Your Real Friends Never Say, "I Love You."

Happy belated Valentines Day. Sorry I missed it, but Easter is coming up soon. Have a happy Easter. If you're expecting to receive a cute animated e-card from me with a giant egg-hiding pooka to celebrate our Savior's resurrection ... well, you would be disappointed. If you don't get one, you fall in one of two categories: people I don't know or people I care about. Friends don't send friends e-cards.

"Why not?" It's a privacy violation. "Really? How?" Well, lets examine this from another point of view. Imagine the following improbable conversation.

Spammer: "I am Sam. I spam. When I'm not spamming, I sell lists of active e-mail addresses to other spammers. Did you get the twenty variations of "Inv3st in Nigerian V1@gra?" that I sent you last week?"

Aunt Ethel: "Yes I did, and I replied to each one to remove my name and clicked all the links to remove it, but I still get those messages."

Spammer: "Sorry about that. I promise I will promptly remove your name from my list, but it may take up to 6 weeks. I'd like to make it up to you. Just give me your name and address, and that of your family members and I will mail them a spiffy Wallmark birthday card, personalized with your name on it. It's only $5, or 5 for $20."

Aunt Ethel: "I'm not comfortable giving out my address to you, and besides I can do that myself. Don't you mean Hallmark?"

Spammer: "Good for you! Obi Wan has taught you well. It was rude of me to ask. I tell you what. We have a new offering. I'll send them a free e-card on their birthday. But naturally I would need their e-mail addresses, and yours so they can reply to it. Oh, and their birthdays so that I know when to send it."

Aunt Ethel: "Oh! Free? Let's send them the cute one with the bootleg Mickey Mouse throwing hearts all over the place."

Is the e-card from a reputable company? Maaaybe. Did she read their privacy page? Doubtful. Was there a privacy page? Perhaps. Do they abide by the rules mentioned in their privacy page? Who knows? I'm sure the Internet Police, Captain America, and the Easter Bunny will prosecute anyone who abuses the system.

The frequent reality is that Aunt Ethel just sold her family's inbox privacy and hers for a spiffy e-card. I guarantee you that nine out of 10 of them think that it was really thoughtful, or just pass it off as "another cutesy card from Aunt Ethel." The tenth one is the designated computer-saavy individual in the family who just got through removing spyware from three of the other nine's computers. You know, the cranky zealot who's always pulling his hair out, scolding the others about buying some sort of antivirus software, and always replies to the fascinating forwarded e-mails with some weird link to a site called Snopes.com. Sheesh, what a whiner. I'm sure everyone's computer is probably still under warranty which means they send a team of motivated experts to the house to fix it if it breaks for any reason. Besides, the site has a gold lock which means it's secure. Right?

In the computer security world, we call this "social engineering." This classic example has the following traits:

1. It attempts to create an environment where the targeted individual is comfortable voluntarily divulging information that otherwise would be treated as private.
2. It attempts to create an environment where the targeted individual is comfortable voluntarily divulging other people's information that otherwise would be treated as private.
3. It plays on your emotions. C'mon! Cute fuzzy kitty cat e-card for your favorite niece! And we'll automatically send them another one on Christmas!

It can also have security implications. Many sites require you to install some sort of browser plug-in to view the really cool spiffy animated card. Is it safe? Were you planning on uninstalling the plug-in when you're done viewing it (assuming it can be)? Are you sure that it doesn't do anything else, like hypothetically collect passwords and credit card numbers?

Some sites are legitimate. Many are not. Many others say they are legitimate and pinky-swear not to sell your information to anyone else. Listen to the cranky zealot: "Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get me!" There's a reason the post office has strict mail fraud rules and tries to establish trust with the public. It comes as no surprise that old snail mail scams just moved their operations to the Internet.

If you love your friends and family, send them a real card, write your own e-mail, or do nothing, but please think twice before sending an e-card. If you find yourself to be the recipient of said e-card, fight the urge to retaliate. Instead, consider giving them an equally thoughtful gift such as a Ford Pinto, a cute litter of free dalmation puppies, or signing them up for a cell phone plan and prepaying the first month.

If you would like me to forward a courtesy copy of this article to your friends and family free of charge, just leave their e-mail addresses in the comments field below, but you might need a free Blogger account first ...

Pandora: Your favorite music that you've never heard

Wow. I'm normally not much of one for the sites that collect my personal information, but this one is different. I'm somewhat of a music nut, and somewhat stuck in the influences of folk songwriting and 70s era rock. I ran across an experimental site a while back called Mercora (now part of social.fm, which was really cool. You could search for your favorite artists and songs, and for a while you could actually record a limited amount of them to your computer. It could broadcast your music library with others, and you could listen to theirs. It was a pretty good way to discover new music, but it had some flaws. You were at the mercy of the "DJ" whose station you were listening to. Sometimes their stations were not very coherent. Mozart + Rap + Country on the same channel didn't flow very well. It appears that the site still works that way, but I haven't used it since the name change. Meanwhile I got sucked into Pandora.

Here's how it works. You're not sharing libraries with other users. You are limited to their library (which seems pretty extensive), so you might not get your favorite indy rock band or older LPs which never survived the transition to CD, but what you do get is very interesting.

First, you search for an artist or song title. Next, it creates a "station" with similar songs, based on certain characteristics of the music. You can optionally add other artists to your station to customize it. Pretty neat? Not yet. This is where it gets interesting. If you really like a song, you give it a thumbs up. If you don't like it, thumbs down. Soon, an eerie thing starts happening. You start hearing music that you've forgotten about, or have never heard before, but you like it...

After a while, you realize that not all of your music belongs on the same station. Pandora lets you create multiple stations, to accomodate various moods or styles. I have a couple that I attempt to keep strictly instrumental. Others are for foreign music, country classics, killer rock riffs, or soothing music. Others are ordered more by their decade. It's amazing how well and how quickly it starts figuring out your music interests.

Oh, and so far, it's free as in zero-cost. Wow. It appears to be financed by advertising graphics and links to purchase music, but your music keeps on playing.

Since this is the age of social networking, you can listen to other users' stations, or share links to yours. I added my channel list to this blog, so if you're reading this from a news aggregator, don't miss out. Here are some links to my channel. You can add them to your RSS reader to see when I create a new station.

My profile on Pandora
My Pandora stations RSS feed

The more you play with it, the more it grows on you. Enjoy!

Still here... just elsewhere.

I'm sorry for the really long delay in updating this feed. Life's been busier lately, and my free time has been spent on various other projects or interests, most of which have been centering around computers. There have many days where I wanted to write about some of the exciting things that I had been doing, but I just didn't have the energy at the end of the day. I need to post an article on burnout. I have recently taken up art as a hobby, since I can't always tell the difference between work and play when I'm on my home computer. I blame my BlackBerry a.k.a., my Wireless Leash.

On the technology front, I have really gotten into various open source projects. For those of you who may not be familiar with the term "open source," here is a brief and incomplete explanation. It usually refers to software where the author has released the programming instructions (source code) for others to view, and reuse, usually under a very permissive licensing system, and usually at no cost. This allows other programmers to see and learn techniques that others use, and incorporate what they have learned in their own programs. It also allows non-programmers to have free software programs that would have cost a lot of money to obtain otherwise. This goes in a very different direction than the commercial software that most people are used to, or even the freeware and shareware that others are familiar with. The source code is traditionally the most guarded part of the software. It is the heart, the blueprints, the schematics. This is the kind of information that fuels industrial espionage against companies like Adobe and Microsoft. Yet, the open source software model thrives today, and even cuts into sales for their commercial "competitors."

In my opinion, the beauty of open source isn't that the technology is shared, or that the programs are free, although those are excellent reasons. The real benefit is the community that it creates. How many times have you been using a program and said, "This program is great, but I wish it had an option to do ___." ? With traditional software, the responses to these requests are usually directed back to the author, who decides if the feature merits inclusion in a future version. If you make the same request in a forum for open source software, you will often hear the response like, "Good idea. Feel free to submit a patch." In programmer-ese, this means, write the changes yourself, and send me a copy when you get it working. Newcomers may be offended by the apparent disinterest in the author to make the change for them, especially if they have no knowledge of how to program, but an interesting exchange has just taken place.

Take a few steps back. The author usually is not getting paid for their program. Many, if not most write these programs in their free time. Occasionally, a company will sponsor a larger project, or donations are made to the author, but in general, it takes a lot of time and usually some money to provide these "free" programs to the public. The author has given a gift to the world by providing the program in the first place. The author provides more of a gift if he/she/they decide to support all the bug reports and feature requests for the programs. What ends up happening is that if the program seems worthwhile to enough people, it will attract other developers who may come out of curiosity, but may end up staying to help. The program turns into a project, gains support from others, and usually starts improving.

This reminds me of the old folk story called "Stone Soup." Read the brief description from the link. if you aren't familiar. You can actually start an open source project with nothing but an idea. Gather some interest, sell the idea to a few people who know how to program, and come up with a rough draft. Borrow pieces, parts, and people from other open source projects, if needed, and if successful, the project will start to have a life of its own. Before long, you have a mix of casual onlookers, enthusiasts, and dedicated programmers who want the project to succeed. Improvements get added, bugs get discovered and fixed, and very complex programs are created by the time donated by all involved.

Here is a list of some of the projects that I have interest in, or use frequently. I haven't contributed code for any of them (yet), but I have participated in discussion on a few. There are many other tools that I use as well, but the ones I chose to list give a sample of the ones I particularly like.

• Drupal - a content management system (CMS) based on PHP. I use this one at work and at home. Perhaps one day I will move this weblog to Drupal. The system seems to focus on community-based web sites. As a result, they have an amazing community of developers and supporters. Interactive lessons are presented at the Drupal Dojo. The lessons are usually recorded for others to view at a later time. If you have looked at Drupal in the past and written it off as too difficult or arcane, I would invite you to come back and see what has happened.
• GNU/Linux - Perhaps the most popular open-source project of all, this is the poster child for success in an open source community. Although GNU and Linux are technically separate projects with different histories, the two almost always go together, somewhat like the chocolate and peanut butter in the 1980s Reese's commercials. In another post, I will describe my experiences with various distributions, but in short, I prefer the Debian stable release at work, and Ubuntu at home.
• Rosegarden - I occasionally play around with music on my computer. I have a cheap QuickShot MIDI controller connected to my SoundBlaster Live. My life doesn't depend on this hobby, so I'm not really willing to fork out the money for Finale, CakeWalk, or CuBase. I do, however, like to put my notes down on paper and hear how it will sound. Rosegarden is an excellent piece of notation and MIDI sequencing software. Unfortunately, it is currently only available for Linux. If you know of any comparable open source projects for Windows, please let me know. I currently dual boot my home PC between XP and Ubuntu, and have to shut everything down, which interferes a bit with this hobby.
• Lilypond - Rosegarden is a powerhouse for most features, but its primary focus is on sequencing. Its notation is good, but not publishing quality. Enter Lilypond. Lilypond is only for notation and lyrics placement. It doesn't play music. It doesn't have a nice graphical interface. It takes a specially formatted text file and converts it to beautiful sheet music, comparable to any modern published work. It supports drum notation, shape notes (Aiken, Sacred Harp, ancient styles), and many other features. It has a learning curve, but has excellent documentation with pictures for every feature. I don't know it well at all, but Rosegarden and other programs are capable of exporting Lilypond files. I do 90% of the work in Rosegarden, and then clean up the Lilypond formatting to my preferences. The good news is that you don't need to know much of Lilypond to get around. Many of the commands are for fine-tuning the results. Lilypond is available on many platforms, including Windows, Mac, and Linux. There are other tools available for assistance with editing your Lilypond files.
• PHP - a scripting language developed by one person for his own needs, gained interest of others, and grew into a huge success used by thousands of web sites today.
• Wikipedia - Open source isn't just for programs. It can be used to describe things like information services. Wikipedia is a community encyclopedia. Its articles are submitted, edited, and maintained by the commmunity. Anyone can edit it. Logs are kept to show who edited what and when, which invites some abuse or misinformation, but is usually corrected by others in the community. Old revisions are kept as well. In addition to the information on Wikipedia being open source, MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia, is also open source. This allows others to use it for managing other collections of information in a similar fashion.
• MySQL - Many open source projects which need a simple database to power them turn to MySQL. Another popular open source database is PostgreSQL, which historically has been considered more powerful than MySQL, but both programs have improved and added features since their introduction, and rival their commercial counterparts, whether by price, features, performance, or more.
• Apache - Meet the granddaddy of the web. While you were busy trying to decide what web browser to use, Apache was serving up most of the pages to your browser. It's main competitor is Microsoft's IIS. For a while, even Microsoft was using Apache for a large number of their heavier duty sites. Neither is particularly exciting for the average user, but if you're on the Internet, you benefit from each. According to a graph on NetCraft, Apache is still the market share leader, but the margin has narrowed significantly since 2006. Much of this is due to improvements in IIS, from the performance standpoint, as well as from their integration with other Microsoft technologies. It used to be common knowledge that Apache always outperforms IIS, but that claim no longer seems to be the case.

I use many other open source tools, especially at work. Many are for network management and monitoring, since that is the central role of my job. Almost everything that I run on my Ubuntu partition at home is open source, with a strong emphasis on audio and games. The only things I can think of that aren't open source are my graphics card drivers, and Finale Notepad, which is a Windows program that I run from Ubuntu via Wine. Ironically, I haven't installed the program on my Windows partition yet.

All of this open source chatter may sound a lot like communism or socialism. I can't really argue with you there, but one difference is that no one is forcing you to participate. There is no cult to join, no oath to take, and you are free to come and go as you want. In America, one has the freedom to write software, and either give it away, or charge money for it. One is also free to decide which one they need. The words "monopolistic" and "unfair" often come up when discussing software pricing. It's their right. If I don't want to fork over $500 for MS Office, I don't have to. I can use OpenOffice, StarOffice, or some other alternative, or just plain go without it altogether. Some would choose to copy (i.e. steal) it instead, leaning on the "unfair" or "monopolistic" argument, which ensures that the price will not go down any time soon. Fortunately, my employer legally provides it for home use through its enterprise agreement with Microsoft. :-)

There's also the argument that open source tools aren't as good as their commercial counterparts. This is often true, but it is not an absolute by any means. I prefer some of the features and behaviors of OpenOffice to those in Microsoft Office. Software tends to develop more rapidly in the open source world. There are frequently rough edges, but there is also no corporate strategy to limit how often new releases can be made. Usually, the new features are a bit rough, but the older features mature. There is no doubt, though, that the growth and maturation of a project depends on its community. The community is both the demand and the supply for the product.

I will try to let you know more about my favorite open source programs, and other utilities that I think might be of interest. Sometimes my posts will be geared a bit more technical than others, but I will try to keep it interesting for the general audience, as well as some tidbits for those who have do similar work.

Please comment if you found this interesting. Thanks, and take care.

Nashville Public Library = Information Central

Well, here I am at the library. I have often referred people to their local public library for computer access, but it has been a good while since I actually used it myself. I started off by trying out the wireless access on my laptop. It worked well, and I was impressed with the speed. After entering my library card number and the PIN, I was directed to their site. I learned something new - you can now download audio books at no charge with library membership. I pulled an Erma Bombeck book off of the virtual shelf and it downloaded a timebombed Windows Media file. I had the choice of "CD quality" near 50 megabytes, but I opted for "radio quality" at 8 MB. Just a few minutes later, I had a book!

The library is a great resource for computer knowledge and access to the Internet. If your branch is crowded, expect a wait. There is a reservation system which will schedule you for the next available terminal. Bring a few $1 bills with you if you need printouts. The first dollar gets you a rechargable card with 50 cents worth of printouts (at 15 cents per page).

Enjoy!

Free Webspace and Free Web Hosting Services

I dabble in web site technologies. I'm not particularly talented with the artwork or other design skillls, but I enjoy trying out some of the different technologies. I have been testing some content management systems at work and have a particular fondness for one called Drupal. It's probably not the friendliest one to use, but it has a nice balance of convenience and flexibility. After all, I'm still a programmer at heart.

If you want to find out more about content management systems, these sites are great resources for comparing products and even test driving them:

• http://www.opensourcecms.com/


• http://www.cmsmatrix.org/

Currently, I use this web log as my main "Internet presence." As time goes on, though, I might switch to a web site running a CMS. Since most of my business is word of mouth, I really haven't had much of a need for permanent web hosting. As such, I haven't been too willing to fork out the money for something that will probably cost more money than it generates, unless I start selling products or otherwise change my business model.

This is where the world of free hosting comes in to play. Free web hosting sites have been around for a long time, but there are some out there worth looking at. Historically, these sites did not offer much to their subscribers in the way of programming languages or database hosting. Now, quite a few of them offer access to MySQL databases and PHP or Perl scripting. I may play around with this a little, just to see how it suits me. I found the following site which has reviews and comparisons of various free web and picture hosting sites:

• http://www.free-webhosts.com/

In particular, I will probably be trying out one of the higher-rated ones, Award Space. It had a bunch of positive ratings, and it was at the top of the list, so I figured that it was worth a shot. Most of these sites have a free plan, and hope that they will attract enough subscribers who want to upgrade to one of their paid plans.

Please note that I do not have affiliations with any of these companies, nor should this be considered an endorsement for any of the sites or products listed in this article.