June 2004 High Water Mark

~1643 visits, and almost enough to buy a $tarbucks.

"The Next Killer App Online" Is Here - And It's Centrsource

As seen on The Canadian Marketing Association's (CMA) CMA e-Communicator - June 2004

"The Next Killer App Online" Is Here - And It's Centrsource What is CentrSource: It's an online utility where consumers can go and respond to virtually any advertisement in their local area, whether its television, print,online or in-store. All at their convenience with total privacy and security. With no intrusive pop-ups or banners. What it means to Advertisers: CentrSource offers dvertisers permission driven responses that link their online and offline content in a way that is completely complementary - and there are no set up fees or admin fees to use the utility. You only pay when a consumer "raises their hand". And it takes literally minutes to set up.

www.CentrSource.com

Here's the press release from the CMA Show

The harder hard sell

Economist.com | The future of advertising

More people are rejecting traditional sales messages, presenting the ad industry with big challenges
...
The advertising industry is passing through one of the most disorienting periods in its history. This is due to a combination of long-term changes, such as the growing diversity of media, and the arrival of new technologies, notably the internet. Consumers have become better informed than ever before, with the result that some of the traditional methods of advertising and marketing simply no longer work.
...
There are plenty of alternatives to straightforward advertising, including a myriad of marketing and communications services, some of which are called “below-the-line” advertising. They range from public relations to direct mail, consumer promotions (such as coupons), in-store displays, business-to-business promotions (like paying a retailer for shelf-space), telemarketing, exhibitions, sponsoring events, product placements and more....this part of the industry was worth some $750 billion worldwide last year, estimates WPP, one of the world's biggest advertising and marketing groups.
...
After the technology bust it was easy to dismiss the internet. But the phenomenal success of many e-commerce firms, such as Amazon and eBay, shows that millions of people are becoming comfortable buying goods and services online. Many more are using the internet to research products, services and prices for purchases made offline. Some 70% of new-car buyers in America, for instance, use websites to determine which vehicle to buy—and often to obtain competing quotes from dealers.
...
Such consumers can be targeted by internet advertisers and, in some cases, their responses accurately measured. A surge in online advertising is being led by paid-for text-links dished up by search engines such as Google and Yahoo! The response rate from people clicking on paid links can be as low as 1%—about the same as direct mail, which remains one of the biggest forms of advertising. But there is an important difference: internet advertisers usually pay only if someone clicks on their link. This is the equivalent of paying for the delivery of junk mail only to households that read it.
..
How are companies and the advertising industry responding to these trends in media consumption? Some people do not believe they amount to a sea-change, while others are simply hoping it will not come to pass on their watch, reckons Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP's chief executive.

Jeff's Pretend Life : the Game of Life in Javascript

This is my implementation of John Conway's (Game of) Life, written entirely in Javascript (or ECMAScript, if you will), titled Jeff's Pretend Life

includes source code, under the GNU General Public License, and links to other resources.

also under the Computing/better mousetrap category is a javascript library to makes writing a Javascript application easier.

A great Job! Someone should hire this guy, fast!

email Your Local Candidates.

I missed it the first time but Ray Slakinski posed the some questions via an email to Local Halton MP Candidates.

WE should all be doing this

CentrSource and Procter & Gamble

Check it Out : Procter & Gamble

Taking Stock of the WIPO Broadcast Treaty

It's tough to find information about the WIPO, but Cory posted on Boing Boing a great resource inculding a first time peek inside a WIPO treaty negotiation has ever been published. As he wrote when it started

There's no transparency into this process for most of the world. The doors are locked, the minutes are sealed, and you need to be accredited just to sit in the room.

So I'll quote from Cory's post on why is very important and very scary:

WIPO Broadcast Treaty: consolidated three-day notes
The Broadcast Treaty is a proposal from a WIPO Subcommittee that's supposedly about stopping "signal theft." But along the way,
this proposal has turned into a huge, convoluted hairball that threatens to make the PC illegal, trash the public domain, break copyleft and put a Broadcast Flag on the Internet. The treaty negotiation process is unbelievably convoluted and hard-to-follow, and they've just wrapped up the latest round in Geneva. But for the first time, a really large group of "civil society" orgs were accredited to attend. Me and another EFF staffer and the Coordinator of the Union for the Public Domain created a heavily editorialized impressionistic transcript of the meeting (EFF mirror, UPD mirror),
trying to untie the knots in the negotiation. This is the first time that a really exhaustive peek inside a WIPO treaty negotiation has ever been published -- get it while it's legal!

see copies of the transcript at either Union for the Public Domain or Electronic Frontier Foundation, or as a Local PDF I made : Taking Stock of the WIPO Broadcast Treaty.pdf (~220 Kb compressed PDF using OpenOffice)

NDP supports bad Internet treaties

Cory points out that NDP supports bad Internet treaties as reported in the The Star and by CIPPIC (Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic) in it's look at Election 2004: Internet Issues

In particular :

The NDP endorsed the Committee's recommendations on swift ratification of the controversial WIPO Internet treaties, and even more surprisingly, it gave its approval to an extended licensing scheme for educational materials, despite the heated opposition from the education community.

It it a ignorance , incompetentance or irrelevancy? How can we educate Jack, Olivia and there happy band? Cory would be a great go to person, with his background.

I brought this up earlier and we have responses from 4 (major) Parties but NOT the Conservatives.

And it's not looking good. Can any of them "Get a Clue"?

Here's another good source Digital Copyright Canada

Jakarta Struts De-Mystified Part 1 - John Topley's Weblog

Jakarta Struts De-Mystified Part 1 - John Topley's Weblog

no power in the 'verse can stop us now

Serenity: The Official Movie Website

Browncoats rejoice!

Lotus Formula Language > Developer tool: read/set document fields from view

Andre Guirard submitted a great idea to the SearchDomino tool shed, a way to read/set document fields from view without writing a agent for each field you what to change.

He has code for R5 and R6, however I found I small boo boo in the R5 code in that


REM "Formula for R5";
choices := @DocFields;
fieldName := @Prompt([OkCancelEditCombo]; "Field Name"; "Enter Field
Name."; ""; choices);
FIELD DUID := @text(@DocumentUniqueID);
oldValue := @GetDocField (DUID;fieldname);

newValue := @Explode(@Prompt([OkCancelEdit]; "New Field Value"; "Please
enter new value (use ";" for multivalues -- don't put space after ;)."; @Implode
(@Text(oldvalue); ";")); ";");

adjValue :=
@If(@IsNumber(oldValue); @TextToNumber(newValue);
@IsTime(oldValue); @TextToTime(newValue);
newValue);

@If(!@IsError(adjValue);
@SetField(fieldName ; adjValue);
@Prompt([YesNo]; "Change field value"; "New value not of same type as
old value. Set field to text?");
@SetField(fieldName ; newValue);
""
)


He had done oldValue := @GetField(fieldname); ,but there is no @getField function in R5.0X. So I've attempted to correct this by using
FIELD DUID := @text(@DocumentUniqueID);
oldValue := @GetDocField (DUID;fieldname);

Which now complies.

But I'm still not out of woods yet, Still not "working as expected", since I'm not getting the old value.

On investigation I'm getting a "@SetDocField and @GetDocField cannot access the document currently being computed". Frell!

It is a slick generic development tool, just needs some more work.

Iron Sunrise's a comming

Via: Charlie's Diary comes word that Mr. Stross has advance copies of the hard cover of his new and soon to be published novel Iron Sunrise, the sequel to his great Singularity Sky novel.

Charlie quotes the June 28'Th issue of Publisher's Weekly which ran a starred advance review. It goes like this:

Best known for his short fiction, Stross shows that he's a master of the novel form as well in this exciting sequel to 2003's acclaimed Singularity Sky, serving up compelling space opera and cutting-edge tech with a tasty dash of satire. In the 24th century, a McWorld ("bland, comfortable, tolerant ... boring") called New Moscow apparently has been destroyed by trade rival New Dresden -- but not before New Moscow launched its own Slower-Than-Light (STL) counterstrike: a massive ship accelerated to 80% the speed of light. The U.N., now central Earth government, knows New Dresden was set up. They need the STL's recall code, now known only to a handful of New Moscow's ambassadors -- but someone has been systematically assassinating them. U.N. special operative Rachel Mansour and her husband, engineer Martin Springfield, must protect the last living ambassador and find out who's really responsible for the whole mess. Stross skillfully balances suspense and humor throughout, offering readers -- especially fans of Iain M. Banks and Ken MacLeod -- a fascinating future that seems more than possible.

and his take on the review :

Which is not bad, for a summary that completely omits the major characters and main subplot ... not to mention the talking cat sidekick.

I've advanced ordered the novel and I'm eagerly looking forward to it.

Singularity Sky made for compelling reading with 2 great characters, an inventive brew and mashup of technologies, and a fast moving plot line that kept you on your toes.

I particular like his solution to the problem of writing fiction placed beyond the Singularity. I think it was Vernor Vinge, who said it is impossible to write about what happens after the singularity. I see Charlie's Stross solution to this is by applying William Gibson's "The future is here…it's just unevenly distributed" quote, and to explore the edges of that unevenly disturbed future narrative.

Okay, I've used up my quota of big words for the day.

And so while I - impatiently - wait for Iron Sunrise and then Accelerando, read this older interview for all of us who are overdosing on /.

This will put a differnet light on the Holidays...

Via vowe dot net comes word of
A tracker, a marker, and a sniper. Professional hunters, feared for their astonishing skills. Their target is a very special one...

The straight goods on DRM

Cory Doctorow talks (via Boing Boing) to Microsoft Research about the problems with DRM (Digital Rights Management) and why DRM is bad for society, business, and artists.
The Short answer is :

1. That DRM systems don't work
   
2. That DRM systems are bad for society
   
3. That DRM systems are bad for business
   
4. That DRM systems are bad for artists
   
5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

Cory explains each point in a easy to understand manner, with small words even a elective representative can follow. The straight goods in ~17 K. Let's see if Microsoft and others are listening....

Update : The straight goods on DRM, now print-centric and polished

Reason to ReJoyce : clevercactus

clevercactus is in first public beta release, even if it missed Bloomsday by a day.

clevercactus share is a private and secure environment to share files with people you know. It is simple and easy to use, it is free for individual users, educational institutions, and non-profit corporations, and it runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Groover for the rest of us?

one of 2 very anticipated tools (Chandler being the other)

Creating Liquid Layouts with Negative Margins

Via A List Apart, a very nice and practical example of using CSS to get that 2 or 3 columns look (Look Ma, no Tables!) which is so very suitable for most Content web sites (Blog or regular marketing content site), and 99% of the rest of them too.

So well explained even I think I know what's going on.

The Two Things

For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.
So here is The Two Things

A few favorites :

The Two Things about Accounting:
1. The trial balance must balance.
2. There's a lot of "grey area."
...
The Two Things about Software Engineering:
1. There is no such thing as bug-free software.
2. Adding manpower to a late project makes it later.
...
The Two Things about Teaching History:
1. A good story is all they'll remember, not the half hour of analysis on either side of it.
2. They think it's about answers, but it's really about questions.
..
The Two Things about Engineering:
1) It's all about tradeoffs.
2) The tradeoffs are all about money, time, and quality.
..
The Two Things about Economics:
1. Incentives matter.
2. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
..
The Two Things about Blogging:
1. Everyone who runs one is a kook.
2. Everyone who reads one is a kook.

New and Improved, Now with Non-Sense

I've been accepted and have added Google Adsense see Lower right)

Let the hundreds of nano-dollars roll in!

Monty Python: Fellowship of the Ring

Monty Python: Fellowship of the Ring

A nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat! ...SAY NO MORE!!

A fresh look at the waterfall

Via The Bitter Endl

Development phase, by its old name	Truly representative name for the phase
Analysis	Dream
Design	Guess and Waffle
Build	Hack and Play
Test	Wobble and Groan
Deploy	Push and Pray
Support	Duck and Deny

All too true

How Google Took the Work Out of Selling Advertising

VIa the The New York Times (free registration required) is a interesting article on Googles AdSense.

The article starts about how technology has changed how we measure and think about intelligence : speed and accuracy in handling numbers was a mark of intellectual distinction until the appearance of calculators. No more. And retaining facts, names, and dates still is (hence "Jeopardy"), but Google and the Internet is quickly eroding that. The article does not mention that this has been going on for a long time; Homer no doubt complained how reading and writing was destroying civilization as evidenced by the decline of 6 hour memorized poetry. And remember how Chess was the mark of "smartness", well your likely too young to remember how 40 years ago Chess playing and AI were linked together. And I'm not even going to touch spelling and spell checkers, in case my own spell checker takes offence.

The article then goes to the heart of the article; the board ways computers are changing our mode of thought and interactions in unexpected ways.

As Ebay is changing the small business - by changing the smallest business of all: the yard sale, and blogs are rewriting the rules of publishing and journalism, so to is AdSense changing the rules of Advertising and the business models that make the small scale publishing/journalism business possible. And it does so by connecting web sites with ~150,00 potential advertisers without adding sales staff, or prepare media kits. Hers the key paragraph:

Why does that matter? It completes the publishing revolution brought on by the Internet. The first stage was the liberation of the reader, who, thanks to browsers, could look at publications in any part of the world. Next was the liberation of would-be publishers. Thanks to blogging tools, anyone can present his or her views online. And now, thanks to automated ad sales, small publishers have a more viable hope of creating a business, and keeping independent voices, than they did even a year ago. A. J. Liebling's wisecrack that "freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one" takes on new meaning when technical and financial barriers to creating a Web-based press drop so low.

and to close:

"Free expression" has always been freest when it has rested on a solid business base. Technology's latest unexpected effect on culture may be to help revive a diverse exchange of views.

In a way the article title is wrong. Google's AdSense has taken the work out of "Buying" Advertising for those who sell something other the Advertising. And made Google heaps of money in the process.

Should I give Adsense a spin here?

Campaigning for Copyright in Canada

Via Slashdot comes "Campaigning for Copyright in Canada" from Digital Copyright Canada (tag line : All Canadian Citizens are "Rights Holders" ) and Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic with a List of Issues and Questions to button hole your candidates

They has responses from 2 parties out of 5 (so far) on these issues and questions.

They also provide background details on the questions raised, but in the Time Honored Tradition of us ADD internet types here's the list :

What is your position on the issue of file-sharing in Canada - should it be illegal?

What is your position on using legislation to prohibit circumvention of TPMs (Technological Protection of Copyrighted Materials)?

Do you support an amendment to the Copyright Act to allow for the use of freely available materials on the Internet by participants in an educational program?

* Should ISPs be protected from liability for copyright infringement when others merely transmit copyrighted materials over their facilities, or when others post copyrighted works on websites that the ISP merely hosts?

What is your position on the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage's proposed "notice and takedown" scheme requiring ISPs to remove content on the sole basis of alleged copyright infringement?

What is your position on increasing or mandating the use of open source software in government operations?

How do you propose to approach the problem of spam?

What is your position on National ID cards?

overLIB - Tooltips in JavaScript

overLIB - Homepage

sweet.

Reservoir Dogs/Star Wars mashup

Via Boing Boing comes word of a Reservoir Dogs/Star Wars mashup by the same fine folks who did Trooper Clerks, and while you're waiting here always Stuck in a Room with R2

Republican Survivor

Via MetaFilter comes Republican Survivor. Hint : you dn't have to fill the "email" field, just click on the button or link.

Don't forget to checkout the Cast of Characters

Something to do till we find out who gets 'voted off the island', in the Great White North

Rules for Successful Consultants

I've discovered a very nice piece by Richard S. Tallent : Rules for Successful Consultants, to Summarize

Take care of business first.

Never EVER lower your hourly rate.

Never bid lump-sum on creative work.

Always have face time in competitive bids.

Don't be the proverbial barefoot cobbler's kids.

Differentiate.

Never send Office documents by email.

Consider not charging for client meetings.

Success = Version 2.0.

Your employees are your clients, not just your consultants.

Several of his points are not "accepted wisdom" , but well eough explained that I will have to consider them as worth trying. Read the whole piece to explore his ideas.

Handy Thematic Checklist

Via Hack the Planet:

[ ] The Singularity
[ ] Inscrutable artifacts abandoned by post-humans
[ ] Humanity oppressed by condescending post-humans
[ ] Humans vs. post-humans
[ ] Longing to return to the abandoned/destroyed Earth
[ ] Uploads/Downloads/Backups
[ ] Culture clash between people who back up and people who don't
[ ] Blowing your head off with a plasma blaster
[ ] Direct neural interfaces
[ ] >3-dimensional GUIs while jacked in
[ ] Humans getting computer viruses
[ ] A galaxy-spanning web of teleportation gates/portals
[ ] Getting irradiated while retrieving a priceless artifact


course for tv or moives it would be a much shorter list....

Confusion surrounds hole

Yet another update on Cisco's Linksys WRT54G: Threat overstated, finder of vulnerability says, apparently NOT the end of the world, just western civilisation....go back to sleep. under WifI

TheyWorkForYou: Is your MP working for you in Parliament

posted by Cory Doctorow, via Boing Boing comes word of TheyWorkForYou a project from the FaxYourMP team. It web-ifies the British Parliamentary record and makes the entire thing commentable, searchable and permalinkable.

Stuff like Voting record, Performance data, how many times Spoke, Attendance, how many times they votes against their party.

Brilliant! We need this is Canada, before the NEXT election. Boy would I love to have a printout of the voting record and notable quotes from Hansard of my MP when she rings the front door!

The Hero's of Juno Beach

Thank you for your Sacrifices of 60 years ago. And not to forget The Dieppe Raid.

Linksys WRT54G with SNMP and VPN

Vowe upgrades to the Wrt54G, under WifI

VoIP: the promise, the pain and the Dance

InfoWorld asks : Merging the phone system into the enterprise network makes perfect sense. But is it worth the investment?,
The short answer : Yes, if you are putting in a new phone system or replacing an existing one anyway, otherwise the cost may not be worth the saving or new functionality.

Here's their 411 On VoIP

They also have a useful Enterprise VoIP glossary: (glossary are they secret weapon of added value!)

• Codec: A compression/decompression algorithm used in IP telephony and other streaming media applications.


• G.723.1: An ITU-T Codec, used in many IP telephony systems, that has two associated bit rates: 5.3Kbps and 6.3Kbps.


• G.729: An ITU-T Codec, used in many IP telephony systems, that has an 8Kbps bit rate.


• Gateway: A network device that converts voice and fax calls between the PSTN (public switched telephone network) and an IP network in real time.


• H.323: An ITU-T collection of standards used in VoIP (voice over IP) applications to define end points, gateways, and other IP telephony devices and their interaction. Precedes SIP (Session Initiation Protocol).


• IP Telephony: The transmission of voice and fax phone calls over a packet-based IP data network; synonymous with VoIP.


• IP PBX: The server that provides call control and configuration management for an IP-based phone system.


• IP Phone or Handset: A phone system handset that connects to the IP PBX over an IP LAN. IP phones often look and function much like typical legacy corporate phone system handsets, but in some cases they also take on PC-like functionality.


• MPLS: Multiprotocol label switching, an IETF set of quality-of-service labeling standards that ISPs use to manage different kinds of data streams based on priority and service plan.


• PBX: Private branch exchange, an in-house telephone switching system.


• PBX trunk: The shared communications path between the customer's PBX and the public network.


• PSTN: Public switched telephone network, which is also called POTS (plain old telephone service).


• Q.Sig: Q Signaling, a signaling standard for PBX interoperability used in the United States and Europe.


• RTP: Real-Time Transport Protocol, the Internet protocol used by VoIP systems for streaming digitized audio and video across an IP network.


• SIP: Session Initiation Protocol, an up-and-coming IETF signaling protocol for Internet conferencing, telephony, presence, events notification, and instant messaging. Competes with H.323.


• Softphone: Software that provides IP phone functionality in a PC, notebook, or other computing device.

Inside Mitch Kapor's World

As a follow up on Lotus's 20th here's Mitch

E.L.I.C.I.A.: Electronic Lifeform Intended for Ceaseless Infiltration and Assassination

See Here for all the explanation your going to get

Love, I

June 4th, 15 Years after Tiananmen

The image still haunts, because of the events that followed, and because so little has really changed.

Peking Duck comments on Nicholas Kristoff, an eyewitness, as he recalls and refects in the NYT on the June 4 massacre at Tiananmen Square:

The night was filled with gunfire — and with Chinese standing their ground to block the troops. I parked my bike at Tiananmen, and the People's Liberation Army soon arrived from the other direction. The troops fired volley after volley at the crowd on the Avenue of Eternal Peace; at first I thought these were blanks, but then the night echoed with screams and people began to crumple.

The image is Via The Sydney Morning Herald and Still gazing down the Tiananmen tank barrel

Peking Duck also has commented on The story behind the Tiananmen Tank Man Photo

The People of Hong Kong haven't forgotten the Martyrs of Tiananmen Square

Linksys WiFi Gateway Remote Attack Risk Discovered

Glenn Fleishman reports that

"According to InternetNews.com, a tech consultant discovered that even if you turn the remote administration feature off on a Linksys WRT54G -- the single bestselling Wi-Fi device in the world -- you can still remotely access it through ports 80 and 443. Linksys sets the HTTP username to nothing and password to 'admin' on all of its devices by default. Web site scanning from anywhere in the world to devices that have routable Internet-facing addresses would allow script kiddie remote access, at which point you could flash the unit with new firmware, extract the WEP or WPA key, or just mess up someone's configuration and change the password."

He's suggesting that you change Your Linksys WRT54G Admin Password Right Now!

I wanted to note this since I earlier mentioned the Linksys WRT54G

Update : LinkSys says WRT54G Vulnerability Not Widespread, just make sure the built-in firewall has been NOT been disabled. via Gizmodo, gadets are us

So time to confirm the setting and Glenn's advise is still a "Good Idea"

another update: Threat overstated, finder of vulnerability says, apparently NOT the end of the world, just western cizelization....under WifI

CVS for dummies

Vinny points to Chu Yeow's redemption in a blog: Your own private CVS repository

It might be at a low enough level for yours truly, if I stand on my tippy toes. Maybe...

Voting for (Canadian) Dummies

Via Metafilter comes VoteSelector Quiz Just answer the questions below to determine which candidate and his or her political party most closely matches your political views.

Julia Roberts' Sonogram: The Twins Definitely Have Her Smile

Either that or they are Alien stomach bursters! via Defamer

Update May 15 2005: Welcome! (and how did you find out about this page?

See also : Ka's evil twin : Astonishingly fucked-up car commercial;
Need directions?;
Inside Jack and Totally Gridbag;
Feed the Models
or Late 4 work or
Wok boarding;
Kikkoman from the Planet Soy
or Jaws in 30 seconds or
Alien in 30 seconds or
The Shining, The Exorcist, The Titanic or
SpiderMan in LegoLand

or Lots more under Humour links

Hung by Their Own Words

In Their Own Words: Quotations by and about Canada's Conservatives

ill-Liberal copyright reform intends to end Fair Use Freebies

Via TechDirt comes word that my federal MP Sarmite Bulte thinks that the "user rights" established under the Copyright - known as exceptions, that allow users to freely use portions of copyrighted work for such things as research, private study, news reporting, and criticism - lead to "freebies.

It looks like Bulte's committee is trying to narrow Fair Use to it's most limited interpretation - if not eliminate it altogether.

Is this another example of politicians fixing the law?

Perhaps she can spend some of her summer reading up on The Creative Commons and Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture.

I talked to her yesterday. I'm thinking I should try to get another word with her. Given it's "Election Night in Canada", it's my best chance for ~4 years.

New and Improved!

No your eyes have NOT gone all buggy! I've applied a new template, the TicTac by Mr SimpleBits : Dan Cederholm.

I expect to continue too tweak the template over the next thousand years to my dis-liking. For the record, it was very easy to do. The hardest part was figuring out which parts of the "old" customization to keep, where to put them, and how to make them work best with the new template look and feel.

Lotus : The First 20 Years

Lotus the First Twenty Years, brings back many (suppressed) memories.
Wonder what the next 20 will bring? Via Vowe dot net