Geodog: Reviews

New Mozilla site goes live: looks better, needs work on information architecture and writing

Ben just announced that the new Mozilla site that I commented upon earlier has gone live. It does look a lot better visually, but as I remarked earlier when reviewing the beta version (and offered to help with), I think the Firefox page could still use some work on the writing and information architecture. The writing needs to be punchier and shorter and there need to be fewer styles and links on the first page. And somebody needs to do something about the car. Making it smaller was a good start, but it I still think one could make a much better graphic to show off Firefox's features.

Linux Torvalds on Conferences

I was just finishing Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary tonight when I ran across the following passage at the beginning of the last chapter. I immediately thought of my good friend Stavros the Wonder Chicken, and one of his recent rants. I usually save quotations for my linklog, but since I couldn't find this one online, and considering the exalted nature of the source, I decided to reproduce it here. I don't exactly agree with ii, but I enjoy it, and I hope you enjoy it too, STWC:

Is there anything more obnoxious than business prognosticators? Those self-important types who pretend to know where the insane technology amusement ride will take us? I guess they serve a good function. They populate the panel discussions and keynote speeches of the indistinguishable technology conferences that seem to crop us like unpleasant, inedible mushrooms in your flower bed. People hoping to cash in on technology trends spend thousands of dollars to hear them speak at technology conferences. It keeps an army of hotel workers and food handlers and bartenders honestly employed, so I suppose they serve a purpose.

-- Linus Torvalds

Unfortunately, this was the best piece in the book. Linus' code is better than his prose. As he himself says elsewhere "I'm hopeless when it comes to documentation." It's not a bad book, it's just a short article's worth of information on Linus Torvalds puffed up into a book. The kind of book that I might buy in paperback at an airport bookstore before a transcontinental flight and leave on the plane for the next passenger at the other end.

If you are interested in a good history of Linux and open source, I highly recommend instead Glyn Moody's Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution. It is a highly readable book that covers the main events in the creation of Linux, and explains many of the internal controversies that can be very puzzling to newcomers, such as why a lot of people prefer the term GNU/Linux, or what the difference is between Free Software and Open Source. It also has capsule biographies of many of the leading lights in the Open Source movement. An interesting and fun read.

If you love words, especially neologisms

Check out WordSpy. It is a site that is clearly driven by a love of language and words. It features a ongoing compendium of new English words. The words are defined, and used in examples. Where known, the first use is given. It also has a wonderful Word about Word section. There is lots of fun stuff here.

A few of my favorites:

Wal-Mart effect n. The economic effects attributable to the Wal-Mart retail chain, including local effects such as forcing smaller competitors out of business and driving down wages, and broader effects such as helping to keep inflation low and productivity high....

Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand. -- Mark Abley

arachnerd noun. A person that spends way too much time either surfing the Web or fussing with their home page.

warm-chair attrition n. The loss of workplace productivity due to employees who dislike their jobs and are just waiting for the right time to quit and move on to something better.

Example Citation #2:
''Most employees are corporate cocooning,'' said Joyce L. Gioia, president of the Herman Group, a consulting firm in Greensboro, N.C. ''They don't like their jobs, they don't like their co-workers, they don't like their bosses, but they're scared. When the economy heats up-and we know that it will-and more jobs are created around the country, these same employees are going to spread their wings and fly away. Right now, we have an epidemic of what we call 'warm-chair attrition,''' she said. ''Physically, they're still warming the chairs, but mentally and emotionally, they're history.''
—Judy Greenwald, "Few companies preparing for impending labor shortage," Business Insurance, October 27, 2003

And the best one I have found so far, which I dedicate to my friend from Blogistan, stavrosthewonderchicken, is:

wave a dead chicken verb. To attempt to resolve a problem by taking steps that one believes to be futile but are nevertheless necessary so that others are satisfied that an appropriate degree of effort has been expended.

Gorgeous stuff. A lot of great words and great definitions, and some thought has gone into the choice of words. As the site author says, "My interest is in new words, phrases, and meanings that aren't yet in the dictionary but that have some traction in the culture, meaning they've appeared in several books, media articles, scientific papers, Web sites, Usenet posts, etc."

The site doesn't have an RSS feed yet (something I hope to change), but there is a mailing list that one can sign up for. Highly recommended.

How to recover deleted digital photo files from a flash card

Recently, due to a combination of very poor user interface, and momentary insanity, while meaning to delete one picture on an almost full flash (SmartMedia) card, I recently deleted all the digital picture files on the card. Once I discovered my mistake, I compounded it by continuing to take photos, assuming that the ones I had deleted were irrecoverable and weren't important anyway. Later that day I was informed in no uncertain terms that the pictures I had deleted were important, and that I should make all efforts possible to recover them.

So later that night I sat up with Google and downloaded and tried a number of file recovery programs. A lot of the programs I tried were totally useless. File Scavenger V2, File Recover, Digital Picture Recovery, PC Inspector File Smart Recovery couldn't find any of the deleted files. PC Inspector File Recovery crashed when I ran it. Plus, the people who make the PC Inspector programs started spamming me about their products. I found one that looked promising, PhotoRescue, that showed me thumbnails of the missing photos, and promised that if I bought the program it could recover the full files, or my money back. That seemed reasonable enough and I was prepared to buy it for $29 if none of the others worked.

However, the clear winner at photo file recovery was a program called Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery. I downloaded the program, checked it for viruses, ran it, and it recovered my files and put them on my hard disk. It has an exceedingly simple user interface. Somewhat disconcertingly for my geeky soul, there are no options to configure or choices to make. I just started the program, told it where to save the images it recovered, pointed it at the card, and it did its stuff. In my case, it worked flawlessly and recovered 155 images, including 22 files that I had deleted and that other programs said didn't exist. It made someone in my family very happy. Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery is the best program that I have found for recovering photos files deleted from flash cards. As a bonus, it is freeware, released by a Russian programmer as a way of promoting his corporate data recovery software. I hope he succeeds. Very Highly Recommended.

Summary:
Program: Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery
Rating: Very Highly recommended
Cost: Free
Version reviewed: 1.0
Date reviewed: October 20, 2003
Affiliate (i.e. Does Geodog get a commission if you buy a copy?): NO
Link:http://www.z-a-recovery.com/digital_image_recovery.htm

The last piece falls into place for moving from IE to Firebird

I've been using Mozilla then Firebird as my second browser for over a year now, but stuck with CrazyBrowser added onto IE as my primary browser because I use Surfsaver and Mybase to save pages that I find on the web when I am doing research. Too many times I have found something on the net, made a few notes on it, copied the URL and gone on, only to discover when I go back that the page has been taken down (or changed). Mybase is better at reconstructing pages exactly as they were, Surfsaver has full-text searching across all files. Both of them only work with IE, and I haven't been able find a similar program that stores web pages in a searchable database that works with Mozilla/Firebird. However, today I ran across a Firebird extension, Iview, that enables you to right click inside Mozilla or Firebird to open that page in IE. Brilliant! It isn't as good as having a Mozilla/Firebird aware web clipping application, but it is functional enough that I can demote IE to position of backup browser, where it belongs.

Also worthy of note are four other Firebird extensions:
TabBrowser Extensions turns Firebird into a modern tabbed browser. I've been using CrazyBrowser for years and can't imagine using a non-tabbed browser. TabBrowser Extensions provides lots of additional functionality to Firebird's default functionality.
RSS Panel turns your Firebird sidebar into a simple but full featured RSS reader. Great!
Flash Click to View replaces flash objects with a button to click if you want to see them -- greatly reduces the annoyance of certain media pages.
And of course, who could live without the Googlebar.

Firebird is turning into a robust and extremely usable browser, with lots of functionality being added through extensions. Recommended.

Outages

I apologize for the the site outages today and yesterday. I'm not sure what is happening, as my hosting service, www.phpwebhosting.com, seems to have crawled under a rock and died, at least as far as communication goes.

I have put my SARSWatch.org site on DR2.Net hosting. I haven't had enough experience with them yet to recommend them, and I have had two very brief outages with them in the first week of use, but when I send an email or post something on the bulletin boards, I usually get a reply within minutes, and the longest I have waited is a couple of hours. It makes a huge difference to customer satisfaction!

The fight in the fields

Tonight, we watched one of my all-time favorite movies, Brother from Another Planet, by the great John Sayles. While rewinding the video, I stumbled across the movieThe Fight in the Fields, Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers' Movement playing on PBS. I stayed up watching it much later than I intended to, plus being me, after it was over I got on the web to find out more about the movie, the companion book Cesar Chavez, farmworkers, and the United Farmworkers Union.

What a moving story on so many levels! While it isn't clear to me how successful the UFW has been as a union, I imagine that victories like getting Porta-Johns in the fields and getting el cortito, the short hoe, banned from the fields, have made a significant difference for farmworkers' lives. And although there is evidence conditions in America's fields haven't changed that much since Ed Murrow's classic documentary 40 years ago, Harvest of Shame, life for many of the people depicted in the film clearly has. Like the union movement in general, which gave us such innovations as the weekend, through the experience of forming the UFW, many people who had been on the outside of society found dignity, self-respect, and recognition from the rest of American society. It also gave a lot of Mexican-Americans their first experience in speaking up in public, in organizing, and in politics. The Farmworkers' struggle sparked the rise of Latino political power in California. Given that 7 out of every 10 children born in California today is born to Latino-American parents, and that Republicans went out of their way to offend Latino-Americans in the 1980's and 1990's, I imagine that the children of the first wave of organizing will be the Democratic leaders of our state in the first half of the 21st century.

The Fight in the Fields is a very well done movie, that tells a very important story in the history of California and of the US. See the trailer (quicktime). Recommended.

Cool DNS tools

I was having some problems with the DNS for one of my web sites, and I got referred to DNS Report, which helped me diagnose the problem. Recommended.

Sam Spade: Find out who is who on the net

If you run on Windows and want to know who owns a domain name, the name of the computer that your firewall says is pinging you, if your server is on an email blacklist, or where the delay is between you and that web site that seems so slow, Sam Spade is for you.

Sam Spade is a handily little Windows application originally written by Steve Atkins as an anti-spam tool, but it is useful for a lot of things besides combatting spam. It replaces or serves as a front end to the command line Unix utilities such as Whois, Ping, Traceroute and Nslookup, as well as providing lots of additional functionality. It can give you the IP address of a website, and the domain name for an IP address. It can crawl a website and report back if there are any email addresses exposed on it, or if it is pulling any images from any other servers.

I don't need it often, but when I do, it is very useful. It is easier than trying to remember the syntax of windows command line tools cloned from Unix, which always vary just a little bit from one Windows version to the next, and it is much easier than dealing with the whois page on various registrar's web pages. The help file is complete, if a little dense, and as a bonus inlcudes the full text of the infamous Monty Python spam sketch. If you want a less dense introduction to chasing down spammers with Sam Spade, one enthusiastic user has even gone to the trouble of writing up her own illustrated help pages for Sam Spade.

I've used Sam Spade for years, and recommend it very highly as a great little network utility. I have never run into any problems with it.

Details:
Rating: 5 stars
Cost: Freeware
Version reviewed: 1.14
Date reviewed: March 08, 2003
Affiliate (i.e. Does Geodog get a commission if you buy a copy?): No
Link:Download Sam Spade

Some people tell me that they don't download shareware and freeware. They miss out on some useful and fun stuff (although they probably don't have as many late nights debugging Windows weirdness). However, if you are one of those people, some of same functionality from the application is available on the author's website, at Sam Spade Org.

Bruce Sterling on book tour

I went and saw Bruce Sterling at Cody's Books tonight. I had never seen or heard him before, and didn't know what to expect. It was apparently the last stop on this part of his tour promoting his latest book, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years, and, as he confessed to us in the beginning, he was fried. He was still wickedly funny, and somewhat combative with the audience. He has a very sharp tongue, and he either has quite a few bon mots stored up, or he thinks incredibly fast on his feet. A few nuggets gleaned from his talk:

Software is headed to where book publishing is now, a shabby impoverished gentility.
Now that I hang out with industrial designers, I can go into WalMart without being revolted by the vertigo of consumer excess.
[Belief in the afterlife is] a psychotic misapprehension of reality.
Having bolts through your head would be better than getting Alzheimer's.

While Sterling was very funny, I actually didn't get much of a feel for the ideas in his book. Based on positive reviews I've seen elsewhere, I've ordered it from the library (once again using Jon Udell's bookmarklet), but I would not have bought it based on his talk.

Note to self: write a very nice thank you letter to Jon for saving me all this money with his bookmarklet.

SUV's, Redux

A self-proclaimed regular reader of Geodog's weblog who enjoyed the pointer to Ariana Huffington's ads sent in pointers to two reviews of NYT reporter Keith Bradsher's new book, High and Mighty: SUVs--The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way. I haven't read the book myself, but Stephanie Mencimer's review in the Washington Monthly, Bumper Mentality makes it sound like a lot of fun, in the way that information that confirms all your worst fears is fun. Sort of.

According to Mencimer, all the stereotypes about SUV drivers are true: "SUV is the car of choice for the nation's most self-centered people; and the bigger the SUV, the more of a jerk its driver is likely to be." Brasher also details how unsafe SUV's are, both to the people around them and to the people inside them. According to the review, "the occupant death rate in SUVs is 6 percent higher than it is for cars – 8 percent higher in the largest SUVs" and the "kill rate... for SUVs is simply jaw-dropping. For every one life saved by driving an SUV, five others will be taken." The review, and presumably the book, are filled with infuriating statistics like that. Clearly, driving a behemoth SUV is an antisocial act.

Gregg Easterbrook also has a long and very positive review in TNR, Axle of Evil: America's Twisted Love Affair With Sociopathic Cars, which goes into a lot of detail on the regulatory environment that shaped this phenomenon. Easterbrook's observation on the political response to the book: "Members of Congress, for their part, have so far responded to this extraordinary book as they have responded to the entire issue: by hiding under their desks."

The book is definitely going on my wish list. I've ordered it from the Berkeley Public Library using Jon Udell's bookmarklet, but there are apparently 4 people ahead of me on the waiting list, so I may actually buy it.

W.Bloggar 3.0 First Look

The last three posts have been done sitting in bed with the laptop hooked up to the net via 802.11b, using W.Bloggar on Win2K. It's a very nice setup, although it's not helping me with the midnight deadline.

W.Bloggar is a way cool client, much improved since the last time that I checked it out about 6 months ago. You can cut and paste text into the app and do reasonable HTML formatting. If you want to do your blogging in a desktop application, a la Radio, it makes a great client. And, unlike browser based clients like Radio, you don't run the risk of losing all your work every time you click on a link.You can even click the save icon as you go, if you are the paranoid type after having been burned too many times by Radio's bugs. (But I'm not bitter, am I?)

The only downsides I have found so far are the spell checker, which is functional but pretty limited, and the fact that it requires IE. In conjunction with Movable Type, W.Bloggar makes a great blogging system. Plus it is free, although donations accepted. Highly recommended.

My Way?

Ran across My Way today, which I had read about a while ago in the Merc. It does look like the old Yahoo, or Yahoo without all the ads, and it does load rapidly. It has a reasonable, if barebones, set of offerings. The Southwest Airlines of Portals. I don't know how they plan to make money, but the two guys who started it, Bill Daugherty and Jonas Steinman, do have a good track record in that respect. I'll use it for a week and check it out. I did register the geodog email address, just in case.