Terminally Incoherent

I just took the google quiz. I scored 13 out of 15 Messed up on the conversion problems because I picked one particular solution, rather than the “all of the above” answer. To my defense - 1 foot in meters and 1 usd in gbp are much better queries than pounds to dollars for example. But who cares

This is a great link to show to my 109 class when we talk about search engines. You actually can learn something from this. I will make them take this quiz in class!

I stumbled onto fubar today, and saw a link to the new Doom movie trailer. I think it has a potential to be the dumbest movie ever made in holywood.

Let’s face it, the game didn’t really have a story to it. It was pretty much: “You are on mars. There are lots of monsters and daemons running around. Go kill them!” How do you make that into a movie? How can you possibly hope to base a good halfway decent movie on that premise? There are so many good games on the market - they had to pick the one without any plot! Gah!

The FPS sequences are beyond dumb. I don’t think they could have made this movie look more cheesy, even if they tried. Seriously, if I wanted to see cool FPS I would play Doom 3…

My users are whining about these stupid winmail.dat files nearly every day. I usually use Kmail for my work related stuff, so I rarely have any problems with these. I simply use ktnef to extract the attachments and go on with my life. But since 100% of my user base is windows based and Outlook bound, this was not an optimal solution.

The problem occurs when an Outlook user sends someone an email with several attachments and he has either (a) HTML enabled, (b) attached vCard or (c) all of the above. If the recipient has a different version of Outlook, or uses a different client altogether, he is most likely to receive an email with a mysterious attachment called winmail.dat

Apparently winmail.dat is used to store the formating information for HTML enabled emails and/or vcards. Don’t ask my why - they just use it internally somehow. Another Outlook client is supposed to decode that file on the fly. Unfortunately, older version of Outlook often can’t read the dat files issued by the newer versions - and you get these mysterious attachments.

My advice, as usual it is: don’t use freakin outlook! But if you cant live without Outlook, just send messages in plain text, and never, ever attach vcards!

If some asshat sends you an email with winmail.dat here is what you do:

1. yell at the asshat
2. send him/her a tar file with a postscript document as an act of revenge (windows users are scared of postscript and tar files)
3. use the TNEF viewer of choice to open the file and extract attachments.

Personally, I use ktnef. But if use windows, you might need to use something different.

For windows usage, I found a very obscure but functional command line tool called WMDecode. I guess an old rule of thumb is that good hackers are usually poor web designers… This guy must be a freakin genius then, because his website sucks! But the WMDecode tool actually works as advertised and its all that counts!

It’s actually really simple to use - you just drag your file onto the WMDecode.exe and poof - the attached files magically appear in the same directory. This way it’s not all scary and mysterious for stupid windows users

So, Google is opening up registration to general public. I still have like 50 invitations left, but it seems that they are pretty useless now…

Or maybe not. Apparently, Google decided to force people to use a cell phone in order to complete the authentication process. WTF? Not only do they want my email, my chats and my searches - now they want my cellphone too? I think this is retarded!

Oh, and btw - great job on cutting off the rest of the freakin world from your service! This is beyond retarded. Is is a fucking ploy to make gmail available only in rich countries where everyone owns a cell phone? No cell phone, no gmail - unless your friend has gmail and can send you an invitation. Gah! This is stupid!

But I’m still willing to forgive them, because they officially haven’t taken the Beta banner from the front page yet. So, as far as I’m concerned, they are still not out of beta yet (shalsdot is wrong, as usuall). Perhaps this is just a way to open up registration to general public, while restricting it to certain demographic (middle to upper class US residents who are old enough to own cellphones) without getting flooded?

Once they finally get out of Beta they better provide a normal way to register that does not require one to live in US and own a cell!

The only good thing about this scheme would be that it could be a nice way to get around the CAPTCHA issues. But, of course they do use a fucking CAPTCHA on the page where you register your phone number (see the screenshot above). Why not, right? Agh!

And I still find the idea of Google knowing my cell phone slightly freaky. Are they on a quest to index all the information on planet earth or something?

I have another interesting question. Why do the cell phone thing, if users can easily bypass that verification and register here?

Last time when I was talking about the Open Media Commons crap, I did not realize what a huge stinking pile of bullshit they are trying to sell to us. If you think about it, Open DRM is actually an oxymoron! It is as ridiculous as dry water, hot ice!

Cory Doctorow makes a very good point at boingboing! What if I decide to modify the DRM software? It’s Open Source, no? So I should be well within my rights to modify it to say… Allow me to copy the file without limitations?

Open Source and DRM are not compatible. Think about it - DMCA prohibits circumventing DRM, which in this case would entail modifying the code of your player/decryption software to remove undesirable restrictions. On the other hand Open Source encourages participation and modification of the code. In the end, we will end up with an open sourced set of DRM related algorithms, which will be illegal to touch or modify without permission because of DMCA. That in turn will likely violate GPL because prohibiting modification of the source code is not allowed under this license.

If you ever considered contributing to that project, please think it over! I would say it is a legal gamble. Any developer working on it will be very, very close to violating the DRM related DMCA provisions. They will also be likely to violate GPL if the software ends up with an end-to-end DMCA protection.

So I ask you, how is that supposed to work? It can’t be open, and untouchable at the same time. Something has to give. And guess who has more money to spend on lawyers? If this would ever go to court, a media company would have a good chance winning a case against someone who modified the code to circumvent DRM because it was under GPL. It would be a very dangerous precedence, and it could bring the validity of GPL as a licensing scheme into question.

This project carries to many risks. It is tainted! Leave it alone people! Let it die.