatantly obvious (argue all you like about strength policies: it’s often not feasible when balanced against support load for resultant forgotten passwords).

Also, to those who argue PayPal = evil, if you’re in Australia then please… don’t. Unlike in the US, here they’ve basically got the same financial reporting obligations as any bank does, and customer service necessarily to match it. All the horror stories from the ‘States (not that I think them universally untrue!) pretty much couldn’t happen here or they’d be chucked out of the country. And, whilst they’re so heavily subsidising (or at least obtaining bulk discounts for) this kinda tech, that’s cool with me.

It was super nice and super shiny and under a super 5 year warranty, but only if I shipped it back to the US, at a cost of around $150. Crazy, huh? I’m sure there were cheaper options, but I couldn’t find them. And they probably involved boats, which just take too long :P

Anyway, I went to buy a video camera yesterday and sort-of-impulse-bought (coz I was at the store and had been thinking I really should get a decent PSU before something bad happens for a few months) a Corsair HX-620W. It had great reviews and was meant to be super quiet which is mostly what attracted me to it — I mean, sure, reliable power is great… but quiet PCs are better! I could’ve gone the Seasonic S12 but it’s not modular, or the M12, but it’s louder (extra 6cm fan)… so the Corsair, despite probably being manufactured by the same company and sharing a lot of identical design features, won.

It’s modular, which the OCZ wasn’t. Not a massive deal, but nice nonetheless. Makes for a tidier case:

You can see the modular connectors here:

I’m not using any of the SLI power at the minute (probably ever) but, again, nice to have in a future-proofing kind of way.

It’s also got one particularly massive fan. The OCZ had two 80mm fans that were super efficient and barely ever made any noise at all, but bigger typically means slower rotation & less whining noises, so it has to be a good thing. My HSF is massive enough and you can see even it’s small in comparison.

I also took advantage of the cleaning-up-the-insides to properly attach a few CCFLs that’d been lying around. Finally, the UV-responsive motherboard can glow properly!

I know, IDE cables suck… I’ve only got one IDE drive left, and it’s actually just there as a spare. Should take it out but haven’t had a chance just yet.

Anyway, whilst I was doing all this I realised my graphics card fan wasn’t spinning at all. It’d been making some funny noises when I’d done some stuff inside the case in the past, but I’d always dismissed it because nothing was crashing and I hadn’t changed anything to do with the graphics card. Turns out it hadn’t actually been spinning for ages and the fan had the driest bearings I’ve ever seen. The heatsink was plenty hot, but nothing was crashing. My system (CPU + memory) runs about 15% above clock but I’ve had no real cause to overclock the graphics card (Fury aside, but it needs more than just a faster clock!). So, consider this research that a cheap and nasty Palit GeForce 7600 GS can run with only passive cooling!

Ironically, that fan has the newest bearing in the system.

After I’d put everything back together I realised the chipset fan could probably do at the very least with a clean, but had rebooted by then and left it well enough alone.

Singer Oil is great, but I tried some spray Aquatec lubricant also which seems to be a little finer and would probably work quite well. The graphics fan squeaked a little when it started up… not quite sure why! It was pretty well oiled, but maybe it was still just working through the bearings completely.

Anyway… I think this computer’s nearly ready for summer’s soaring temperatures and increased power instability.

I want to use it (and will) because it’s freaking awesome. The bitrate thing doesn’t massively concern me… generally speaking, I can’t tell the difference (though I will continue to rip my CDs as lossless, mostly in case I lose them). What concerns me is the potential undermining of my CD-store perusing ways as a result! I haven’t had to consider this until now because mainstream music simply hasn’t been available in a relatively open (don’t give me crap about MP3 patents, anyone can read them), DRM-free format.

It ships with artwork but that so doesn’t count.

Oh, so apparently this post was a waste of time. Of course, it’s only licensed for US sales. I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me, but it didn’t. Now I’m grumpy. And irrationally craving popcorn.

Well, if you’re in the US and using iTunes… stop. This is pretty cool for you guys, meanwhile I’ll keep buying my grey-market imported CDs (which is completely legal in Australia and morally fine). All that’s standing between me and Amazon’s MP3 music is a US shipping address for invoices, presumably, so I totally could just make one up. Not breaking any law that I’m under there. But whatever, it’s all too messy.

Yeah, that’s right, record companies screwed it up again.

We’ll get there, one day…

What I want to know is, why do infrastructure companies need lots of positive PR? Sure, they make CE products, too, but that’s absolutely nothing to do with this technology. We have a social conscience, buy our CE gear?

Quoth the concerned: “That’s like the only way I have of seeing how you are most of the time now!” — which makes me almost as depressed as I was after my nostalgia trip writing the last post, because ‘the concerned’ is someone who is also of fair significance to me. It’ll move, but not die.

I’ve got too many business cards with the address printed on it to let it die for another year or so ;-)

I spent a few hours today tracking down a good web host after evaluating DIY hosting and deciding it almost certainly wasn’t worth it, even with a static IP and remarkably stable ADSL2+ link (no, not just against 2003’s 256/64 PPPoE standards!). I’ll be switching this site across sometime in the next week or two, probably at some arcane time of day that no-one will notice anyway because that’s just how I roll. It’s funny, because I’ll now be using the same hosting my clients do… and I switched hosting providers to do so. Segpub were great for a few months, but they’re just a little too expensive and inflexible for what they are — an Aussie company doing good US hosting. New provider is A Small Orange, who have a positively yawn-inspiring website but get good press. I was so tempted by Site5 and Dreamhost’s absurd promises, but given none of this is going to come close to the reliability of web hosting on one server where the admin has an enormous vested interest in, it made sense to go with someone smaller and more sensible. That, and I wanted to be confident reselling it… now I might actually start making some money out of my handful of hosting clients… just.

Hosting for me is continually about keeping people around to help them out with support and preventing them from worrying about managing the component parts of their web services, more than any concerted effort to make money. Even if I were to take it more seriously (i.e. actually bill people on time, etc.) it would rarely amount to anything more than pocket money unless I really chased after a lot more clients than I care to single-handedly engage with… reselling hosting is only profitable if you outsource support to a bunch of geeky high school students with too much free time (that was me when I considered reselling to be even slightly lucrative!) — ideally high school students who have never had a real job!

The biggest thing I’ll miss technically? Having a relatively local SSH box (low latency) with relatively permissive security (ever tried running a text-mode browser on a Jailrooted terminal? BadTimes™). But that barely affects publishing so… nothing is dying.

All for some American power-behind-the-throne. If he’s going to be the key string-puller, he should at least stay invisible so we don’t need to concern ourselves with his (admittedly unwelcome) presence.

They were blocking all useful traffic (but letting private cars through? Bizarre…), and claimed to have been using sniffer dogs on the cars they were letting through. Yeah, right. I didn’t see a single dog last night. I was wearing a backpack the whole evening. OH, LOOK, THERE GOES A TERRORIST!

No-one stopped me…

Then, after having blocked off half of the northern CBD, police stop a protest from going ahead on the grounds that it’s going to cause traffic chaos. Like that was a consideration a few nights back.

And, whilst I’m on this little soapbox, what on earth is a “lawful protest” about? “Oh, here you go, protest in a nice little out –of-the-way place where no-one can see you, much less be seen by the person you’re protesting about/to. Just… stay away from the Rocks and everything’ll be okay.”

Because I’ve seen so many rabid gun-toting uni-students trying to blow up the US puppetmaster. Nevermind that Australia has far-more-sane gun-control legislation than the US does… John Howard isn’t the centre of all this rubbish when he travels to the US, even, and yet over here we’ve got to keep unarmed protestors a good couple of kilometers from their target in case they pull out… well, something.

Meanwhile, I don’t know whether I should be satisfied or frustrated that I was wearing a conspicuous black backpack all evening around various protest sites and didn’t get glanced at once.

Go home, Cheney. You’ve wasted enough of Sydney’s time and resources already.

Me, I blame the crappy web proxy they make everyone use. It’s so cheap, though, that I’m not too fussed about it.

Just in case you cared, I’m syncing at 16418/1021… it’s acceptably snappy. The performance isn’t amazing during the day (and you’ve really got to wonder why–it’s not like many businesses use TPG, is it?) but it tends to behave itself more (i.e. with Australian servers) at night. I haven’t had a chance to hit up a bit of CS/Q3/UT/UT2k4/other network game for “testing purposes” yet… maybe this evening. Maybe.

In other news, I’ve discovered I’m generally more productive working from home than in the city. Something to do with a little more sleep, a little less aircon (it’s oppressively warm compared to super-chilled offices, but I prefer it that way), a little more monitors (I’ve only got one at work), a little faster Internet (aforementioned speeds versus a 4Mbps link shared between about 150 people, 20+ servers and channelled through a craptacular proxy), and more natural light. Perhaps.

Now the only problem is juggling freelancing commitments with “employee” commitments… but I’m using a computer for one and textas for the other at the minute, so it’s fairly clearly delineated right now.

It all drives you slowly crazy, but I was never a huge fan of sanity, anyway.

Professional studios around the world spend millions of dollars and man-hours producing commercial entertainment. Please don’t steal their work or in ten years, it will cost $50(2) to see a movie in the theater [sic]. But, you can find lots of material on the Web that’s legal to cut, copy and remix. Look for the Creative Commons license and add to the world’s culture.

(2) Exaggerated estimate.

What. The.

It’s hard to tell whether they’re mocking the MPAA’s of the world or being serious. In which case, it’s great to see they’re being honest, but, again… what the?

Oh, and I still haven’t bought Quicktime Pro. I went there via their trailers site and saw this line in the footer: “Broken Movie icons? QuickTime 7 is now required to view Trailers– and it’s free.”

Clearly, Quicktime 7 isn’t free if you paid for 6. And, so far as I know, there’s no way to run multiple versions of Quicktime in tandem. So if you want to be able to view new generation content being created, you’re basically locked into a continual upgrade cycle. Which is a load of crap.

Also a load of crap is their Australian pricing for Quicktime Pro, which is $AU44 versus $US29 (about $AU38 at time of writing). The bits are identical. Don’t charge me more. I have foreign exchange transaction fees added to my card if I purchase something in a different currency, but it’s not anything near six dollars (try twenty cents or something ridiculously small). And it doesn’t cost you six dollars more to send an email to Australia instead of to your US customers.

I’m in this bizarre pseudo-closed-source land at the minute and I’m really fearful for the longevity of content sitting where I am now. In terms of relative openness, Apple aren’t looking too crash hot right at the minute…

My money doesn’t go anywhere near as far on textbooks here as it would if we were fortunate enough to have books at the same price they are in the US. I’m trying to track down some Vygotsky works (and Fisher’s collection is categorised by emptiness, haven’t checked out UNSW yet but imagine it wouldn’t be much/any better) and don’t want to spend the earth to pursue what is, essentially, an entirely peripheral interest. So I can spend, you know, $190 on a decent text in Australia, or I can get that bundled with one other (also apparently excellent resource) for US$50 plus shipping from Amazon. It’s absolutely nuts.

One day someone will try to explain the economics behind this to me. And that day my head will implode with frustration.

Jimmy wasn’t really popular
He had a couple of friends back home
And sooner or later they’re all getting out so he had to join up alone
He was dreaming of the Ivy League since he was only three feet tall
And get the hell out of jersey and then he would never look back at all

And then your heroes say
That miles away
We lost another one that we sent with a gun
They’re gonna miss him he was two weeks from twenty and there’s still no shame
From the man to blame

Jimmy never had a reason to stay
Cos all the factories shut down
All he had was a line for his name
So he could sign away his right to be proud
He tried to kiss her on the way out the door,
She just put her little hand on his face
I don’t understand why you’re leaving, she said
But I hope your gonna ask me to wait

And then your heroes say
That miles away
We lost another one that we sent with a gun
His lady missed him, he was two weeks from twenty and there’s still no shame
From the man to blame

Jimmy’s mother went to Capitol Hill
So she could fill her heart up with joy
Maybe shake a few hands while she’s there and tell them thank you sir for taking my boy.

And then your heroes say
That miles away
We lost another one that we sent with a gun
His momma missed him he was two weeks from twenty and there’s still no shame
From the man to blame
No there’s still no shame
And we’re all to blame
We’re all to blame
We’re all to blame
We’re all to blame
We’re all to blame

Maybe the lyrics of every track are this politicized, and it’s just that the elocution in this track makes the message more accessible, but I’d hazard not. I don’t normally listen to song lyrics, mostly because music is rarely an object-of-attention for me (that is, anything more than appealing noise in the background to aid other tasks), but for some reason this stood out.

I’ve heard Yellowcard dismissed as emo crap… is there such thing as political emo crap? I suppose that’d aptly characterise the apparent inclination of most politically active (i.e. not apathetic/indifferent) uni students: perpetually frustrated and looking to hurt someone (quoth the banner, “The next cut: Howard’s neck”). Well, that seems to be the case at Sydney, anyway. ;-)

Anyway… enough of that. I liked the song even if it’s a bit US-parochial (i.e. one guy two weeks from twenty is more valuable than [blank] foreigners) … and yeah, I know this artistic sentiment isn’t isolated to recent conflict or even just the US, and yeah, I know it’s a valid objection. If you haven’t heard it yet it’s worth listening to at some point.

News, apparently, but all it really means is that we’re (a safe enough contraction, in light of the fact that if you’re reading this, you’re part of the fifth of the world’s population that has access to a computer/the Internet) overconsuming. And they’re not. And if they do, too — that is, leave the ranks of the sustainers/impoverished populations of the world — then there won’t be enough resources left.

Wow, clever. I’m pretty sure I agree with the researcher’s idea(s) entirely, but the way the article is written it’s like… damn those emerging nations for coming out of poverty, etc. It reads as ridiculously parochial (in a global “Western” parochial kind of way. Maybe stretching the definition somewhat.), but maybe that’s just me being cynical. Yes, I see IT/sustainable resource usage as not being mutually exclusive. I’m not being completely hypocrictical on this one… though I have to admit, air conditioning was amazingly welcome on New Years’ day, irrespective of power usage (Australians, incidentally, use the second highest volume of electricity per-capita in the world, coming in only after the US).

Ultimately climate change doesn’t mean that much. As in, it’ll all level out when it gets too hot for us to continue producing goods using carbon-based products. Sure, lots of people will die, but it’ll all be stable eventually. Cue eye-rolling. We know it does mean lots, certainly for our generation and the next several. Current efforts (in which a 3% reduction in emissions is seen as mind-boggling) strike me as being way too little, too late.

The solution? No idea. Ideas such as an vehicle emissions tax could work, along with substantialish marketing budgets (hey, this is Government we’re talking about here… if they put in substantial money to start with, at least something should trickle out the other end) to try and change attitudes… but the biggest problems are industry and power generation. And 3% sounds suspiciously close to nothing.

This is a seriously cool program. Sure, it’s just a frontend to mplayer/mencoder, but it’s so easy! Having said that, I’m still not game to touch more than half the options, but whatever :P I now no longer need to pull out my Coldplay Live 2003 DVD to watch tracks on it :D

(I’d ripped it before, but couldn’t figure out how to do individual Chapters as separate files, so the resulting file was the whole DVD)

And yes, this program is probably illegal in Australia, as in the US. But then so are iPods prior to iTMS.

Keep in mind : Apple is not screwing musicians. Labels are screwing musicians. Apple pays 70 cents per 99-cent download. If the artist has signed their music over to a label, they don’t own their music anymore. The label does. So Apple pays the label 70 cents per song, and the label pays the artist… what… a penny? Two? Nothing at all? But when an artist is NOT signed to a label, when they’re going through CD Baby for example, we only keep a 9% cut and pay 91% of all income directly to the artists every week. Our accounting is wide open so they can see every dollar every day, and it all goes to the artist every week, without fail, for over 7 years now.

Also, I’ve just discovered that iTunes users, even on Windows, can rip CDs with supposed “Copy Control” technology without even having to resort to the typical Shift key “hack” (heh, and, in the US, pressing Shift at that point in time is entirely illegal. Remove those copyright circumvention devices from your keyboards, America!!) to prevent the loading of supposed restricting technologies. I guess this means iTunes is now illegal under the DMCA, too?

For the record, the CD in question was Placebo’s 2003 “Sleeping with Ghosts” album, published by Virgin. At least they didn’t have the audacity to use the standard CD logo on it (because these copy-control things are outside of Red Book spec).

The sensor on this must be an absolute piece of trash. It hasn’t even got the excuse of a slowly dying sensor due to a manufacturing defect/humidity… it’s just really poor quality.

The above image has just been scaled, and carefully compressed so as not to exacerbate the problem (in actual fact, JPEG compression artifacts reduce the severity of it). It looks as though it’s had a posterize filter applied to it (reducing the number of colours in the palette, similar to what indexed GIF photos look like), but it hasn’t. That’s straight out of the camera… so far as I can tell, no other software has touched it.

Maybe it just looks worse to me than it is because I’ve got three sets of images here, the other two of which come from a Canon EOS-300D — or Digital Rebel in US-speak — (or maybe a pair of them, judging from time delay between shots, but last I heard they were junky consumer versions of the EOS-10D with plastic casing, and “special” lens options, so why anyone would buy two of them is beyond me). I don’t know, I was just pretty appalled this was coming straight of a camera — ANY camera, regardless as to the brand. It’s not overexposed, or blurred, or grainy (well, it is, but you can’t see it particularly well in the scaled version and that’s not what I’m complaining about — I understand low-light does that to photos), it’s just really bad colour. Incidentally, it was shot as a JPEG. So, it’s not like I or anyone else has screwed up RAW processing — the camera has done that for us.

Oh, and incidentally, what’s with 3:2 ratios? I think it’s nicer than 4:3, but it bugged me to look shots from the Canon before I figured out what was going on!

Update: Perhaps they have been processed a little. One or two of the Rebel’s photos are exhibiting similar qualities, so that leads me to believe someone was being a tool with saturation in Photoshop or the like. And unhelpfully left the EXIF data intact so I thought it was unchanged. :-( I guess I’m often guilty of much the same thing with the GIMP, but oh well. Doesn’t hurt to be wrong once in a while!

There’s a new TV network out there that’s got a radically different programming model, and looks immensely interesting. They’re foward-thinking type people. This is Cluetrain–model television programming. And I wish they’d gone and launched a video stream as well, because neither I (nor anyone else outside the US) can see any of it live — only what’s been specifically selected and uploaded to their online Current Studio section (not yet live).

(Oh, and if any US people are reading this — I’m looking at you, Matthom ;) — expecting a full report! :P)

I’d say some more nice things about them if their website were as foward thinking as they clearly are: they could easily have a validating website if they cared (look ma, no tables… also no doctype), and streaming is obviously not beyond their reach if they already have the facilities to provide some of their content selectively.