Nonsequittal Rumblings

That’s what I’ve got to say for today. Really, you don’t want to hear about 6 months worth of my monotonous life.

OK, let’s spice up the post a bit.
100% corn socks – socks made out of corn. Yup. Instead of using cotton or wool or petrolium based fabric. And Kansas produces helluva lot of corn – most of it for cattles, but others for ethanol production too. Go Kansas agri-business! (Not that I have any part in any of that business.)

http://www.factorycity.net/sfx/always_use_protection.jpg

I knew this was going to happen. Firefox ain’t perfect. What a shocker that is… NOT. But now all I hear anymore is about the security vulnerabilities found in Firefox. Oookie… Of course, if you don’t practice safe sex safe computing, you’ll always be vulnerable. Duh.

Anyway.

I want that condom. Such a geeky sex toy.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyID=8443560&src=rss/oddlyEnoughNews

No, I don’t buy that. That’s screwed up!

Dog bites

Since I was bitten by a dog 20 years ago (and I think I had much worse injury than this girl), I got very scared of dogs, then I gradually come to love them again. Properly behaved dogs are just very lovable. I couldn’t possibly name anything I disliked about Maggie, a very sweet border collie. Of course, she has a very responsible owner – she’s a fortunate dog. But sometimes, I wonder about some owners…

City of Wichita has no regulations on how many dogs you can have. Not that it’s a bad thing, but I do wonder if people are wise enough to know their limit. Take this news item for example – that house had 6 grown-up dogs. That’s a quite a few to handle for anyone. I know some people gets very attached to their pets. That’s a good thing. But along with that must come responsibilities. It may be hard to let go of your puppies. But wouldn’t it be worse if your dogs gets sent to the pound, as these dogs did?

I hope that this girl will overcome the fear against dogs. It might take time. But animals can bring lots of good to us.

Another story linked from slash dot – ‘Geek speak’ confuses net users

I’m not too surprised about this finding, but the result is still depressing and scary. People tend to form some sort of community anywhere and everywhere they go, and some type of lingo starts to form. IT is very notorious about that. All kinds of new technologies are born everyday, both good and bad. Along with them, new lingoes pop up.

I hear it at my work place all the time too. Answer the customer questions using the terms that we have gotten accustomed to. We know exactly what we mean, because we face the technology everyday. To end user, that may not be the case. What might sounds like a common sense term is not common at all to the customer. It is difficult to provide help in the language that anyone and everyone can understand.

I also see it on AnimeSuki Forum too. People ask “I can’t play the video I downloaded. What’s wrong with it?” Someone else answers “It’s your codec. Reinstall the codec.” Most readers knows what that means, to some extent. What’s a codec? That’s a simple question. “How do I exactly go about this reinstalling?” That’s a much harder question. And often, this more complicated part is omitted from the answer, just because that’s something those people who give the answer do all the time. It’s a common knowledge to them. But to the person who asked the question, this “how to” is what they really want to know… most of the time.

But hey, there are plenty of FAQs and README and manuals out there. So we say RTFM!

Several things have been going on around me this week.

First, on the fansub front.
Froth-Bite took a semi-break during the month of March – we made 4 releases during the entire month. Now, as of April 6th, we’ve already released more than double of that number already for this month, and more are on our way. The Leiji joint project has finally got their senses together, and started working on Space Symphony Maetel again. Finally released first 4 episodes again after taking 6 months break. Some of our own projects had some progress too. Then there is the new joint I’m doing with another group, Minor ja Nai. They’ve lost their translator for MAJOR. And I love that series. So it felt natural to step in and give them a helping hand. They didn’t coordinate the release effort with us very well… They released it while I was still sleeping. But oh well. We’ll live. Sounds like they will be ready with next MAJOR by this Sunday. I better pick my speed up on their project.

On to the music scene.
The leader of the jazz band I belong to has decided to make a career move. He has decided to move to Seattle. So someone had to take over his duties… I was chosen as one of those people. Even though it’s Cessna Jazz Band, there are only 6 of us who actually work for Cessna. We are minorities. Oh well. Poor Carl is brand new to the group, and he picked up co-leadership as well.

And tonight is our first gig under the new management. There are many uncertainties. Will we really survive? We’ll see.

On the different music front, I went to a first music concert in ages. Rajaton is a Finnish a cappella group. It’s a somewhat jazzy, very contemporary, fun group. It was $15 well spent. I love finding all these small, unknown gems. They reminded me of The Real Group – another a cappella group from Scandinavia. I later discovered that I’m not alone having such opinion. They have their similarities, but also differences as well. The Real Group likes to do traditional jazz standards (It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, Come Sunday) to some pop hits (Drive my car)… Rajaton likes the pop covers (Ticket to ride) and their original tunes. It’s fun to listen to all these Beatles tunes a cappella. Hehehe.

I let kojih.com domain name expire… and left it expired for over a week. Ouch, that hurted when I realized it. But how wonderful is DNS caching… kojih.com continued to work until today. Yay, internet.

But I need to manage these things better. I host my mom’s e-mail address on this domain… now she’ll never have to switch her e-mail address when she switches her ISP. And it’s free for her. And it’s all made easy, because Mozilla Thunderbird is translated in to Japanese too. ….as long as I keep kojih.com up to current, that is!

That’s a surprise statement coming from me. Various people knows that I am a Firefox enthusiast. Then why am I making this statement?

It goes back to earlier this month, when we received a notice from the IT department.

You have been identified by IT Dept. as running a non-standard browser (firefox Mozilla) on one or more devices assigned to you. IT Dept. has been alerted to vulnerabilities with this application. I have not been able to locate any related requests security review for this application. Please let me know if you can remove this application by end of day. If not please document the business requirements, forward to me (by end of day) and cc: your project leader. IT Dept. will be instructed to implement the patch, and a security review will be performed. Any questions let me know. Thanks

Our response to that is that we need Firefox to keep our current level of productivity. Personally, I use Javascript Console, HTML Validator extension, and Web Developer extension on the daily basis. It’s more than just a damn good web browser to me.

But still, it made me think of this whole issue, and I came up with my own conclusion.

In general, IT department likes to be in control. They control all the computer deployment, including all servers, desktop PC’s, laptops… hardware and software. Microsoft lets the computer maintenance folks power to control the software deployment in centralized manner. Our PC’s are tweaked so we can’t manually modify the registry files. Nor can we use tools like TweakUI. (I think tweakUI is an excellent productivity tool, but we’re out of luck.) And the “Security” setting section of MSIE Options panel is completely locked – they are in control, not us. So, when they need to deploy new software or security rules, they can do it in very organized manner.

Now, try to apply that on Firefox. That’s a completely different story. Firefox lets you control the application. And there are some very well-known extensions and plug-ins to enhance its features. Of course, along comes the possibility of introduction of malwares. Without the proper tweaks made to the application, it’s impossible to control these possibilities, short of enforcing the ban the use of Firefox.

Also, there’s an issue of the aptness in Firefox issues by the support personnel. Are all security folks and PC support groups be able to provide the sound support for Firefox? What if problems occur during the use of Firefox? This question can also lead to the security problem. With inadequate support, more problems will come up faster than the solutions.

With all that said, I still support Firefox. Firefox may be insecure, but IE is even worse. The IT department just can’t see this point.Sure, IE lets them take control of the application settings, but there are still plenty of problems. Currently, our Windows XP doesn’t have SP2 loaded – no pop-up protection. It scares me to go to the internet using IE anymore. I really believe the IT department will save more troubles and money in the long run by making the switch. The cost of training will be made up quickly by the lack of support they have to provide!

By the way, our IT department allowed us the use of Firefox. I guess our business requirement sounded good enough to them. Damn right!P.S. If you think “That’s why Opera is even better!” (yes, that’s you, Ledgem), don’t forget, same security concern of Firefox applies to Opera too.

First Swede Prosecuted For File Sharing

By itself, the news isn’t too big. It’s just another case of pirate being caught. But it’s the method used that’s questionable. An unconfirmed report (I read it on faireal.net, a Japanese site) says that APB, the anti-piracy bureau (Antipiratbyrån) was using an agent who acted a part in the file sharing community. 68000 titles of games and stuff!!! A thought of cyber-Jack Beuer came to my mind, but heh… this is just insane. Even Jack wouldn’t go THAT far.

I have some strange fondness to transparent terminal windows on computers. (And with a few other objects as well, such as game dice, etc…) back in 1998-1999 or so, I was messing around with wterm on Linux/WindowMaker. (I first found eterm for Enlightenment, but that thing was too heavy for my slow computer.) For DOS prompt, I *could* use programs like eConsole… but I use more telnet/SSH than command prompt. I especially want a transparent SSH window.

What I just found out today, is there’s a patch for my beloved SSH client, PuTTY. That’s just slick. I might even start using this to do fansub works… Yup, I think I will.