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May 31, 2005

Razor goes live

It's happened - although we're not quite sure how - a day ahead of schedule. as Alister Scott just pointed out [well spotted!] the existence of that new blog we've been working on - Razor - has been announced in the blogs section on the front page of the SMH Online edition. But it's not yet on the front page of The Age.

Let's know what you think of it. Oh, and the first post is hidden, but you can find it here.

It will be interesting to see who makes the first comment.

Posted by cw at 07:57 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

The blog heirarchy

As we've observed in another place [to which the reading public will gain access tomorrow], there's an interesting battle emerging in the Blogosphere between the Forces of Light and Goodness the Left and those fascist bastards those on the Right.

What's particularly interesting about the story that sparked these observations, however, is the apparently poor traffic statistics that the top blogs here report.

John Quiggin surely can't be right when he says he gets only 2000 page views per day, can he? Not when he's constantly being plugged by Crikey, and getting stories in the Financial Review. He must mean individual sessions, surely? And even that we can't believe, because on both counts this blog would be well ahead. In terms of page views, this week we're running at an average 53,088 per day (including the weekend, mind you), and our individual daily sessions are at 2220. That would also put us well ahead of Tim Dunlop's traffic, which judging from the number of comments he gets, and his Technorati links, also seems extremely unlikely.

In any event, we're more than satisfied with our performance over the past year, despite the fact that the time we've spent blogging has accelerated our descent into poverty. We do hope their ad revenue is A LOT better than ours.

Posted by cw at 01:32 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Second class employers?

Tim Colebatch opines that the Howard Government's "historic work-place reforms" will create a two-class system of Australian workers, in which those working for big business will be entitled to redundancy payments and protection against unfair dismissal, and those working for small business will have no rights in either area, and could be fired at any time without a cent.

He describes the situation as "absurd and unsustainable", and suggests it creates a powerful disincentive to small firms to grow big, "which ought to be their goal". Here in the Land of Idle Speculation, however, Bleeding Edge has been exploring the potential for the law of unintended consequences to stuff up the theorists yet again.

Small companies may be thinking that they're going to be saving a lot of money by being able to negotiate wages and conditions down. While they will, of course, be able to screw some of their workers, we can't help but wonder whether they're also going to be faced with a rapid erosion of talent - you know, the human capital that the latest management speak suggests is a company's most valuable asset.

It seems likely to us that the most-valued employees will be striking smaller companies off their list of prospects. Even if you can negotiate a contract for better pay and conditions, why would you want to work in a company where many of your colleagues are going to be dissatisfied, and worse, regard you with suspicion, and resent you for being in a more favoured position?

Surely one of the first questions the smart job candidate will ask in future interviews is "How many employees do you have?" And those currently employed in the sub-100 category will very quickly be looking to move to bigger firms.

Posted by cw at 01:06 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 30, 2005

Qantas makes softer call on mobile phones

Qantas has decided that its pilots are sufficiently skilled, after all, to locate the terminal, even if passengers do start to use their mobile phones after the plane touches down. Accordingly, if you're on a domestic flight, you'll be able to ring somebody as soon as the hosties are sure that the wheels are on the ground. Other airlines have allowed this for quite some time now, but Qantas always has its passengers' best interests at heart.

Under the new rules, you'll also be able to use your phone/PDA in flight, once the seat belt signs go off, provided that before take-off, you switch it into flight mode (which if your phone doesn't already have, you might be able to get via Psiloc's System Tools.)

We do hope though, that even if the US FCC does decide to approve the use of mobile phones during flights, that airlines don't allow it. We tend to agree with the 63 per cent of respondents to a recent survey by the US Association of Flight Attendants who didn't want the rules relaxed, largely because having a lot of people shouting on the phone - which of course they'll have to do to make themselves heard - is going to make you wish you took the train.

Posted by cw at 10:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 29, 2005

Your Sudoku assistant

Matt's been playing around with something that you might find useful if you're looking for something to help solve Sudoku puzzles. This is the first generation. Tell us what else you'd like to have in there, and we'll see if we can accommodate you.

Posted by cw at 07:16 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Let's put Andrew Bolt on the couch

We're starting to wonder why the ABC bothers paying Barrie Cassidy to "run" the Sunday morning Insiders panel, when it's clear that the man in charge is the increasingly smug Andrew Bolt, who, as we learn in this upchucking display of false modesty, doubts he'd have "the courage and tenacity to continue searching for the truth", without "the generous support and encouragement" of friends and strangers.

Obviously they include his fellow Insider panel members, because Bolt is the focus of everyone's attention, including Cassidy's. If Malcolm Farr, or each week's token woman commentator makes a point, they don't make it to Cassidy, they make it to Bolt.

And Bolt's body language indicates he's quite aware that the focus is on him - possibly because he's now taken to writing love notes to the most decent, caring, compassionate, gentle and infallible Prime Minister in Australia's history. He leans back in the chair, makes languid gestures, and interrupts as he pleases. It's rare for anyone to get to complete a sentence without Bolt dismissing it, or changing the subject.

We're beginning to think that it's the seating arrangements. Farr and the women seem to be stuck on the couch, whereas Bolt and Cassidy get the chairs. We'd like to see Bolt stuck on the couch. Supine. Preferably with a psychiatrist taking notes.

Posted by cw at 09:36 AM | Comments (13)

May 28, 2005

Podcasting culture

Here's a great application for podcasting: why not use it to remix culture ... specifically museum and art gallery commentaries so that they're less pedagogical and you don't have to cope with those irritating buttons on those audio devices you have to hire and hang around your neck.

They're springing up all over the place, including this one covering New York's newly revitalised Museum of Modern Art.

The project sprang from soundseeing, in which people record narrations of their travels on iRivers or iPods or whatever your particular taste in MP3 players, umm, dictates.

David Gilbert, a professor of communication at Marymount Manhattan College, who organised the MoMA commentaries, says his primary goal is to try to teach his students to stop being passive information consumers - whether through television, radio or an official audio guide - and to take more control, using as his model the guru of so-called remix culture, Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School.

And can we just try once again to make the point once more, having failed to get it across in our original comment that aerated those G'Day World chaps: we're not opposed to podcasting. We love podcasting, and we'd like to see a lot of institutions making better use of it.

What we're less than enthusiastic about is transposing indifferent podcasts to radio. The situation is made somewhat moot by the fact that, as we've been reporting here, enlightened radio stations are moving to podcasting.

Posted by cw at 04:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 27, 2005

Turning the Web into (commercial) TV

US marketers are almost beside themselves with joy, having decided that the Web is about to turn into television, and is therefore crying out for a lot of commercials and promotional programs.

Scripps Networks, for instance, has just launched an all-video Web site that uses programming from its Food Network, Fine Living, HGTV and DIY Network brands, together with new clips.

Somehow, having had a look at some of this stuff, Bleeding Edge is pretty sure it's going to end in bitter disappointment for them. The Web was a great place to find TV programs and download them via BitTorrent - before the studios turned their attention to destroyhing that - but we just can't see it replacing the television set.

Not that the television set is necessarily going to be showing broadcast television. With attendances at movie theatres dropping, more people are watching DVDs, and timeshifted programs recorded on their PVRs. While box office attendances are down 8 per cent.

Time spent on the Internet, however, has soared 76.6 percent and video game playing is up 20.3 percent. You'd think the advertising industry and the movie and music studios would start to pick up some clues, but so far they're uniformly out of touch.

Posted by cw at 10:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Another new virus?

Perhaps we're being paranoid, but we've just received a couple of emails that look suspiciously like viruses. They purport to be the sort of thing that anyone administering a domain might well respond to: a notification of the suspension of an email account, and an online user violation report. Both come with ZIP attachments.

Perhaps they're not malware, but we'd be particularly careful about opening anything like that.

Posted by cw at 03:29 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Go digital ... or else!

Look. You mob haven't been buying digital TV sets, which puts the Government in a bit of an embarrassing spot, what with it plannning to switch off the analogue signal in three years time. Particularly given that in Britain, where 80 per cent of people have gone across to digital, the analogue transmission will continue until 2012.

Our Minister for Selling Telstra Plus Some Unimportant Stuff, Senator Helen Coonan, thinks it might be a bit dodgy for the government if it throws 90 per cent of TV viewers into sudden darkness, and is therefore muttering about possibly extending the deadline.

What we can't understand is Kerry Packer's pussy-footing around, telling the government it ought to mandate installation of digital tuners by manufacturers - one of those typically Packeresque tactics of getting someone else to subsidise his profits. Surely he should just ring up the Prime Minister and tell him to jail anyone who's still using analogue TV. They could possibly include it in the new industrial relations reforms. Maybe Kerry's just waiting until his company opens its private prisons department.

Posted by cw at 01:22 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

More jobs from sacking people

Look. We don't want to get overtly political again, but can someone please explain to us how freeing nine out of 10 employers from the constraints of unfair-dismissal laws will create 77,000 jobs in small and medium businesses, as the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry claims? Isn't it more likely that a lot of businessmen are going to take advantage of John Howard's Sack The Bastards Law and terminate people?

According to a 2002 report by Melbourne Institute, unfair-dismissal laws made it less likely that small businesses would hire "people who changed jobs frequently for no particular reason, people who were unemployed at the time and the long-term unemployed".

We understand the logic - if you think you might not be able to get rid of someone who doesn't work out, you're probably not going to be prepared to give them a chance - but so far as we can see, employers are unlikely to be queuing to give those people jobs under any circumstances.

What's more likely to happen - and we're possibly being grossly cynical here - is that while some people thoroughly deserve the sack, a lot of employers are going to get rid of people who aren't prepared to work a lot of extra hours, perhaps because they're trying to live a more balanced lifestyle which gives them more time with their families. Or get rid of people they just don't happen to like.

We can't help but wonder if "Howard's Historic Work Reforms", as the Financial Review describes them, are going to produce a lot of dictatorial bosses, and a new generation of thoroughly cowed workers. Which we're pretty sure is what chaps like John Howard and Alexander Downer etc. feel much more comfortable with. What's the use of being born to rule, if you don't have a lot of serfs and slaves to lord it over. This law is un-Australian.

Posted by cw at 11:42 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 26, 2005

The OTHER blog

For the past few weeks, Bleeding Edge has been blogging away on that other blog we mentioned ... the one we're going to be paid for. We're still not allowed to show it to you, but it's scheduled to launch on June 1. At which point you'll see what we've been spending quite a lot of our time on.

It's been an interesting - and not entirely satisfactory - experience, blogging into a vacuum. It's convinced us that blogging really IS a conversation. And a conversation requires responses.

Posted by cw at 07:34 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

That's (possibly not) entertainment

Just how dangerous is Richard Stubbs' brand of radio? According to Gay Alcorn's opinion piece in The Age today, Radio 774's afternoon announcer - who we all know was recruited from the faraway land of commercial radio - is so lethally boring he could be presenting the ABC's opponents with a perfect excuse to stop funding the national broadcaster.

Gay was understandably upset, having sat through one program where Stubbsy fascinated the audience by reflecting on how good it was to find himself still on the B list of personalities, then invited listeners to become enthralled with sharing their hints for pampering themselves, before encouraging them to ring up and tell all their fellow listeners how they got themselves stuck in strange places. Not only was this particularly announcer frivolous and dull, according to Gay, he was possibly contagious.

Jon Faine, she suggests, has become suspiciously fluffy recently, to the extent that last week he unleashed his investigative skills on council policies on the length of dog leads. (Bleeding Edge possibly shouldn't admit this, but we probably would have been quite interested in learning about dog lead regulations.)

Had Gay listened this afternoon, she probably would have been beside herself. Stubbsy was at it again, getting callers to ring up and chat about the pet names people deployed with their loved ones.

Let's see now: one chap complained that his wife used the same four terms in a completely undiscriminatory fashion (about which Stubbsy observed that terms like "love" and "darl" were "default settings", which we thought was quite a clever line), a young woman revealed that although she loved the name "Chief" which her boyfriend gave her, she was no longer playing cowboys and indians with him, and a Welsh chap explained that the fact that he was called "Johnny Grownomore" was a practical necessity, given that (a) his family were height-challenged, and (b) the fact that every second Welshman is called Jones, or Williams, means they have to have some way, aside from surnames and Christian names, of identifying themselves.

What's fascinating to Bleeding Edge is that the people who call in clearly can't regard this stuff as . For all we know, it's the . And given that they're paying their few cents a day to run the ABC, just like everybody else, shouldn't they be entitled to have their dull and frivolous needs met?

After all, isn't the current ABC promotional line something like "Everyone's ABC"?

The fact is, of course, the ABC has never been everyone's ABC. It's been the exclusive preserve of the more patrician levels of our society. Ironically, an awful lot of Liberal voters wouldn't listen to anything else.

And if there has been a dumbing down of ABC content, it's not been confined to local radio. How did the householders of Toorak and Brighton react, we wonder, to the fact that the ABC TV news recently led its nightly bulletin on the Kylie Minogue breast cancer story?

Perhaps our brain has become addled by the occasional exposure to this sort of stuff, but we're starting to speculate on the possibility that the appearance of Richard Stubbs is in fact part of some devious plot to piss Liberal voters off to the point where they start to demand that the Treasurer and Prime Minister do something to address the decline in ABC funding. Stubbs is probably in on the conspiracy.

Posted by cw at 02:13 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Customize your PC ... with care

One of the most hazardous activities the computer user can engage in is embraced by an apparently innocent word: “Customisation”. Like other forms of “futzing” – the expenditure of vast amounts of time fiddling with PCs – customisation starts off innocently enough.

With programs like Microsoft Word, for instance, it’s essential to do a little customising, in order to achieve a more productive working environment. Whenever we install Word on a new computer, for instance, we routinely change the default for the Recently used files from four to nine, using the Tools/Options/General menu, and we also change the default locations for saving files. There are some excellent suggestions for other Word customisations in the Word MVP FAQ.

We’re less likely to make merely cosmetic changes, although we acknowledge that modifying one’s desktop could possibly induce a rosy state of mind and untold increases in productivity. We imagine a lot of people are going to be doing just that, with the continual delay of the next version of Windows – codenamed Longhorn. Having read about its new features, they’re justifiably impatient to try out its new features.

One likely contributor to this phenomenon – in addition to the wincustomize.com Website - is the June edition of APC magazine – isn’t it fascinating that the June edition arrives at the beginning of May? - which suggests that Windows XP users can add some of Longhorn’s new graphics features, including the Sidebar, ObjectDock, and the Aero look, by adding programs like Desktop Sidebar, ObjectDock and the Windows Longhorn Transformation Pack.

ObjectDock lets you organize your short-cuts and running tasks onto “an extremely customisable dock” that sits on your desktop. The same company also produces WindowBlinds, which is certified and recommended by Microsoft. It allows users to add thousands of new visual styles to Windows. Another member of its stable, RightClick, adds additional functionality.

Those programs are probably worth experimenting with, but we’re not quite so comfortable with APC Magazine even mentioning the Windows Longhorn Transformation pack. It might well cause considerable grief if you use it to tinker with system files to replace the desktop shell and experiment with different skins.

Our advice is to be very careful of any of these things. It can take you down a path that can cause considerable pain.

Take the experience of one of our friends as a cautionary tale. He’s a normally sober individual who regards the addition of wi-fi networking as a potential catastrophe, and agonises over worthwhile improvements to his system.

He cannot, however, resist customizing his desktop, which is what he did a couple of weeks ago. He installed ObjectDock, and delighted in its selection of program icons, which have the elegantly rendered, three-dimensional look of Mac OS X icons.

Once he’d installed that, he moved the Windows task bar to the top of the screen and set it to Autohide by right clicking on the Start button, choosing Properties. And selecting the Autohide check box under the Taskbar tab. You can unhide it by pointing to the area of the screen where it’s located.

Gripped by inspiration, he went to Konfabulator, and downloaded its JavaScript runtime engine which allows users to run things called “widgets”. It’s available for both Windows XP and Mac OS X, although Tiger has stolen much of its thunder on the Mac platform.

He installed some quite handy widgets, including a weather watch that keeps track of the weather in Melbourne Australia (as distinct from Melbourne, Florida), and a station clock. There are many more available - more than 550 of them at last count.

By this time, he had the bit firmly between his teeth. He downloaded the MSN Quick Search Toolbar suite, dragged the icon onto the ObjectDock, and was, for a brief time, contented.

At that point he also downloaded DesktopX, which allowed him to change his graphical user interface with a single click. You can find the themes here.

Even that went well. The point where it suddenly went awry, however, was when he thought he might do some fine tuning, and began to tinker with the desktop’s Display Properties box. He clicked on Themes, and tried out various offerings until he clicked, rather fatefully, on one called Eclipse.

As it happened, it was a particular apt name, because when it installed itself, he was unable to see anything on his screen. The background and the text were all in black. Clearly, this was a total eclipse.

We won’t go into the emotional pain and stress he suffered recovering from this disaster. It might have been a lot worse than it was, and eventually he emerged with a very nice, and much more functional desktop. But just remember. If you must customize, customize with care.

Posted by cw at 11:17 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

May 25, 2005

How to solve Sudoku puzzles

By now, no doubt, you're tearing your hair out over those new Sudoku puzzles that The Age has inflicted on you (and which we occasionally mis-spell as Sudoko). Bleeding Edge has been scouring the Web, looking for help. Here's some great clues for solving Sudoku. Here's some more Sudoku secrets.

There's a Sudoko helper, and Sudoku addicts have banded together for self help. You can learn advanced Sudoku tactics, or perhaps use a Sudoku spreadsheet. Alternatively, you could ignore them and stick to cryptic crosswords.

Posted by cw at 08:02 PM | Comments (9)

How iTunes will support Podcasting

Steve Jobs did little more than whet everyone's appetites with his announcement that the next version of iTunes would support podcasts. Now Apple's providing some more details, and it looks much like what iPodder does, which in essence is RSS for podcasts.

Nevertheless, the fact that the feature will be available in iTunes may serve as some form of official recognition, and who knows, may stimulate a market for podcasts - even possibly, paid podcasts.

Posted by cw at 05:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The hidden city

I spent an absorbing couple of hours this morning wandering around the inner city lanes and alleys, orientating myself for a piece I'm doing for a travel magazine, on Melbourne.

Melbourne seems to set a test for those who would try to know it well. If you're satisfied with the obvious, you'll miss some extraordinary treats.

Flinders Lane and Degraves St, Hosier Lane, Drivers Lane etc are full of tiny delights that I suspect most visitors - for that matter, most residents - never discover. How many of us notice the blue terracotta faience facade of Majorca House, and the Nicholas Building, with its leadlight barrel-vaulted arcade? It seems to have become a magnet for quirky little shops and designers. The Victorian Writers' Centre has recently moved there too. I suppose they've been attracted by the fact that it actually has windows!

We've been blessed recently by creative business people who seem to have been prepared to go burrowing around looking for interesting spaces to re-develop. And a lot of them don't advertise their presence.

The fashion boutique Marais, for instance, seems to have parachuted into the Block Arcade under cover of darkness. There's a small sign, but nothing really that would attract the average person to walk upstairs, to track down the work of young, interesting designers.

Has anyone discovered M.O.O. yet? It's a fabulous bar/restaurant downstairs in the lane beside the GPO. It's been fitted out with a pony-hide bar, 18th Century parquetry floors imported from France and Buenos Aires.

If I hadn't taken the Hidden Secrets Shopping Tour with Fiona Sweetman, I wouldn't have known that Christine Barro, who as buyer for Georges filled the place with expensive little treasures, had opened her own emporium downstairs in Flinders Lane.

What should I write about Melbourne? Any suggestions?

Posted by cw at 03:48 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 24, 2005

To Do or not To Do. That is the existential question

Merlin Mann, who we suspect suffers from a particularly virulent strain of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder - we're prepared to bet that as a baby, he insisted on putting on his own nappies, for instance - has observed that less disciplined persons fail to gallop through their To Do lists due to some access of existential angst.

Well-organised chaps like Merlin have of course filed all their existential angst under F, for Forget, and therefore do not have to be prompted to perform the following recommended routine:

1. Print out your TODO list (alphabetically, if possible
2. Read it over—beginning to end
3. Go back and circle each item that makes you cringe, or that causes you some kind of existential angst
4. Per cringe item, think honestly about why you’re freaked out about it. Seriously. What’s the hang-up? (Fear of failure? Dreading bad news? Angry you’re already way overdue?)
5. Now, again, per cringe item, add a new TODO that will a) make the loathsome task less cringe-worthy, or b) just get the damned thing done
6. Cross the original cringe items off your list
7. Work immediately on the new, cringe-busting TODO

Bleeding Edge thinks this is an excellent idea. We would do it immediately, and not only that, we would sign up to Merlin's idea of doing it every Monday, without fail. Were it not for one single little problem. The thought of drawing up a To Do list makes us cringe.

Posted by cw at 02:39 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Fudging the figures on online fraud

According to the Financial Review Australian corporations "could be winning the battle against computer criminals", based on figures that indicate "electronic attacks fell [PAY WALL] in the past year and financial losses edged only slightly higher".

Oh yes, and the US could have been winning the war against North Vietnam, if it hadn't been for all those bodies being shipped home in bags. What's more likely, it seems to us, is that Australian corporations could be losing the battle against computer criminals, but winning the battle against truth.

Australia's computer emergency response team, AusCert, reported that only 35 per cent of respondents to a new survey fell victim to a harmful electronic attack in the 12 months to February, compared to 49 per cent the previous year.

Now that's something we could all celebrate, were it not for the fact that the survey doesn't include incidents associated with online identity theft, which in the 12 months to April 2005 increased by a mere 1200 per cent.

Umm, doesn't that suggest that the entire survey is utterly without meaning, and that the war is not going at all well?

Here's another ludicrous statistic: AusCert would have us believe that "total annual losses reported from electronic crime were only marginally higher at $16.9 million, compared with $15.9 million or a 34.9 per cent rise the previous year". The figures look even better, according to the Fin, when you consider the fact that they were skewed by a single denial-of-service attack on one company, which accounted for $8 million. In other words, the value of online fraud would have been less than half that of the previous year.

As we learned last year, Australian banks are reporting only a tiny percentage of online fraud cases - less than 5 per cent - and these figures, in the best traditions of military non-intelligence, serve only to keep the public deluded.

The figures don't tally with reports from other countries, where instances of phishing and pharming and social engineering, together with common or garden fraud transacted online have been spiralling. Or maybe banks and financial insitutions aren't regarded as corporations.

Posted by cw at 11:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 23, 2005

What we learned from the Sunday papers

Looks like we can dispense with all those wealth-creation seminars and ditch any plans to do an MBA, what with having read that ever-so-handy cover story in the Sunday Age's Life magazine, in which 40 of "Australia's highest achievers" tell us how to be successful, just like them.

We're pretty sure we've got the formula down pat. What you have to do is have an almost fanatical belief in yourself [a great help when claiming the achievements of others]; cultivate a manic personality that can conjure up passion and enthusiasm for the spectacularly mundane; disguise your obsessive self-interest by constantly employing approved euphemisms ["Surround yourself with talented people" means "sack most of the bastards and terrorise the rest", etc] and tell everybody who's prepared to listen what great vision, energy, courage, commitment, passion - "passion" is the current vogue word - enthusiasm, stamina, persistence etc. you [that is, You Inc.] have.

Next step: acknowledge that although you're absolutely wonderful, you had to work very hard to correct a slight deficiency. Maria Vandamme, founder of the Melba Foundation, for instance, explains that a very wise friend told her there were five requirements for leadership: "vision, knowledge, courage, urgency and judgment", and the secret was to decide "which one you need to focus on to turn the corner".

Maria did a comprehensive character stock-take. Vision? No problem. Knowledge? You betcha. Courage? Of course. Judgment? In spades. There was, however, an apparent lack of urgency. "I worked on urgency, and as soon as I did that, everything fell into place." [Maria has actually achieved some worthwhile things, not the least of which is muscling an awful lot of money out of the Government for promoting classical music, but having mastered urgency, she might want to do a bit of work on humility.]

There are a handful of the successful 40 that seem to display recognisably human characteristics, but wouldn't it be nice if the editors who come up with these stories once in a while included someone whose success was measured in terms that didn't involve making a lot of money, or achieving high-status positions in business or the professions?

People who were successful in living rich and contented lives for instance. Great friends. Great family makers. Great thinkers. Great carers. Great teachers etc., etc., etc. There's not a single person in this collection whose biography we'd like to read. In our view, that's a measure of real success.

Posted by cw at 01:06 PM | Comments (2)

May 22, 2005

Sudoko craze means your days are numbered

Bleeding Edge is already addicted to cryptic crosswords, so we don't know if we even dare look at the new sudoko puzzle that The Age gave us a taste of yesterday, and officially launches tomorrow.

Invented in Basel, Switzerland, by an 18th Century mathematician called Leonhard Euler, Sudoko made its way via Japan, and a New Zealand-born judge and amateur computer programmer, Wayne Gould, to Britain, where newspapers swarmed over the idea. Their readers have apparently refused all nourishment until they are given their daily dose.

The victims are confronted with a grid of 81 squares, nine across by nine down, some containing numbers. You have to fill in the blanks, observing the following condition: each 3 x 3 box, as well as each row and each column, must contain the numbers 1 to 9.

You can pick up clues at the Daily Telegraph's Sudoko site, and there's a Dashboard widget for Sudoko-obsessed Mac owners.

Posted by cw at 06:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Under the weather with Rocketboom

We've previously mentioned our enthusiasm for the zany video blog Rocketboom. Obviously we're not alone. The New York Times reports that when the show advertised for a weatherman - an unpaid position on an amateur show that's shot five evenings a week in the creato's one-bedroom apartment on New York's West 81st Street - they had more than 300 applicants.

The story gives us a few pertinent details about Rocketboom: we didn't know that the anchor, Amanda Congdon, is a 23-year-old actress, and that the other member of the team is a 34-year-old Web designer named Andrew Baron, nor that the "desk" she sits behind is made out of a fireplace screen turned sideways, and the world map used as a backgroup, cost $10.

But we're happy to agree that these unpolished virtues are the sine qua non of video blogging. Bleeding Edge's friend and fellow journalist, Jason Romney, for instance, shoots his videoblog with a couple of iSight Web cameras. We wonder if he needs a weatherman too?

Posted by cw at 05:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 21, 2005

So Microsoft thinks WE'RE dinosaurs?

We think it's official: Microsoft really does regard its customers as cretins. That's surely the sub-text of that expensive advertising campaign for Office 2003 that we seem to have inherited from some hot-shot American advertising agency [McCann's].

This surely must be the oddest-ever attempt to woo business. Do they really expect people are going to rush out and buy Office 2003, because people who don't are depicted as dinosaurs - and pretty odd dinosaurs at that. Doesn't this one look more like a turkey? Microsoft's message is that people who still find Office XP - hell, for that matter Office 97, or Office of practically any generation - perfectly adequate to their needs, haven't evolved. as a bizarre cross between a turkey and a dinosaur? Aren't they instead, likely to feel that when it starts insulting its customers' intelligence, Microsoft is getting way too big for its britches?

According to Microsoft's message to its partners, the dinosaur is "an ironic metaphor for the everyday Expert Information Worker (EIW) trapped within the limitations of a dated software environment - deflated and frustrated by the limitations of their workplace technology. Using humour as a key component, the campaign focuses on the everyday problems faced by these EIWs". [Can't be too expert, can we, if we've got dinosaur heads sticking out of our shirts?]

And wait just a bit. When Microsoft claims to have evolved, just how evolved is a piece of software that's as dated as 2003? A piece of software, moreover, that on its release was regarded as being noticeably lacking in any refinements to Word, Excel and PowerPoint?

There were some minor touches like Word's Reading Layout view, a slight change in the Office XP task pane, and Excel lifted the list management feature directly from Excel for Mac. Most of the work went into Outlook, but even that was driven as much by years of studied neglect. There are some advanced features, like Information Rights Management, for instance, that were aimed at the big corporation. It seems they must have missed their mark if Microsoft is now trying to drum up business.

But it's bad business, in our view, to make any pitch on the basis of what might be widely interpreted as an insult.

Posted by cw at 08:38 PM | Comments (6)

A lukewarm first look at the LifeDrive

In principle, Bleeding Edge likes the idea of having an MM, rather than a PDA, what with Mobile Managers promising to be much more organized than your run-of-the-mill organizer. But after a couple of days playing around with the first mobile manager, palmOne's LifeDrive, we're not entirely convinced.

Let's start with the general feel of the thing. It's thicker, the consequence of the 4GB Hitachi microdrive that gives it its management capabilities. There's enough space there to manage lots of digital photos, music files, and movies which increasingly these days constitute the digital donnée. But we're not sure if we're ready for the trade-off in pocketability.

Another thing we're not particularly keen on is the fact that the additional bulk seems to have slowed things down. We're used to Palms that obey our every command, instantly. [When it comes to electronic devices, we're the British Raj.] The LifeDrive has to think about it. We know, we're talking seconds, perhaps even fractions of seconds here, but when you've spent all those years feeling like Clive of India, it's noticeable.

Then there's Wi-Fi. It took a lot of resetting to get the damned thing to work. Eventually it did work, and it works even faster than the Tungsten C, to our mind - which is a damned sight faster than the PocketPC Wi-Fi - but look, it was a hassle, dammit.

You're going to be doing a lot of transferring from your desktop to your LifeDrive, so it's good that it's got USB 2.0. Not so good: when we rebooted the Toshiba Portege whenever it was attached, the LifeDrive reset itself. As for communicating with a Mac, well that was huge amounts more frustrating.

And finally, the multimedia viewer had a tendency to crash. Sorry, there is one more irritation. It sells in the US for $499. In Australia, make that $899. Now let's see. Isn't that a TERRIBLY generous exchange rate calculation in Palm's favour, even allowing for [SIGH] GST?

We'll keep testing it, and do a much more in-depth review in LiveWire, and maybe it will grow on us, but we've noticed the first reviews don't seem to mention any of these things, and if you're bursting your britches to get yourself managed, mobile-wise, it may be wise to wait a week or two until further and better particulars emerge.

Posted by cw at 10:56 AM | Comments (2)

May 20, 2005

Personalize your Google home page (sort of)

What a great idea! You can customize your Google home page so that it displays the latest arrivals in your Gmail Inbox, Google news, headlines from the New York Times and BBC News, movies screening in your area, local weather etc.

Unfortunately, if you happen to live in such remote parts of the world as Australia, the weather appears not to be obtainable. Movies appear to be not obtainable. And of course, the fact that you might be interested in seeing the headlines from the ABC, and your local newspaper cuts no ice with those Google PhDs, possibly because we're not likely to throw a lot of money into their pot.

But given that even a Konfabulator widget can stick the local weather on our desktops, and local movie listings aren't difficult to track down, wouldn't it be nice if Google asked its local offices in countries that don't happen to be the US and UK - there are quite a few of them, we understand - to set some arrangements in place so that we don't constantly feel as if Google doesn't give a stuff about us? [Gosh we're in a whingeing mood today!]

Posted by cw at 04:33 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

You want Paris Hilton's password? No problems!

Nobody who heard celebrity hacker Kevin Mitnick address Toshiba Australia's Mobile Xchange conference a couple of months ago would have been at all surprised at the latest revelation from the annals of institutionalised insecurity, that it took just one phone call from a teenager to break into Paris Hilton's mobile phone account, and reveal those nude photos and A list phone numbers.

T-Mobile International's computer programmers did leave a security hole that the kids exploited - the architecture of their Web sites, according to one security expert, appeared to have been modelled on the beehive - but by itself, it wouldn't have been enough to expose Paris Hilton's kinky communications to the world.

What it took was a simple exercise in social engineering: a teenager posing as a supervisor rang a sales rep, who obediently divulged details of the Web site used to manage T-Mobile's customer accounts, and a user name and password.

Mitnick, who by the way used precisely the same tactics to get the source code for the then hush-hush Motorola MicroTac Ultra Lite phone, says social engineering beats hacking every time, because:

• Asking for somebody's user name and password is easier than hacking a firewall
• It evades intrusion detection systems
• It presents only nominal risk for the attacker
• It works on every operating system
• It's 99.5 per cent effective

According to a woman called Kelly Hallissey, who has had contact with the teen hackers for several years - as a consequence of which she no longer has any control over her most intimate secrets - "Major corporations have made social engineering way too easy for these kids. In their call centres they hire low-pay employees to man the phones, give them a minimum of training, most of which usually dwells on call times, canned scripts and sales. This isn't unique to T-Mobile or AOL. This has become common practice for almost every company."

Here's more discouraging news in relation to glib corporate assurances that of course they've got the problem under control: the CEO of a major financial institution told Mitnick that after 30 days of security training designed to condition employees against such social engineering vulnerabilities, it took just 10 phone calls for the company it hired to test the effectiveness of the program to break into the system.

Posted by cw at 09:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 19, 2005

Bleeding Edge research

A post-graduate student in media is casting an eye over how the implementation of advertising on this blog affects the view of readers of this blog, and blogging in general.

He needs five volunteers (in the Melbourne area only) who are prepared to answer some questions). If any of you would like to help him out, you can contact him at tao@blackandcameron.com

Posted by cw at 04:37 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Walk-up start for kids' television

Here's a great idea for ensuring your kids don't become couch potatoes. A London university student has come up with the design for a shoe called Square Eyes that measures how much exercise kids do, and converts it into television viewing time.

One button on the shoe records the amount of steps taken by the child over the day. Another transmits the information to a base station connected to the TV. It calculates the time earned and once it runs out, the TV automatically switches itself off.

The ultimate aim is 12,000 steps for girls and 15,000 for boys. For that they can earn a maximum of two hours TV a day. Which is, let's face it, quite a lot.

Posted by cw at 08:50 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Have your say on copyright

Perhaps the most important piece of advice this column has offered in 15 years of prognosticating about IT, is something you can do in the next few weeks: overcome your quite natural apathy over participating in the so-called democratic process, and have your say on the matter of fair use rights over copyright material.

No other single act is like to have quite such a profound influence over your ability to join the citizens of other nations, including the US, Canada, Britain and Europe, in enjoying the benefits of digital music and video without unreasonable constraints.

We ought to have the right, like the citizens of those countries, to copy the contents of our music CDs to an iPod. The right to make a back-up copy of a DVD. The right to record the television news on DVD or computer hard disk. The right to “timeshift” TV programs so that we can record them digitally on a personal video recorder, and view them later at our convenience. We do not have those rights.

Instead, Australian legislators have imposed on us what is arguably the most user-unfriendly copyright regime in the Western world.

Over the next few weeks, we have a tiny opportunity to correct that spectacular failure of the legislative process, through public submissions to the Attorney-General, Phillip Ruddock.

Perhaps inspired by the fact that the Free Trade Agreement with the US imposes some drastic penalties on those who breach copyright regulations, Mr Ruddock has released an issues paper on "Fair Use and Other Copyright Exceptions - An examination of fair use, fair dealing and other exceptions in the Digital Age".

Australians have until July 1 to comment on the existing laws, and suggest proposals for change.

According to international copyright authority Professor James Boyle, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School in the US, and co-founder of the Centre for the Study of the Public Domain,, bureaucrats and politicians internationally have set back free speech, competition, innovation, and science by what he describes as “an international stupidity pact” by extending the term of copyright, and applying it retrospectively to the work of dead authors.

“Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 per cent of 20th century culture to benefit 4 per cent,” Professor Boyle wrote in an article for the New Technology Policy Forum,, sponsored by the Financial Times.

“The harm to the public is huge, the benefit to authors, tiny. In any other field, the officials responsible would be fired. Not here.”

Unfortunately, the stupidity pact has been particularly powerful in Australia. It would be very useful indeed to wind it back a little.

A Melbourne academic, Ms Kim Weatherall, associate director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia at Melbourne University, has been examining the issues paper.

She says that it is likely to produce a re-examination of Australian copyright law and its appropriateness in the context of modern technology. “My sense is that there is a desire to deal with the problem of personal copying on the part of the Attorney-General and potentially also on the part of copyright owners,” she says. “I’ve heard a lot of comments on the part of copyright owners that they are aware of how bad it looks. That doesn’t mean necessarily that the outcome will be a good solution.”

Ms Weatherall believes the chance of obtaining a reasonable regime which accommodates the interests of copyright users and owners will be enhanced if consumers participate in the review.

“If people are thinking about submissions they should be thinking about giving examples of real problems. What is that consumers should be able to do? Time-shifting is one example. Format-shifting (where the contents of a CD are moved to an iPod for instance) is another. Government would be keen to hear from people who have encountered serious problems, where for instance they might have been threatened with legal action, or where business opportunities were affected by existing laws.

“Everyone these days is personally affected by copyright, and it would be very helpful if ordinary people gave examples of real world issues. Why do they want to copy CDs? Are they copying DVDs because children break them? How do they want to use time-shifting?”
She also hopes that creative people who have been unable to produce material because of the restrictions of existing law will be able to contribute real examples to the review.

Ms Weatherall also raises some doubts about suggestions by a Sydney lawyer, Alex Malik, on the issue, pointing out that he seems to be suggesting "that we pay a levy for potentially less user rights than they have in the US for free."

Among the issues that Bleeding Edge would like to see raised in this review is the possibility of Australia adopting something like the Canadian copyright scheme, about which Professor Michael Geist has some fine ideas.

Canada imposes a levy on blank CDs and audio tapes – in the case of iPod-like devices it could be as much as $US25. That money goes into a fund to pay musicians and songwriters for revenue lost from personal copying.

An attempt to introduce similar legislation in Australia in the 1980s failed on Constitutional grounds, but it would now be possible to frame legislation that would be both Constitutionally sound and would guarantee rewards for creators without restricting the rights of the public, or denying opportunities for other creative projects. That’s one of the things we’re going to be proposing in our submission. We’d be interested in hearing about your submission.

Posted by cw at 08:12 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

Google beta for RSS ads

RSS feeds have been a mixed blessing for bloggers. Many readers regard them as a valuable service, and like a lot of blogs, Bleeding Edge provides one. The problem is that they deprive bloggers of what for most is their only source of revenue because the ads don't appear on the RSS feeds.

Over the past few months, Google has been trialling a new service which embeds the ads in RSS feeds. Now it's extending the beta. Bloggers can apply at the Google beta site.

Posted by cw at 08:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 18, 2005

The filthy rich

We're delighted that Malcolm Maiden, for whom we have great respect and affection, has just launched a business blog for The Age. This afternoon he makes the point that BRW's latest Rich List will be published tomorrow, and the top 10 in the Filthy Rich stakes work out like this:

1. Kerry Packer, $6.9 billion - NSW, media, casinos, investment
   
2. Frank Lowy, $4.8 billion - NSW, retail property
   
3. Richard Pratt, $4.7 billion - Vic, manufacturing, recycling
   
4. Harry Triguboff, $2 billion, NSW, residential property development
   
5. David Hains and family, $1.9 billion, Vic, investment
   
6. Len Ainsworth and Sons, $1.6 billion, NSW, pokies
   
7. John Gandel, $1.5 billion, Vic, property, mainly retail
   
8. Kerry Stokes, $1.42 billion, WA, media
   
9. Bruce Gordon, $1.3 billion, NSW, media
   
10. Bob Oatley and family, $1.26 billion, NSW, wine,
    property

Mal takes the view that it's "another sign of the decline of Victoria". We're not altogether sure, however, that it is. If you take the Balzac view that behind every great fortune there's a crime, maybe we're better off without too many really rich bastards.

Posted by cw at 07:55 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Goal-setting for the independent thinker

Thanks to Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway, Bleeding Edge has been keeping itself up to date with those common-sense-defying manuals of approved behaviour [PAY WALL] which modern management delights in circulating to the workers.

We've heard about Cadbury Schweppes' Leadership Imperatives, a Guide for Improving Performance which contains 144 rules that have nothing whatsoever to do with the making of good chocolate, and JP MorganChase's 126 rules which have the consistency of fairy floss and could, if followed, turn you into a mindless drain on the company balance sheet.

We think, given this week marks the 80th birthday of the great baseball hitter Yogi Berra, and someone has just sent us a list of his legendary, mangled, and possibly apocryphal sayings, that we should officially adopt one as our official management planning motto: "If you don't set goals, you can't regret not reaching them."

By the way, we can highly recommend a little book we picked up recently at Readings in Port Melbourne: Laura Ward's Foolish Words - The Most Stupid Words Ever Spoken, which cost us $19.95. Here's one we love: "Murdoch is a monster." Which was said by Charles Douglas-Home, just before accepting the editorship of The Times under ... Rupert Murdoch.

Posted by cw at 11:31 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

What (bizarre) people are wearing these days

We're not entirely sure that we'd describe "Victorian era garments" pieced together from, ahem, tripe, cow stomach, chicken skin, lamb testicles and - yes, we're pretty sure we can detect a pair of them on one of those Victorian era garments - chicken's feet, as "beautiful".

On the other hand, in a world where people implant RFID chips in their hands so they can effortlessly switch on lights and command car doors to unlock, it doesn't seem all that eccentric. Really. Does it?

Posted by cw at 10:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 17, 2005

The not exactly unlimited "unlimited" iPrimus ADSL plan

Well, when we at iPrimus say that our latest "Big Kahuna" ADSL plan is "unlimited", we actually mean that it's unlimited in the sense that a limit of 500MB is unlimited, as the fine print sort of clearly points out. When you squint. That's 500MB per month, by the way, although, when we say the plan costs $5.95, we mean $5.95 per week. Obviously.

Yes, we know the entire industry is based on monthly rates, and that might be a bit of a trap for the unwary, but if we said the Big Kahuna plan costs $24 per month, it would look like a relatively small kahuna, offering a relatively pointless 200MB extra per month for a price that is little different to what other limited "unlimited" plans cost, and why would we bother advertising THAT, for God's sake?

And yes, it does get a little confusing given that we're also advertising a $2.99 per week plan that, at speeds of 256k and 200MB of downloads is even less unlimited than the Big Kahuna, but the little asterisk after that phrase "No excess download charges" quite clearly doesn't refer to the Big Kahuna plan, otherwise we wouldn't be able to charge people 15c per megabyte after they exceeded the unlimited 500MB. That's perfectly clear, isn't it? OK?

For our next ad, we're thinking of writing the fine print in Hawaiian language. Now that will be a truly huge kahuna.

Posted by cw at 11:31 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Internet Explorer 7 will pick up the tabs

As it so often does, Qantas kindly arranged a delay - this time only 28 minutes - in the flight back from Sydney, so we may be feeling even more uncharitable than usual.

On the subject of which we should probably mention that we popped into the beautiful little St Patrick's Church at The Rocks yesterday, and in mid-genuflect were stung for $4 by a particularly demanding umm, Christian, umm, down on his luck.

Personally the thing we hate most about what is, let's face it, a demeaning experience for both sides, is that these people always insist they need the money for food.

"Wouldn't you prefer a stiff drink?" perhaps, might be a good response, but given they might have a hypodermic in their pocket, it's probably not a good idea. So we kept our trap shut and handed over the cash, then beat ourselves up for being a poor example of Christian charity etc, contemplating the fact that the liturgical calendar for the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time invites us to "Treat everyone well", "Help to do Good", and practise "Magnanimity."

We are therefore NOT, absolutely NOT, going to say anything bad about Microsoft's announcement that Internet Explorer will include tabbed browsing. Except. To point out. It's five years too late.

And we're not going to take offence at this comment from Microsoft's IEBlog:

Some people have asked why we didn’t put tabs in IE sooner. Initially, we had some concerns around complexity and consistency… will it confuse users more than it benefits them? Is it confusing if IE has tabs, but other core parts of the Windows experience, like Windows Media Player or the shell, don’t have tabs?

Although it does, doesn't it, make one feel that they must think we're a mob of idiots?

Posted by cw at 06:09 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

A battle of blogs versus globs

This is scary stuff for most print journalists. They're much more comfortable with the status quo, which Jonathon Miller, in The Guardian Online, describes thus: "remote, unaccountable and impersonal".

While it allows newspapers to control the agenda, says Miller, a former Murdoch journalist, it also makes them vulnerable to competition from blogs and other digital media services that can be "more frank, more responsive and more engaged with their readers".

Miller says that if they are to meet this challenge, newspapers must be prepared to take criticism and suggestions. "A journalist who publishes a story should face the consequences. A reader who wishes to challenge the journalist should have the chance. This is more than letters to the editor. It is a readers' channel."

Bleeding Edge suggests that so far, the number of newspaper journalists who understand this, and are prepared to expose themselves to this form of direct accountability, is tiny. We know of one, for instance, who hosts what he imagines is a blog, but his posts are infrequent, mannered and devoid of spontaneity. And he rigorously censors comments that don't support his point of view. The effect is painfully bogus.

Miller suggests the answer is not so much a blog as a "glob" ...

by which I mean that newspapers must glob a genuinely interactive dimension onto the side of their print products. This involves putting journalists in front of readers. It means hosting credible, entertaining and intelligent discussions that open dimensions to more information and more authority. Newspapers that duck this responsibility are going to be rumbled by their readers.

Posted by cw at 07:36 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 16, 2005

Pedalling Wi-Fi at Starbucks

We're in the Starbucks at Circular Quay - it seemed more welcoming than the other establishments at the lower end of George St - and we've got the laptop on the table, reading our email. A dead give-away, of course. Sure enough, we're quickly approached by a visiting American who's just failed to get any sense out of the counter staff about the "blazing speeds" available through Starbucks' Wi-Fi hot-spots.

The staff can tell you everything about a double-shot mocha and a frappuccino, but they don't know whether there actually is Wi-Fi access in this particular cafe. Our visitor is of course convinced that Bleeding Edge - who is cursed with the sort of earnest expression that makes everyone assume that he's an omniscient being - will of course have the answer. And while we're at it, can we tell him how much it costs? Given he's already been stung between $9 and $20 an hour for Wi-Fi during his visit to the lucky country, he's starting to wonder if the Internet in this country is run on pedal-power. [We suspect he's on to something there.]

As it happens we can't tell him right away, because we're very happily connected via iBurst [SEE BELOW] and although we can't detect a Wi-Fi signal, maybe the iBurst modem has knocked it out. So we ring "a Telstra spokesman", Telstra being the service provider.

A few minutes later he gives us the news. Circular Quay is one of the 36 Australian Starbucks outlets where these blazing speeds are available to anyone who has $5 for the first 15 minutes and 20c per minute thereafter. That works out, let's see now, to $14 an hour. We're pretty sure we can hear the faint sound of someone pedalling away, out the back.

Posted by cw at 04:47 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Today's agenda

We're off to Sydney today to speak to Henry Wilhelm, the world's leading authority on the permanence of photographic prints. That will also give us a chance to test iBurst performance in Sydney. we expect to find it's a good deal better than in Melbourne. The company behind the mobile wireless technology, Personal Broadband Australia, yesterday claimed to be the first
wide-area mobile broadband carrier able to reach about 70 per cent of all Australian businesses. Our experience suggests that's probably a touch optimistic at the minute, but it's likely to improve substantially as its relatively speedy roll-out of base stations continues.

Posted by cw at 10:43 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Let the Farm be with you

We picked this one up from Jason Kottke's del.icio.us Inbox, and we doubt we'll ever be able to walk down a supermarket aisle again without feeling we have to do our little bit to help Obe-wan Canoli and the forces of the Organic Rebellion defeat the Dark Side.

It's a refreshing change from the semi-religious attitudes of some elements of the organic food movement, which takes a little while to load. But it's worth it, we think.

Oh, and there's a link to emdashes, which is an interesting blog dedicated to New Yorker magazine. To which we are also. Dedicated.

AND ... you may perhaps be interested in the trailer for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Posted by cw at 07:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 15, 2005

BitTorrent site battles on against movie moguls

We daresay the British BitTorrent site CDDVDHeaven has had a lot of traffic since other major sites closed down under a legal assault by the Motion Picture Association of America.

In notices on its site, CDDVDHeaven says it has had no dealings with the legal heavies, declares it's doing nothing more than Google or Yahoo, and plans to carry on as it always has, despite allegations that it is endangering the hand-to-mouth existence of all those coolies churning out movies and TV shows.

Posted by cw at 06:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Microsoft trials pay-for-security Windows OneCare service

Microsoft has launched a trial of its new Windows OneCare security by subscription service. The initial trial has been confined to its employees, but it will be extended to the public later in the year. How much it will cost, nobody, as yet, is saying.

"We're designing the service so it will continually update and evolve over time," Ryan Hamlin, Microsoft's general manager of the technology safety group said in a statement.

Once you cough up your cash, the service will automatically patch-up security holes, and boost anti-virus and spyware protection. It will also help maintain the health of a user's PC generally, according to Microsoft.

We've been waiting for the move ever since Microsoft bought Romanian anti-virus house GeCAD Software in 2003, then picked up the Giant spyware vendor, which it re-released as its free anti-spyware beta.

On the positive side, it will almost certainly lead to better security for Windows PCs. But the fact that Microsoft will be making money out of what might be argued are weaknesses in its products seems to us to constitute a serious conflict of interests. And isn't someone who buys an operating system already paying for security?

Posted by cw at 09:57 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 14, 2005

The end of computer civilization as we know it

When it comes to the bold statement, no one in the computer prognostication business is ever quite as bold as Robert X. Cringely.

This week, Bob's convinced that with the release of its new xBox 360, Microsoft has finally begun to compete with its hardware OEMs; Google's Webcache will give it de facto control over ISPs and all Web content, and possibly save you the cost of upgrading your computer; and Apple is about to take over video and movies.

Posted by cw at 06:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Irritating Mac Syndrome

We've probably just picked up a bad dose of Irritable Male Syndrome, but wouldn't it be nice if you could just go into an Applecentre store and find what you want - beyond the very basics - without having to order it, and trek back to pick it up whenever Apple or some other vendor gets around to shipping it?

This morning we wasted two hours doing the rounds of Apple outlets in the city, South Melbourne and South Yarra, with a fruitless excursion to Harris Technology, which has shifted - unfortunately without our knowledge - from Hoddle Street, Abbotsford, to Burwood Road, Hawthorn.

What we were looking for was a FireWire hub. Given that all Macs use FireWire, one would surely have thought that there would be considerable demand for FireWire hubs, and that a decent Apple specialist would have one in stock. Alas, that's not so.

Instead, out of sheer desperation, we bought a Marathon RePorter, which relocates your FireWire 400, FireWire 800, USB 2.0 and audio in and out ports to your desk, where you can plug things in without clambering under your desk.

It wasn't terribly good for our Irritable Male Syndrome to discover that this was going to cost us $156. In the US, they cost $US59, so the local agents are ripping us off something shocking! And the final blow, which elevated our condition to Apoplectic Male Syndrome, was the 3 per cent surcharge for using an American Express card. We'd left both the Visa and the EFTPOS card behind, with the mobile phone. It was not a good start to the day.

We've decided to register the domain name maconoclast.com, which one day we might devote to a blog on the realities of Mac life. We love them, but unlike [SIGH] Mac Man, we're constantly running into mostly minor, irritating, but occasionally quite serious problems with the things.

For instance, although Mac Man absolutely loves the G5 iMac, and over at the New York Times David Pogue is a one-man cheer squad for everything Apple there's a most unsatisfactory silence from Apple on the topic of the faulty backplanes and power supplies, high-pitched noises and video problems which have beset far too many owners of G5 iMacs, dating back to months before the Mac Man review, and continuing still.

We've just ordered a 15-inch PowerBook, so obviously it hasn't turned us off Macs, but really, it's time the mainstream press and magazines like Macworld dug a little more deeply into the less rosy side of Apple technology. Until they do, Apple will continue to flout its obligations to what has to be the most loyal, long-suffering user community in the history of computers.

Posted by cw at 04:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Movie industry attacks BitTorrent sites

The lights are going out all over the Internet, as a series of legal actions by the Motion Picture Association of America closes down the most popular sites used for the downloading of US TV episodes. Horror of horror, the victims include our favourite, BTEFNet.

MPAA president, Dan Glickman, is ever so pleased to report that "Since we began shutting these sites down, the time it takes to download a file on BitTorrent has increased exponentially, which means the experience of downloading copyrighted films and TV shows is not what it used to be. We intend to make it even worse. Protecting the television industry is essential."

Protecting the television industry is only essential, if all you're interested in is the cash, rather than the viewer, who is treated with absolute contempt - particularly in Australia, where the networks routinely delay even the most popular series, and ignore their own schedules.

In other words, forget the opportunity for a new distribution model that would have allowed users a great deal more freedom to watch television without those ever-increasing, appalling commercials. We suspect it might even have made more money for the studios. Looks like the only answer now is PVRs, or to wait for the DVD. We have taken a solemn vow: no commercials! Nohow!

Posted by cw at 11:01 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Firefox still safer than IE ... and some great new tips

By now, no doubt, you will have downloaded version 1.0.4 of Firefox, which includes some all-important patches for new vulnerabilities, and you may perhaps be wondering whether Firefox is as secure as you were led to believe. Well, according to Brian Livingston, it still beats Internet Explorer, hands down.

He quotes research from Scanit NV, an international security firm with headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, and Dubai, United Arab Emirates which analysed the dates when vulnerabilities were first discovered in various browsers, and when they were patched.

The results: IE was wide open to exploits that were in the wild for a total of 200 days in 2004, or 54 per cent of the year. The Firefox browser and its older sibling Mozilla had no periods in 2004 when a security flaw went unpatched before exploits started circulating on the Net. With the latest 1.0.4 upgrade, Firefox has retained its "patch-before-hackers-can-strike" record so far in 2005. According to Secunia, based in Copenhagen, Denmark, there are still 19 unpatched security flaws in IE, the most severe of which is rated "highly critical." Firefox has only four unpatched flaws, all of which are rated "less critical" or "not critical," the lowest severity rating. Opera has none.

And Lifehacker has some great new Firefox shortcuts, including one that opens a link in a new tab, simply by clicking on it with the mouse scroll wheel. And here's a list of all Firefox mouse shortcuts. And Firefox keyboard shortcuts.

Posted by cw at 10:44 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 13, 2005

iPod washing instructions: DON'T!!

Oh yes, we know it's all very amusing. Melbourne teenager sets bed on fire after taking a screwdriver to his iPod. Fire engine is summoned. Paramedics are called out. Boy is treated for minor breathing difficulties. Grown ups go away, shaking their heads. "Dumb kid," etc.

But nothing seems to have been done about what seems to us a distinct and possibly persistent hazard: the mother. This woman put the kid's iPod through a washing machine, for God's sake. Probably on the long cycle, and the poor kid was trying to fix it. Totally tragic. But look, how do women get to be mothers, may we inquire, without learning one of the first rules of laundry? Check the kid's pockets.

It's not like one of those stray tissues that sneaks into the wash while nobody's looking, so it can spread bits of itself over an entire load of stuff. Filthy, disgusting things, those tissues.

An iPod, you know, is something completely different. It isn't exactly as light as a feather. There's a solid weight there, right? And it would impart significant mass to your average article of clothing. What mother wouldn't know, when she picked up the kid's jeans, that she was holding more than denim in her hands? If it had been a condom in her kid's pocket, she'd have picked it up right away. Every time! So in our view it was deliberate iPodicide. She had it in for that iPod. No doubt about it.

We'd pull her in immediately for compulsory re-education. No wonder the kid had breathing difficulties.

Posted by cw at 04:47 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Get your Radio National podcasts

If you took Bleeding Edge's advice and signed up for Radio National's podcasting trial, you will have received an email today alerting you to the fact that it's all going to start at 5pm today. If you didn't sign up, and you'd like to get those podcasts, don't be discouraged, because Bleeding Edge has some confidential information for you.

First, however, what's going to be available at 5pm? There will be four shows: The Science Show, Late Night Live, The Night Air, and a 13-minute segment from today's Life Matters ... Noughts and Crosses, with young adult writer Malorie Blackman.

Next Wednesday another four shows will be added: Background Briefing, one live music item from The Deep End, All In The Mind, and the socio-documentary Street Stories.

You'll be able to get the shows here, whether you signed up or not. [But don't tell anyone we told you!]

In addition to that, you can get a podcast for ABC Local Radio's Sunday Profile via RSS here and Triple J and dig have trials here and here.

Posted by cw at 03:33 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Update your Firefox

It's time to update Firefox again. Version 1.0.4 includes a security patch which takes care of those serious flaws uncovered just last week. While it's true that Firefox is certainly not free from security holes, they seem to be a damned sight faster plugging them than Microsoft.

Posted by cw at 12:34 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

High-tech crime: it's only human

According to The Guardian, most online crime isn't really high-tech at all. Echoing the comments of Kevin Mitnick at Toshiba's recent Mobile xChange forum, and our post on the circumstances of the Sumitomo bank raid in London, the story says there's a basic blueprint for all computer crime: go for the weakest link, keep it simple and exploit people.

"From what we see when we investigate computer crime incidents, around 85% involve an internal lapse of security," says Simon Janes, international operations manager for computer forensics at Ibas, a Norwegian company that specialises in data recovery.

In one case, criminals targeted a group of City secretaries and seduced them. Pillow talk revealed they all used passwords based on favourite tipples. Buying a round of drinks gave the gang access to the computers of a number of City companies.

What hasn't yet started to emerge from all these stories, however, is the fact that police forces haven't - certainly the Victorian Police Force hasn't - been given the manpower to go after many of these criminals, and the banks seem to be dragging their feet giving them the details they need to prosecute.

If you've been ripped off for $150,000 for instance, don't expect the detectives to be able to get around to doing anything for many, many months. If ever.

Posted by cw at 10:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Place your bets on new Palm

It's going to be one of those days. Bleeding Edge is meeting a palmOne heavy this morning, in preparation for which we've signed an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement). That means, after 11.30, we won't be able to breathe a word about what we will have been shown in our little tete-a-tete in the Hyatt. Hmmn. That's a good point. Which Hyatt?

Until then, however, we can speculate. We're prepared to bet that what we're about to see is that Life Drive we've been talking about. Now if we can just keep our hands in our pockets and avoid that damned impulse to buy the thing.

Posted by cw at 09:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 12, 2005

Kind words from Oregon

Gosh, this is nice. Some very kind words from Eugene, Oregon. One of our favourite parts of the world, as it happens, not that we've ever met the author. If we get back there though, we'll be sure to share a coffee with him. And if he visits Melbourne ... well, he's got a very pleasant surprise in store. The best coffee outside Italy. And specifically, Rome's Tazza d'Oro.

Posted by cw at 08:08 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Graeme Samuel: unguided gadgetry

It turns out that ACCC chief Graeme Samuel is as confused about his personal technology as he seems to be about applying penalties that might stop Telstra laughing up its sleeve at the sheer ineffectiveness of measures to stop it crushing the competition.

This is his current gadget collection:

• A BlackBerry, which he uses for phone calls and email, and as a repository of the ACCC's media statements, so he can [SIGH] regurgitate them for journalists.
• A Pocket PC for news updates while on the road, and personal email
• In his Canberra flat, a notebook linked to the ACCC by wireless LAN and VPN
• At home in Melbourne, a Tablet PC to work with documents, using the handwriting feature built into the operating system for notes and amendments

The grand vizar of competition says that he terrorises the ACCC's IT staff by asking them questions such as can he connect his PDA via the virtual private network. We'll just bet he does.

We can only wonder why none of them seems to have told him that the idea of having either a notebook or a Tablet PC is - TA-DA! - to carry them around with you. Otherwise, you end up with stuff you really need on the OTHER computer.

And given he also has a BlackBerry, why on earth would be want a Pocket PC? Wouldn't it be MUCH easier to have a Treo, which would do both jobs somewhat better than either the BlackBerry or the Pocket PC?

We don't want to be cruel. Well, not REALLY cruel, but doesn't it make you wonder, for such a smart guy, whether there's a touch of the simpleton about him? We think we're beginning to understand why those clever chaps at Telstra might be running rings about him.

Posted by cw at 06:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

What's that you say? iPods? Make you deaf?

We know we're going to have to shout to get your attention, but you may just want to turn the volume down long enough to digest this story from the London Evening Standard which warns that iPods could be causing hearing loss and inner ear damage.

London commuters face the greatest risk as they play the machines at potentially damaging volume levels because of the background noise on Tubes and trains, according to Andrew Reid, head of audiology at the Royal United Hospital in Bristol.

Experts say problems like tinnitus and noise-induced hearing loss have reached critical levels due to the popularity of the iPod. Recent research found that 39 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds listen to personal stereos for more than an hour each day, with 13 per cent listening for two hours or more.

The RNID has launched a new website to warn users about the problem. It says users who are worried should investigate buying in-ear headphones that can block out background noise, allowing the volume of players to be turned down. [On that topic, we notice APC Magazine recommends the Etymotic ER-6i, which will set you back a mere $219]

And experts [there seem to be a lot of experts in this story] have called for Apple and other manufacturers to limit the volume of their players, and for users to limit their listening to under an hour a day.

According to one expert [there they go again] reducing the time people listen to their player is key.

"It would obviously be beneficial to reduce the volume and restrict the usage of personal players," said Christine DePlacido of the Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy.

She added: "The difficulty is in persuading people to do this before their hearing is damaged, as many believe hearing loss will not happen to them until they are much older. A lot of the young people I see with tinnitus describe listening to music at high intensities."

Posted by cw at 08:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

First-person shooting your way to the top

Further to yesterday's post on the IQ-boosting power of video games comes this suggestion that video gamers display superior business skills.

Charles Schwab human resources vice president Chip Luman declares that "The people who play games are into technology, can handle more information, can synthesise more complex data, solve operational design problems, lead change and bring organisations through change."

We can't help wondering how many of them might also entertain fantasies about gunning down the competition, but the San Jose Mercury News reports there's a growing wave of research and first-hand reports about children, parents, workers, corporations and even medical patients experiencing notable benefits from computer or video games, and growing efforts "to change the mindset of people who dismiss video games as dangerous or worthless".

"I'm extremely interested in scientific validation of gaming for good," said Dr. James Rosser, director of the Advanced Medical Technology Institute at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City.

Rosser, also the director of minimally invasive surgery, is a gamer who oversaw research indicating that surgeons adept at video games were less likely to make mistakes during certain forms of operations and suturing. The study, which used games that included sniper shooting (Silent Scope) and futuristic racing (Star Wars Racer Revenge), generated major publicity for games as possible teaching tools.

The potential teaching value is a key area of research for linguistics professor James Paul Gee at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

No doubt, having caught up with this news, CEOs all over the world will be insisting that their employees bring their Play Stations and XBoxes to work, so they can work on corporate strategy.

Posted by cw at 07:54 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Bringing Shrek home

There’s a certain irony to the story of how a German shepherd pup got himself a blog and became perhaps Australia’s most technology literate pet, since the whole saga began because someone lacked what most of us these days would regard as basic piece of technology: a mobile phone.

The day Shrek went missing he’d been taken for a walk in Caulfield Park by a friend of the owner. When he let him off the leash, the dog bounded off for some distant games. A mobile phone call would have brought the owner down to the park, but by the time he managed to alert him, Shrek was gone.

The owner took the familiar steps available to everyone in the analogue world. He called on the council, the RSPCA and the lost dogs’ home. When that produced nothing, Shrek’s owner didn’t wait for the phone to ring.
He owns a 15-inch Macintosh PowerBook Aluminium, and he happened to have a copy of Apple’s Pages software, which is a remarkable desktop publishing program. He used it to create a flyer with a colour picture of Shrek, that he’d taken with his Pentax Optio S digital camera.

He quickly found it in iPhoto, which comes free with Macs, and printed it out on his Epson AcuLaser C1100 – one of the new generation of astonishingly cheap colour laser printers.

When the flyer turned up on Bleeding Edge’s doorstep, we were quite impressed. The quality of the image was very good, for a printer that costs around $700, and three weeks after he’d posted them on various light poles around Caulfield and St Kilda, they were still in surprisingly good condition.

He estimates that it would have cost him $100 to have the brochures printed at Office Works. It cost a lot less than that with the AcuLaser. It prints roughly five colour pages per minute, and 25 black and white, and works with both Macs and Windows PCs.

The fact that it has a USB 2.0 link means that Shrek’s owner has been able to hook it into a print server port on his wireless router, so he can sit anywhere in his house with his laptop, and print colour documents using the Mac’s Bonjour technology, which works with an increasing number of printers. When you add your Mac to a network, Mac OS X automatically discovers and connects to the available Bonjour-enabled printers.

The owner also had a .mac account, which meant that he could put up that blog, and divert it to his .mac address. The domain name cost him a little more than we would have paid at our favourite domain registry, namecheap.com, but it was still less than $15.

He used a free blogging program from Apple called iBlog, and a program called ComicLife, which allows you to use your iPhoto library with various templates to create various comic effects. He used it to give Shrek a “voice” in a comic balloon: “I want to go home”.
In fact, by this time, three days after he’d disappeared, Shrek probably did want to go home. There was no way, however, that he could.

The owner had spent the first 48 hours since his disappearance trawling through the list of vets in Victoria on Google. He used the Mac’s in-built Mail program to send out emails embedded with a photo (a small 20k JPG) of Shrek. In some cases he used a fax. The Mac comes with one of those, too. He located a number of online forums and lost dogs sites where you can put a description of your dog and a picture.

He’d been handing out the flyer to dog walkers, dog washers, and pet suppliers, and he’d registered for a service at Sensis’ online Trading Post, which alerted him to any advertisements for German shepherds.

It wasn’t until a week after Shrek’s disappearance that his owner discovered that the dog was still alive. It was the afternoon of April 14. He got a call from the lost dogs home telling him that a man had walked in, and told them he had picked up the dog, which he identified by giving three letters of his ear tattoo. He spoke to the owner, but it quickly became clear he didn’t want to give the dog back.

He took the owner’s phone number, and left a phone number with the lost dog’s home. But he didn’t call back. When the owner tried to retrieve the number, he found that the lost dogs home keeps its records in a red accountant’s book, and nobody could find any notation about Shrek. (The owner intends to offer them some assistance to computerise their system.)

A day or so later, the man who had found Shrek rang back from an unlisted number. The owner had a copy of AquaMinds Software’s Notetaker (aquaminds.com), which runs on a Mac. It’s a personal note and idea organiser, but much like Microsoft’s OneNote, which does a similar job in Windows, it allows you to keep a voice recording with your notes. That which allowed him to record his end of the conversation, and make notes. He made it clear that he wouldn’t be giving the dog back.

Shrek’s owner reported the matter to the police. They told him they could get authorisation to reveal any unlisted telephone calls to his phone. It would take two weeks, however, and they weren’t sure they could justify the expenditure.

Instead he rang his telephone provider, Optus, and spoke to their Law Enforcement Liaison Unit. They told him they didn’t have to wait for another call. They could identify the number of the previous call, provided the police authorised it. It would take less than an hour on a working day, and it was free.

The police rang the number and had a conversation with the man who answered. It turned out he lived an hour out of Melbourne, and had picked Shrek up while passing through St Kilda. A day later, Shrek was reunited to his owner at the police station. The story is recorded on the blog, and Shrek has become the talk of the dog community of Caulfield Park. These days, Shrek doesn’t go anywhere without a mobile phone. He’s a high-tech dog.

Posted by cw at 07:11 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 11, 2005

Landeryou versus Lew et al.

What is it with Crikey and all the other media outlets that have mentioned the recently returned Andrew Landeryou's bare-all blogging efforts? They haven't bothered to mention the blog's address, and it took Bleeding Edge - ever on the alert for a bit of scandal - a terrible lot of trouble to find it. This is a matter of modern etiquette, folks: if you're going to talk about somebody's blog, it's good manners to tell people where to find it.

To save you the aggravation, "The Other Cheek - Andrew Landeryou's Blog of Freedom" is here. And this site also seems to be full of of information on the alleged shenanigans at MUSUi (Melbourne University Student's Union Inc), where the funds are said to have been used in a most peculiar fashion. But not according to Andrew.

We doubt that Solomon Lew is enjoying Andrew's blog, which has promised "to catalogue the complaints against Lew and his vast array of companies and publish them systematically". At the moment it's dealing with certain activities relating to meat pies.

Andrew, by the way, isn't at all impressed with The Age, or the Financial Review's Nicole Lindsay.

We must say that we felt more than a little heart-sick reading this stuff. It makes one fear for the immortal souls of these people. Shrivelled. Hateful. Obsessed with power and money. And terribly, terribly cynical. Melbourne's seamy side.

Posted by cw at 01:28 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

Magic solution for mobile phone bills

The kit that's been produced by the Australian Communications Authority to learn to manage their mobile phone and Internet bills must be awfully powerful.

According to ACA acting chairman Allan Horsley, the kit would "help students understand their rights and responsibilities and manage their personal spending on mobile phones".

What's it consist of? An off button?

Posted by cw at 01:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

No homework until you finish that video game!

We linked to a piece on the sleeper curve recently, which suggested that shows like Desperate Housewives are making us much smarter. But Malcolm Gladwell's piece in New Yorker magazine takes us into even more interesting realms with a review of a book called Everything Bad Is Good for You, by Steven Johnson.

It emerges that one of the reasons you might have such a negative view of video games is that reading books has dulled your brain. And tragically isolated you from complex social relationships.

Playing a video game isn't really about mere entertainment. It is, according to Johnson, an exercise in “constructing the proper hierarchy of tasks and moving through the tasks in the correct sequence ... It’s about finding order and meaning in the world, and making decisions that help create that order.”

Players are required to manage a dizzying array of information and options. The game presents the player with a series of puzzles, and you can’t succeed at the game simply by solving the puzzles one at a time. You have to craft a longer-term strategy, in order to juggle and coördinate competing interests.

In denigrating the video game, Johnson argues, we have confused it with other phenomena in teen-age life, like multitasking — simultaneously e-mailing and listening to music and talking on the telephone and surfing the Internet.

And by the way. Homework might not be such a good idea, after all.

Posted by cw at 09:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

We're jack of commercial radio

In the US, radio seems to be reinventing itself, in a response to incursions from Podcasts and whatever else people entertain themselves with these days.

One of the new formats is called "Jack" - an expanded playlist of 1,200 songs, that cruises the hits of the past four decades in all genres, from pop and R&B to classic rock and Motown. It also means no disc jockeys, no promotions or contests, and fewer commercials. The professionals are saying it will never work, and that what listeners want is to feel a connection with the station, which means "personalities". Personality is one of those words that in commercial radio seems to equate to nastiness, which is one of the reasons we never listen to commercial radio. Although we do make an exception for Rumour File.

We'll no doubt be seeing the same sort of thing here in the not too distant future. In the meantime, Garrison Keilor says what we're missing is "good neighbour radio".

Posted by cw at 08:54 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 10, 2005

So now we're a professional blogger!

It's almost exactly a year since we started this blog, largely as a research project. We never thought we'd last this long, but somehow we got addicted to it. Those of you who have stuck with us have watched us go through some ups and downs, and the occasional piece of agonising over whether we could possibly survive. One of the reasons we kept going was the possibly irrational belief that we'd gained an entirely new circle of friends, people whose company we enjoyed, without ever actually meeting any of them. It's a rapidly growing circle. Every day now, we get close to 2000 individual visitors.

We thought we should bring you up to date with the latest news. We've just agreed to a deal in which we'll be producing a blog, much the same as this, for a major publisher. For money. Not a lot of money, but enough to give us some much-needed breathing space. And because the deal includes a link on that MUCH bigger site to Bleeding Edge - yes, we'll continue with Bleeding Edge - you'll probably find a lot more people will be checking us out.

Thanks to all of you for your support, for your comments and kind words. Thanks for coming back, and giving us enough faith to stick at it. We'll give you the details when the new blog starts, next month.

Posted by cw at 11:14 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

That unique iTunes upgrade/downgrade path

Feeling lucky, punk? Maybe this time, when you upgrade to the latest version of iTunes (4.8) you won't lose features. But knowing Apple, we wouldn't bet on it.

Posted by cw at 11:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Bad-tempered teenager runs amok on the Internet

Investigators believe a 16-year-old Swedish student - one with a particularly bad temper - penetrated thousands of Internet servers in a series of attacks that arose from last year's theft of Cisco's IOS 12.3 Operating System source code.

Calling himself "Stakkato", the intruder exploited an SSH vulnerability to smuggle trojans on to key servers, which allowed him to break into the Cisco system, and mount attacks on several supercomputer laboratories attached to the US TeraGrid.

He showed his nasty side when a geophysics student described him as a "quaint hacker" in a communication with her system admins. Unfortunately, the quaint hacker was monitoring system traffic, and in a fit of anger, erased the student's directory and destroyed a year and a half of her e-mails.

Posted by cw at 05:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Palm announces the mobile manager

Looks like that Life Drive/Tungsten X about which palmOne has maintained a deafening silence is about to become a real product. We'd say it fits right into the new category of mobile computing products the company announced in a press release today - "mobile managers".

Due for release within the next month, the first of these devices is "designed for customers who are eager to take full advantage of the trend toward 'digital everything' – from documents and email to music, images and video, as standalone files or in organised folders".

It looks like palmOne has had the same response to that tiny Hitachi 4GB drive that Nokia will be using in its new Nseries phones. It might turn the heads of people looking at buying an iPod Mini, although it's going to take some solid marketing, and some superior software, and - who knows - white earphones, to get the market's attention.

Posted by cw at 05:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The art of asking technical questions

Try not to take it personally, but according to Eric Steven Raymond, technically superior people might regard you as a loser, and therefore ignore your plight, if you should fail to observe the unfortunately unknown protocols about asking questions.

The first thing to understand is that hackers actually like hard problems and good, thought-provoking questions about them. If we didn't, we wouldn't be here. If you give us an interesting question to chew on we'll be grateful to you; good questions are a stimulus and a gift. Good questions help us develop our understanding, and often reveal problems we might not have noticed or thought about otherwise. Among hackers, “Good question!” is a strong and sincere compliment.

Bad questions - anything that might indicate you're the sort of "luser" who seems to be unwilling to think or to do his homework before asking a question, and thus rob hackers of the opportunity to answer a really good question from a non-luser - might go unanswered. Unless, of course, they're picked up by a good-natured expert user who doesn't hold the god-like status of a hacker.

Well, yes, they're a bit up themselves, but there's some useful information in there. Although it doesn't know about the expert advice that's distributed free on the Bleeding Edge forum.

We got the link from Lifehacker

Posted by cw at 01:30 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Closed minds kill gains from Open Source

The fact that our Minister for Communications and IT, Senator Helen Coonan, wouldn't know a piece of software code from an Egyptian hieroglyph, and in any event is really interested only in selling Telstra for big bucks, means that she has continued to ignore Bleeding Edge's serial entreaties for our policy makers to save the country millions of dollars every year, and kick-start a home-grown industry, by embracing open source software, beyond somewhat token efforts.

No doubt, what with "scoping" T3 and having tiffs with Barnaby Joyce, she doesn't have time to read the Financial Times either, and will thus remain ignorant of the fact that the UK and Europe have started to wake up to the fact that they're being bled dry by companies like Microsoft [PAY WALL].

In the UK, councils are following the lead of their European counterparts and are improving their bottom line by deploying open source alternatives.

Down here, under the "leadership" of clueless dolts like Richard Alston et al. - we're pretty sure they haven't yet worked out how to use a pocket calculator - our bureaucrats and policy makers have been sitting on their hands and fawning over Bill Gates, while UK government agencies have been doing some elementary calculations.

The British Educational Communications and Technology Association, for instance, undertook a three-year trial of open source alternatives in 33 schools and concluded that the IT savings amounted to 44 per cent in primary schools and 24 per cent in secondary schools.

Now Britain has set up an Open Source Academy, aimed at promoting open source and helping authorities overcome their reservations about its use. Is it too much to hope that after a decade of Federal Budgets that ignore the issue, Peter Costello might provide some funding to drive a genuine Open Source initiative? Don't hold your breath.

Posted by cw at 12:36 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Games without girls

The University of Derby is seriously nonplussed that all 106 applicants for its new computer games programming degree are conspicuously non-female. It's therefore wracking its collective brains to find ways of convincing young women that they should devote their lives to developing obsessive compulsive tendencies and a spectacular addiction for pizza and Coke, churning out first-person shooters and car chase sequences.

Quite why the university should want to do this, we're not sure, although it might have something to do with the fact that acting programme leader, lecturer John Sear, has apparently only ever met one woman.

Our advice is this: leave the girls alone, for God's sake. If they've got better things to do with their time - now let's see, what could possibly be more worthwhile than developing Halo III, IV and V etc? - isn't it a good idea not to distract them?

Posted by cw at 11:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Fun with Firefox

Pozz Agency, hired by Firefox to draw some attention away from [yaawn!] Internet Explorer, has done a pretty good job with three Web commercials.

And while you're at it, you might want to clean your screen for free.

Posted by cw at 11:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 09, 2005

Stationery is sadistic

We've admitted our secret love affair with stationery, but paper has its bad points. For all of us who've endured one of those small, but all-too-common humiliating defeats at the hands of ballpoints, Post-It notes and staplers, the opening animation on Microsoft's new OneNote site is priceless.

And just because we like the Filofax and index cards doesn't mean that we don't regard the Tablet PC - on which OneNote runs best - as a sadly under-utilised technology.

Posted by cw at 04:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

How to get that domain name

The Wall St Journal's small business special has some good advice [PAY WALL] on choosing a domain name. Choose something short and memorable, avoid hyphens and potential mis-spellings and don't go venturing down the .biz or .net trail. It also has some hints on liberating the domain name you want from those cybersquatters who make a business out of capturing all the good ones. The journalist managed to haggle the price down from $US3,900 to $US195.

Bleeding Edge has been going through much the same process with a European domain broker. We've so far got the price down from 500 Euros to 250 Euros. The key is patience.

Posted by cw at 12:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The persistence of copyright stupidity

If we're ever going to stop the lunacy of copyright creep (in this country more of a mad dash), we must somehow force the world's legislators to read James Boyle.

James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School and co-founder of the Centre for the Study of the Public Domain, and a contributor to the Financial Times' New Economic Policy Forum.

In a series of articles, Professor Boyle has established that the process of policy-making is "almost evidence-free", and that "new rights are created on the basis of anecdote and scaremongering".

Thomas Macaulay told us that copyright law is a tax on readers for the benefit of writers, a tax that shouldn’t last a day longer than necessary. What do we do? We extend the copyright term repeatedly on both sides of the Atlantic. The US goes from 14 years to the author’s life plus 70 years. We extend protection retrospectively to dead authors, perhaps in the hope they will write from their tombs.
Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 per cent of 20th century culture to benefit 4 per cent. The harm to the public is huge, the benefit to authors, tiny. In any other field, the officials responsible would be fired. Not here.

What are the reasons for this extraordinary ineptitude on the part of the people we pay to protect our interests? Professor Boyle says the suggestion that it's the result of corporate capture of the decision-making process is a "nicely cynical conclusion", but he argues that film and music industries are tiny compared to the consumer electronics industry, which stands to lose from the gains of the former. Yet copyright law dances to the tune of the content industries.

Further, "Open source software is big business. But the international IP bureaucracies seem to view it as godless communism."

He identifies three principal delusions that are responsible for the sloppy thinking of legislators:

• Maximalism: the idea that the more intellectual property rights we create, the more innovation we gain.Industry contract: the abiding belief that companies and industry groups are required to generate wealth-producing IP, ignoring the fact that "the citizen-publishers of cyberspace, the makers of free software, the scientists of distributed data-analysis are all now implicated in the IP world

  In Bleeding Edge's view, this article is required reading for anyone who is interested in, or seeks to influence copyright policy. Let's get it into the hands of those dolts who've sold off our rights and freedoms. And Australia desperately needs resources like this.

  Posted by cw at 10:28 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

  Is Skype a threat?

  We know a lot of highly experienced network guys who use Skype in their business, and nothing we've seen so far suggests any real threat from the VoIP program. That's why we mentioned it favourably on the Jon Faine show. On the other hand, this sort of thing cannot be ignored.

  A lot of security people are nervous about Skype, and Marc Eisenstadt reports an alarmingly large number of attempted simultaneous TCP connections after he'd installed the program, which slowed his PC and crashed his browser. He links to three reports that might be worth casting your eyes over.

  We'd be interested in hearing about your experiences with/concerns about Skype.

  Posted by cw at 09:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

  Blogs a business? Get a grip!

  Either blogs aren't much of a business, as Gawker Media founder Nick Denton tells the New York Times, or Nick thinks they'll be much less of a business if potential competitors think they're umm, a good business.

  In what is as much a fascinating insight into journalists trying to come to grips with blogging, as an investigation of their commercial potential, Nick says he never had a business plan, and established the company solely because he wanted to make his network of about a dozen blogs more attractive to advertisers.

  "It doesn't help with readers," he said. "It's actually a disadvantage, because it looks corporate."

  It's all rather pathetic, Nick suggests:

  The hype comes from unemployed or partially employed marketing professionals and people who never made it as journalists wanting to believe. They want to believe there's going to be this new revolution and their lives are going to be changed.

  Fortunately for Nick, advertisers like Audi, Nike and General Electric apparently share this fallacious belief, which has led them to "vie for eyeballs" on the Gawker site.

  Nick won't 'fess up to the amount he pays his editors - possibly because he fears being drowned in a flood of applications from people who never made it as journalists, or possibly people who made it as journalists but don't get paid terribly much, but according to an interview (which doesn't seem to be up at the moment), they pay $US2500 a month, plus traffic bonuses.

  For that, the editors have to file 12 posts a day. Although that apparently amounts to 700 words a day - not that we've counted them - which isn't a bad per-word rate, they must be early risers, because Nick says it's best to have eight posts up before noon, to keep people coming back. Hmmn. We thought WE were working hard!

  What else do we learn? On the Gawker sites, C.P.M. rates - the cost for every 1,000 times an ad is presumably seen by visitors - can run anywhere from $US4 for a small, button-sized ad to $US50 for exclusive-sponsorship ads, in which an advertiser helps underwrite the debut of a new Gawker site, which is what Sony did with the ever-interesting Lifehacker.

  Another interesting tidbit: he also plans to reintroduce Gawker's ill-fated "blog of blogs," called Kinja. A team of programmers has been working for the past two years to revamp the service, which allows users to explore and scan their favorite blogs in one place. The new version will be ready in about a month.

  Stowe Boyd, president of Corante, a daily online news digest on the technology sector, suggests that there may be something lost when networks like Gawker Media and Weblogs turn blogs into commodities, churned out for a fee, owned by an overlord and underwritten by advertisers.

  "They're pursuing a very clear agenda and they've done very well with that," Mr. Boyd said of Gawker. "But they're just an old media company in new media clothes, and I still maintain that they are missing part of the point."

  The real point, according to Clay Shirky, is that when they publish stories like this, mainstream media overlook the obvious. As Clay says, they'd do better to do the following:

  Forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this - the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.

  Even more to the point, Stowe Boyd warns that articles written by mainstream journalists about blogging are suspect, because they don't take the trouble to understand the medium. And even when traditional media dips its toes into the blogging world, they tend to overlook the fact that the art of blogging is to sustain a conversation with readers. A lot of journalists have difficulty with that.

  Posted by cw at 08:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

  May 07, 2005

  Why wine critics should NEVER taste blind

  The Financial Review's Tim White always tastes his wines blind. We can only imagine that the minute his eyes are closed, someone's been sneaking some foreign substances under his nose. How else to explain his tasting notes for Tahbilk 1860 Vines 1998 Shiraz:

  "Aromas of fruitcake and coal, with some plasticine, and fine oak toast. Strawberry and loganberry conserve flavours and powerful shallac-like tannins." You wouldn't dare to taste something that smelt like that, would you?

  For the latest Grange Hermitage: "Super-deep with bluebeeries blueberries and custard and Grange-like inky crushed ants". Another favourite of Tim's: raw meat. We think he might be suffering from a bad case of cork taint.

  Posted by cw at 07:57 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

  Soppy bulldog break

  It's doggie time, and we interrupt this blogcast for a few self-indulgent oohs and aahs about man's best friend, which in our case, happens to be a British bulldog called Basil.This picture is from the hot shots section of the Herald Sun's That's Life.

  Meet Tiberius, winner of the 26th annual Drake Most Beautiful Bulldog Contest.

  It's amazing how as puppies they have faces like toads that have been sat on, but quickly become creatures of extraordinary beauty. The other thing is that they tend to rest those massive heads on the nearest and dearest arm. A bulldog's head is exceptionally heavy.

  Posted by cw at 12:10 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

  Burning the TV broadcast flag

  Although the actions of George W. Bush, the US legislative branch and their regulatory authorities have indicated otherwise in recent years, it appears that the movie and music recording industries don't run the country after all.

  In a decision [PAY WALL] that restores one's faith in common sense, as much as the institution of democracy, a US federal appellate court yesterday ruled that the Federal Communications Commission had overstepped its authority in requiring manufacturers to modify TV sets to receive a so-called "broadcast flag", which would prevent recordings of digital shows being uploaded to the Internet.

  Ruling in a case brought by the American Library Association - God preserve and protect them - the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said the Federal Communications Commission had no business trying to regulate how consumers can use their TV sets after they receive broadcasts.

  It would have destroyed some of the more interesting potential of BitTorrent, of course, and driven up the price of TV sets and recording devices, placing an unconscionable financial penalty on the majority to appease the greed - sorry we can't think of any other way to describe it - of the well-oiled few. More importantly, however, it would have denied, at a single stroke, the freedom to copy enshrined by US legislation. One of those inalienable rights, as far as we're concerned.

  Too bad the Australian government - which in the area of protecting its citizens from the financial rapacity of big business has a truly contemptible record - hasn't seen fit to allow us the same rights. However much we might despise the policies of George the Belligerent, let us not forget that there are still many things to celebrate about the good old US of A. The ability to download episodes of Desperate Housewives being just a tiny example.

  On the other hand, it looks like the industry's campaign to turn the laws of copyright into a set of communal handcuffs isn't finished yet.

  Posted by cw at 09:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

  May 06, 2005

  Steve Jobs: high [paranoid] achiever

  Given that Steve Jobs ordered every Wiley book out of his retail outlets for daring to publish what so far looks like a pretty tame biography, we think we can say with some degree of certainty, that The Economist won't be taking up any space on the company's shelves, having dubbed him, in a brief editorial "the most successful paranoid in business history", and observed "Mr Jobs is as media-friendly as an apparatchik in Communist China."

  Posted by cw at 10:52 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

  Firefox tweak guide

  If you want to understand Firefox, and learn how to customise it to suit your purposes, you'll probably find this article very handy.

  Posted by cw at 10:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

  Next perhaps, a Bachelor of Blogging

  Universities are encouraging their students to become bloggers, after observing that certain benefits that derive from the practice - testing ideas, keeping track of research, sharing work with peers and developing a writing style - could help students.

  A prime example is the UK's Warwick University, which has attracted 3000 students to its Warwick Blogs project.

  The idea behind it, says John Dale, head of IT services at Warwick, is "self-publishing for all". Students were allowed to create home pages on the university's network, he says, but few bothered because it was too difficult.

  Setting up a Warwick Blog, however is easy. The hope is that once students start blogging, says Dale, it could build a community, foster collaboration and perhaps help with the personal development planning that students and tutors have to work on.

  Dale says he has been most surprised by the way people write "emotionally charged, highly personal entries ... about intimate aspects of their lives, knowing they are publishing to an audience of 20,000 or more, and getting something very positive out of doing so".

  We can't understand it!

  Posted by cw at 04:55 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

  On covering (technology) news

  Developments like the ones we've been writing about today, and things like Flickr and del.icio.us are truly inspiring. They're just the tip of the iceberg, however, and they're comparatively little known, largely because mainstream media isn't doing its job of keeping up with technology.

  As Janice Fraser observed recently, hypertext has been changing the way we think about things, and there are some very exciting developments out there.

  More people ought to be talking about these things, because they are going to affect the way we do things, and - putting on our mercenary hat - they represent new business opportunities.

  Alas, the media's attention still seems to be focused on blogging, and relatively minor phenomena like Podcasting. They're interesting yes, but in many ways they're old hat.

  We journalists really need to stop going for the easy stories, and do a little more digging.

  Coincidentally, Tim O'Reilly, whose publishing house has arguably the single most informative site on the Web, posted a blog entry recently that was inspired by a conversation he had with Jason Fried, of 37Signals, the company behind Backpack.
  

  He [Jason] believes that contrary to the normal expectation that applications are built on top of frameworks, applications should always be designed "from the outside in." That is, at 37signals, they try to design the usability and function of the application first, and that drives the implementation. And if they can then extract a re-usable framework, all the better.

  The example he uses is Basecamp, which wasn't so much built on top of Ruby on Rails, as providing the birth canal for it. Never heard of Ruby on Rails? That's our point. You should have. At least Spin Technology has. Among other things, it's provoked our interest in a new web logging application called Typo, which you can find more about here.

  We found Tim's entry fascinating for another reason. Jason likens his approach to the design pattern for landscape architecture, codified by Christopher Alexander in A Pattern Language,
  which has been sitting on our bookshelves for years. It's a wonderful little book.

  What it refers to is the concept of "desire lines". Architects who try to dictate where the public will walk generally end up being thwarted by the people who use public spaces. The best way to lay out paths is to put in lawn and then see where people actually walk, and add paving only later.

  Larry Wall cites this philosophy as a key driver in the design of Perl.

  Tim asks the question: "Are designers the new heroes of the computer industry?" In some ways, the post suggests that if they are, users may well be equally heroic.

  Posted by cw at 12:06 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

  Managing your social calendar on the Web

  What with that gratuitously critical streak we seem to have developed recently, Bleeding Edge doesn't expect to be getting too many social invitations in future. But we know that the rest of you are probably driven frantic with demands to spread your light on various gatherings.

  You need to find a way to manage these appearances, and you'll therefore probably be delighted to discover upcoming.org, another site in the same vein as Backpack.

  According to the developer, Upcoming.org is a "collaborative event calendar", completely driven by people like you. Enter in the events you're attending, comment on events entered by others, and syndicate event listings to your own weblog. As Upcoming.org learns more about the events you enjoy, it will suggest new events you never would have heard about."

  Posted by cw at 11:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

  Mac Mini keyboard fix

  While we're on the subject of keyboards, what with the fact that a lot of Mac Mini users might be interesting in mapping their PC keyboards to duplicate all those special Apple keys, uControl could be a godsend.

  Even if you're a Windows or Linux user, you might be interested in uControl, on account of the fact that it has

  evolved into a fairly sophisticated means of not only remapping modifier keys, but providing a virtual scroll wheel for track pad users, providing real function keys for laptop users, swapping the right and left mouse button for left handed users, and even providing a one handed typing feature for those with disabilities.

  Posted by cw at 11:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

  Fixing that F-ing Microsoft keyboard F-lock

  Those experts of ours over in the Bleeding Edge forum (see that link on the main menu) have yet again come up with an answer to a problem raised on the Jon Faine computer segment.

  We had a caller who was intensely irritated by the F-lock setting on his Microsoft keyboard. The key toggles the function keys between their normal operation or a new "enhanced" operation. Alas - why is this always so? - the default creates a hassle for most people, who have come to expect that when they push a function key, it will act like function keys have always acted since they were invented way back in Biblical days.

  Fortunately, our forum experts have tracked down a registry patch from Microsoft MVP Jason Tsang, which changes the default setting. There's versions for the various Microsoft keyboard models, and some other fixes you might be interested in.

  Posted by cw at 10:58 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

  Web tools to boost your efficiency

  Memo to self: must spend more time playing with Backpack and JotSpot. These Web-based organising tools offer a good deal of potential for keeping track of ideas and events and organising projects.

  They're a little different JotSpot is a "shared, invitation-only collaborative Web site" (a.k.a. wiki) which is still in beta, but looks perfect for collaborative projects.

  Backpack seems more suited to the role of personal organiser, and there's a big brother, Basecamp, for larger businesses. We've just signed up for the limited free version of Backpack, and we're checking out examples of ways we might use it to improve our efficiency. We'll get around to JotSpot later.

  In the past we've used a visual thinking tool called Inspiration to plan projects. It's a great tool for brainstorming and planning workflows and org. charts etc. Backpack has different, and in many ways more powerful capabilities. Even from the tiny amount of tinkering we've been doing with it, we can see it has great potential for getting Bleeding Edge a little more organised.

  The way Backpack works is that you build Web pages on the Backpack site, using their simple interface. You can store entries as to do lists, notes, files, links and images, and share them. Because they're on the Web, you can access them from anywhere.

  Clearly the people who designed it are lateral thinkers. You don't purchase a copy of Backpack. You sign up for the service.

  It costs nothing to get five pages and 10 reminders - one of the most powerful features of Backpack - but if you're crazy/busy, like most of us, and you learn about the ways other people use it, you're likely to discover all sorts of ways of using its features, which might lead you to signing up for the different levels: $5/month (20 pages, 40 MB disk space for images/files, 100 reminders); $9/month (100 pages, 100 MB disk space for images/files, 200 reminders); or $19/month (500 pages, 250 MB disk space for images/files, 300 reminders.

  Backpack can become even more powerful if you team it up with a smart phone. Our Treo 650 is rapidly becoming indispensable, so we were particularly interested in Marc Hedlund's Backpack application.

  He's capitalised on the fact that Backpack will send you the contents of one of your pages as an email. The Treo 650, of course - and for that matter the Treo 600 - is a great mobile email tool which outstrips the BlackBerry in many key areas. This is how Marc links the two:

  Since I use my Treo 650 as a laptop wherever I go, Backpack has become the equivalent of a source control system for my writing. Before I leave in the morning, I send myself the content of my pages. While I'm on the subway or waiting in a movie line, I edit the text and give it a new title ("CodeZoo 2.0 rev. 4") and then send it right back to Backpack. At the end of the day I delete the stale versions.

  It's early days yet, but we'll report back as we prepare a column. If you decide to check either of these programs out for yourself, let us know what you think of them.

  Posted by cw at 08:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

  May 05, 2005

  The Bleeding Edge infectious pronoun problem

  The fact that [ahem] "we" tend to refer to ourselves in the first person plural has been variously described as "pompous", "old-fashioned" and just downright "irritating". It's therefore quite hilarious to discover that Chris Curnow, who's celebrating the first birthday of his blog, has got so used to our style that he's been tending to fall naturally into using "we" as well. But he's just a bit ambivalent:

  I guess you notice we can't make up our mind whether we are "we" or "I". I've been reading Bleeding Edge too much and I just fall into the habit. I really like "we" but it feels like I am just stealing Bleeding Edge's style.

  Wouldn't bother us a bit. In fact, we'd be flattered. More than that, we'd like to see huge numbers of blogs using the same style, if only because it would ruin Tony Goodson's day. Almost as much as having to listen to "over-researched" podcasts.

  Posted by cw at 05:32 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

  How to use BitTorrent

  Down here in the trenches, as the battle between technology and the legalities of copyright rages over our heads, Bleeding Edge has learnt not to ask too many questions.

  When a friend told us that he couldn’t get the BitTorrent file-downloading system to work, we decided it was better not to know the details. It was, however, Tuesday, and we know that on Monday nights he usually records Desperate Housewives, so we had our suspicions. It’s awfully easy to record the wrong program by mistake, and if you’ve been watching an entire series, one might be reduced to desperate measures to keep up with the dramatic events.

  Over in the US, on the servers that feed the BitTorrent community, there are 19 episodes of Desperate Housewives, plus one special, all of them in wide-screen digital format without ads. What with all the episodes of other shows yet to air over here, we imagine that whatever the legal situation is about downloading free-to-air TV from other countries, a lot of people have already worked out how to make BitTorrent work, or are making similar telephone calls to people like us.

  In our friend’s case, he was using a BitTorrent client called Azureus. The standard BitTorrent client is written in the highly flexible Pyton language. Azureus is written in Java, which can be slower than Python, but Azureus works on both Windows and Mac OS X, and it’s much better looking, more configurable and provides a lot more information and potential for tweaking than most of its competitors.

  Bleeding Edge, however, prefers to use the Windows client called simply BitTorrent, which is now at version 4.01. It’s fast and very simple to set up, and we particularly like the slider feature that allows you quickly to change the amount of bandwidth you devote to uploading, while downloading a file.

  That’s the first thing the BitTorrent user has to come to terms with. Unlike other peer-to-peer programs, BitTorrent works on the principle of sharing. You have to devote some of your upload capacity to give the file to others while you’re downloading it. In order to get the best out of these “swarming downloads”, you have to finely balance your uploads to maximise the speed at which you get the file. We generally set it at between 7 and 8k.

  The other thing is that BitTorrent isn’t as nicely “wrapped” as other peer-to-peer programs, so it’s not easy to use, or to find files. Simply identifying a reliable source of torrents can be difficult. You may have to trawl though on-line forums or watch IRC channels just to find the torrent you’re looking for. The ones you come up with could be dead, or painfully slow.

  If you’ve got a firewall – and we sincerely hope you do – you’ve also got to set it up to allow BitTorrent to accept incoming connections from the Internet. If you have a router, you have to set up port forwarding. If you run a software firewall like Zone Alarms or Sygate, you will have to open the ports used by BitTorrent.
  In the case of Azureus, the default is 6881. BitTorrent seems to require 6881 – 6889. In practice, however, some ISPs throttle back those ports, so it might be wiser to set it to something like 4881 etc.

  Most BitTorrent clients seem to allow you to set the exact IP address you’re using. If you don’t have a static connection, you can find out what that address is here.

  Most peer-to-peer programs centre around a search program that helps you find what you are looking for. Then you tend to download off a small group of clients. BitTorrent has no built in search engine - it simply deals with the mechanics of downloading. Before you can even start, you need to find a .torrent file. They’re very small, and they contain information about the file you want to download and the location of a “tracker” that is looking after the torrent.

  A couple of good sources are here and http://www.btefnet.net.

  The tracker is the only centralised part of BitTorrent. It doesn’t hold any files. It merely tracks who is interested in them, and sends Bit Torrent a random list of peers that are also downloading the same file. BitTorrent then negotiates with the peers what to download.

  Centralised downloading systems tend to fall over as the load increases. The genius of the BitTorrent architecture is that the more popular a file is, the faster everything goes, because there are more peers to share the load.

  Bittorrent works by slicing the file up in to little pieces so a 300
  MB AVI file may get dived into 600 512Kb pieces.

  BitTorrent will try to download a piece at a time from as many peers at it can. By default, it goes for the rarest piece first, making it more likely you’ll get the entire file in the shortest possible time. The client may show a linear progress bar, but in reality you download the files in almost random fragments.

  BitTorrent is used to download many things that don’t breach copyright. Many Linux distributions are available as torrents and there are sites like filerush.com that use BitTorrent to distribute game demos and trailer videos. We’re almost sure that’s what our friend was doing.

  Posted by cw at 11:48 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

  May 04, 2005

  Stopping the boss from reading your email

  If you live in NSW, your boss will no longer be able to snoop on your private email, spy on you with a video camera, or fit you up with a tracking device - not without risking criminal charges.

  The state's Workplace Surveillance Bill 2005, introduced today, will make it a criminal offence to take part in any form of covert surveillance of an employee, unless an employer can prove he had reasonable suspicion of wrong-doing.

  "While some employers argue that this is necessary to protect their legitimate interests, employees expect that their private correspondence, like their private telephone calls or private conversations, should never be the subject of secret monitoring," NSW Attorney General Bob Debus said in a statement today.

  This sort of protection should be available nationally, in our opinion. And then we need legislation to make it a criminal offence for anyone at your ISP to snoop on your email. Some of the higher profile members of Melb PC, for instance, suspect that their email may have been exposed to prying eyes.

  Posted by cw at 03:16 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

  Banks abandon online fraud victims

  If you happen to become a victim of a phishing exploit, don't expect that your bank will stand by you. That's the devastating point [somewhat buried] of this story.

  One in 20 UK internet users say they have lost money through online scams, according to a survey by AOL, and of the 1% who had lost money through phishing, 53% were not compensated by their banks. A further 11% say they are still waiting for compensation.

  The odds don't look good, do they? And governments seem to be happy to ignore the fact that - as we've said several times - personal computers are simply not secure enough for online banking, and the banks are making ever-increasing profits, while passing the buck to their customers.

  And guess what? The CBA plans to charge its customers a lot more for Internet banking. According to the Australian Consumers Association, it's "cynical". An accurate description, in more ways than one.

  Posted by cw at 02:21 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

  Steve Jobs versus Disney versus free speech

  Steve Jobs must have his reasons for banning all those books over the publication of iCon: Steve Jobs, the Greatest Second Act in the History of Business, but it doesn't emerge from this excerpt.

  Given that it details Jobs' humiliating defeat of former Disney CEO, Michael Eisner, who seems to have some workplace relations problems, over the terms of their arrangement with Pixar, you'd have thought it would be Disney that would want to ban it. The excerpt isn't breaking any new ground, by the way. And this version was less complimentary to Jobs.

  Eisner, by the way, clearly isn't anywhere near as good a critic as Bleeding Edge. He thought Nemo was going to be a disaster. As we've indicated previously, we like fish.

  Posted by cw at 01:47 PM | Comments (0)

  The question of Tiger and Spotlight versus Info Select

  We're thinking of registering the domain name gratuitouscritic.com, because we seem to be going through some sort of phase where we can't resist giving our forthright views on other people's creative efforts. We hope we get over this pretty soon, because honestly, it's likely to seriously interfere with our social calendar.

  Take our friend Jason Romney for instance. He's just put up a new video show evaluating the Mac's new Tiger OS. And Jason. We've just got to say this. Can you stop answering your own questions please? Hmmn?

  This is the deal with interviews, see. One person asks the questions, and the other guy answers them. If the interviewer answers them, the guy being interviewed starts to wonder what the hell he's there for, and might even fall asleep, so the interviewer will have to prod him, when he finally gets finished answering his own question. It doesn't look good.

  Otherwise. It's an interesting interview. Jason gets into a comparison between Tiger's spotlight feature and Info Select, which runs on Windows. That's the burning issue which might determine whether we really do go out and buy that 15-inch PowerBook we've been lusting over, or stick with the Toshiba. We're not sure if either the interviewer or the subject answered it. Possibly it got overlooked in the demarcation dispute that erupted when Jason and his guest started disagreeing on who had the right answer.

  Posted by cw at 01:20 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

  Podcasting: crap radio plus commercials

  Now let's see if we've got this straight: you don't need to put podcasts on radio in order to turn them into crap radio. All you have to do is insert commercials into the podcasts.

  According to the media release from G'day World, "The world’s first and largest commercial podcasting network today announced its first commercial sponsor." The sponsor is LearnDog - "a new Australian company working to help teenagers make better life choices".

  We can't tell you how worthy LearnDog is, because unfortunately the link on the page doesn't work, and even the proper one doesn't tell you anything, because their blog link doesn't work either, and the other link requires a log-in.

  The details of the deal weren't announced, but the press release says Podcast Network, run by Mick Stanic and Cameron Reilly, will place LearnDog’s audio advertisements in 10 of their highest ranking shows over the next week. They'll also display their logo and links to their site in their show blogs.”

  We wonder if any of those fierce defenders of the podcasting faith who've been providing so much fun with their comments would care to give us their take on this development? To us it looks like commercial radio, except you pay to download the stuff, and it takes up space on your iPod, or hard disk. Or have we missed something?

  We must say that Cameron Reilly has a great eye for commercial opportunity, which is what you'd expect from someone who's been through the Microsoft sausage factory.

  This is his response to the podcasting versus radio issue, and our criticism of the quality of G'day World:

  Charles is just trying to increase his googlerank and traffic by talking about us a lot. He’s riding on our coat tails.

  It's hard to get through to the lad. Look, Cameron, we're writing about you because we think G'day World is crap! OK? We've made it our business to tell you this, because apparently no one else will.

  Robert Scoble and those other experts who - according to the G'day world promos - can't think of anything better to do than spend an hour or so listening to crap, either have no critical perspective, or are just too kind to break the news. Or haven't really ever listened.

  It turns out we've got much the same attitude to blogging as Scoble, who's building a book on business blogging online. They've just posted the fourth chapter. According to Scoble:

  If you want a good blog, you need to be authoritative and passionate.

  That's Bleding Edge. Authoritative and passionate. Also broke. But all that will undoubtedly change when we finally get around to putting up one of our podcasts on C&M's spot.

  You may remember Cameron telling us all we had to do was ask, and we responded thus:

  Jee-zus! Ma-ate! Thanks for the bloody ripper invitation to have a yack on the show! I'll be rabbiting away with yerz for sure, no kidding, faster than a rat up a drainpipe. Just as soon as I perfect my Chips Rafferty impressions. What a bonzer mob of blokes you are. Fair dinkum. Love yerz all.

  We think we've got it pretty well perfected now. Can't wait to start rolling in the big bucks!

  Posted by cw at 10:42 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

  May 03, 2005

  Your Turn washes out lazy males

  Bleeding Edge suggests that you might like to avoid the rush and get yourself a comfortable, efficient personal gas mask, because there are going to be an awful lot of smelly people around real soon now, what with the invention of the Your Turn w***ing machine.

  The Spanish-designed device uses fingerprint recognition technology to prevent the same person using it twice in a row. Somewhat ironically, they're advertising it as a Father's Day gift.

  Its creator, Pepe Torres - who we imagine will quickly be running short of mates to have a sherry with - proclaims

  I thought it would be good to finish with macho man from the ice age who doesn't do anything around the house except drink beers.

  He's perfectly frank about it. "I wanted to come up with an invention to enable men to do more around the home." Hang on though. Isn't it really about preventing women from doing more around the home?

  The whole thing could end pretty badly, we suspect. Torres seems to have overlooked the fact that many men are afraid of this technology, and for very good reasons. Anything that chews up that many socks has to be EXTREMELY hazardous, doesn't it?

  How many women, fed up with having no clean clothes, are going to have to hack off their significant other's finger in order to get the laundry done? We suspect Quentin Tarantino might have a hand in this.

  Posted by cw at 10:41 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

  Adam Curry and the rules of podcasting

  It turns out - Mea maxima culpa - I/we was/were completely wrong about podcasting and radio.

  The latest news is that from May 13, over in the crucible of modern entertainment, subscribers to Sirius Radio will be able to listen to a four-hour show in which former MTV personality and Podcast pioneer Adam Currie Curry will present "material from some of the thousands of amateur shows produced in basements, living rooms and dormitories". They will actually pay money for it.

  Somehow, I/we just know that G'day World will find a place there, and that an Australian radio network will be hiring [SIGH!] Cameron Reilly and Mick Stanic to do precisely the same thing over here.

  Bleeding Edge has completely misunderstood the entire phenomenon, you see - but what else could you expect from a Perfectionist. Tall. Poppy. Conventional. Pompous blog like this? [We're ever so grateful to one of those G'day World fans for the detailed character analysis] In this particular area, we're not on the Bleeding Edge at all. We're Past It.

  According to the New York Times:

  Unscripted podcasts are an audio version of television reality shows for the airwaves. The unpolished and recreational feel of podcasts often draws comparisons to the Saturday Night Live skit "Wayne's World." The serendipity of the shows appeals to listeners looking for an alternative to canned commercial radio.

  Bleeding Edge thought there already was an alternative to canned commercial radio. The ABC, for instance, and PBS. Or Not Listening to Anything At All. Which is probably why we completely overlooked the fact that Adam Curry has apparently snuck in a significant rule governing all podcasts: "It has to be the completely unedited voice. There's a whole universe of people who make music but there is no disc jockey putting it out there."

  Mr. Curry's show on Sirius will include advertising, but "the company expects the show to have a free-form feel, much like the podcasts, rather than the more rigid format of mainstream radio".

  It's likely that Mr Curry has developed a tool that will measure every performance to make sure that nothing has been cut, so that the entire stream of podcast consciousness will flow directly into the ears of the audience, without the arbitrary constraints of grammar or old-fashioned dictates of pertinence.

  The multiple personalities that reside at the Bleeding Edge cave can't help but wonder whether it really is the Wayne's World zeitgeist that influences podcasting, so much as that of Big Brother, in which the "reality" is commercially-motivated pretence.

  Soon, no doubt, we'll have people demanding the same careful lack of attention to detail in theatre and literature and newspapers, and of course, blogging. It's perfectionism you see. Pompous, tall poppy conventional perfectionism.

  But isn't it a teensy bit ironic that having established something as an alternative to radio, so many of them should be clamouring to put their shows ... On ... Radio?

  Posted by cw at 08:59 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

  May 02, 2005

  Pre-populate that iPod

  Here's an interesting development. It would cost $US5000 to fill the latest iPod with downloaded music, which creates a significant potential market. The Guardian writes about a "concierge service" called Jayci that provides "pre-populated" iPods at $US1.29 per track, or customises it with a package of 100 tracks in some preferred style (blues, classical etc) for $119. Which is certainly not cheap.

  On eBay, pre-owned and pre-populated iPods are beginning to appear, and the story suggests there could be a lot more of that - wink, wink - going on. Of course, with that new family and entertainment bill we mentioned, that would probably be worth life imprisonment.

  When we tried the Jayci link it didn't work, and we couldn't find a mention of it anywhere. Maybe they're in a police interrogation room.

  Posted by cw at 09:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

  MP3 killer worm

  Who else but a toad could truly appreciate the mindless stupidity of releasing a worm that, under the self-righteous guise of attacking music piracy, deletes all MP3 music files, disables various system utilities, and wipes .COM programs on the infected PC?

  Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for anti-virus firm Sophos, puts it quite well:

  "The internet is swamped with people pirating movies and music, costing the entertainment industry millions each year. The Nopir-B worm targets people it believes may be involved in piracy, but fails to discriminate between the true criminals and those who may have MP3 files they have created themselves. Whichever side of the fence you come down on in regards to internet privacy piracy, there's no debate about the criminal nature of this worm - designed to inflict malicious damage on people's Windows computers.

  Posted by cw at 10:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

  May 01, 2005

  See! We told you it was tough keeping up!

  Gulp! We'd hate to think it could end like this:

  Childress H. Wanamaker, 54, an account executive at a New York-based new media company, died of starvation according to the West Nyack coroner's office. Wanamaker's emaciated body was found by Loraine, his wife of 26 years, who told MediaPost she had been bringing her husband meals on plastic trays for weeks, but that he never took the time to eat them.

  "He was glued to his computer 24/7," she said tearfully. "He was so afraid he was going to miss an opportunity to contribute a comment or start a discussion, that he just stopped eating." She added that Wanamaker's last words were "OK Picard, stick that in your pipe and smoke it..."

  It's humour. We're sure. Isn't it?

  Posted by cw at 08:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

  G'day F-ing World: A critical perspective

  Oh dear. We HAVE stirred up a hornet's nest over at G'day World. There are four angry commenters incensed that we've poked our toad-like nose into their affairs, and in one case demanding to know why we didn't detail our criticisms.

  If they'd read our comments, rather than Cameron Reilly's clip, they might have understood that the point we were making was that a lot of Podcasts - and G'day World is definitely one of them, we don't resile from that for a minute - simply don't have sufficient quality to be broadcast on public radio.

  They're OK on the Internet, where the sheer diversity of the audience means you'll always find people, even a lot of people, who are prepared to listen to - indeed to pay for - practically anything. That why spam is so profitable.

  As for G'day World. Some of the reasons we think this, for instance, is crap RADIO, repeat, radio ...

  It tries to cash in on the worst cliches of the dinkum Australian of the "bloody good mate, we love you mate" variety, and the occasional f-word. We've spoken to both Cameron and Mick. They're intelligent, even sophisticated men. We don't recall either of them bunging on the sort of accents and attitudes that they display on the show, although we're prepared to be convinced that maybe they do talk that way all the time. But it's one thing to behave like that in a private conversation. Quite another to do it on radio.

  Every show we've heard has been poorly researched, and full of interminable raves - the spoken voice version of karaoke.

  In this show, the interviewers clearly don't have a clue about half of the products they're asking questions about, and they're winging it, so what the listener gets is the company spiel, with scarcely a single penetrating question. If you've got the time to listen to it, fair enough, but the opportunity cost is pretty steep, it seems to us.

  Even for the Internet, G'day World is technically inept. They're constantly apologising for something or other dropping out. The interviewers are the so-called stars, and they frequently emphasise that by wrenching the microphone away from the guests, leaving them muttering in the background. There's no editing, it seems, or if there is any, it's self-indulgent. There might be 15 minutes of vaguely useful information in this episode. Let's be generous and say half an hour. Is any of it radio quality? I'd say probably not.

  Not that they give a stuff - sorry, we must have picked up a bit of attitude from the show - because they're far too busy with their karaoke, but it probably turns a lot of people off podcasting, which is a pity, because there are some good shows out there. IT Conversations, for instance, is consistently VERY good. And the thing is, both Cameron and Mick have the ability to do better. A lot better. In our opinion, they should be setting an example, if they want to be a responsible aggregator.

  There's a lot of good amateur radio available on the Internet, and wonderful resources for learning how to do it. And that site looks at the sort of equipment you might use to produce it.

  Posted by cw at 06:13 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

  Ever been kissed by a toad? Didn't think so.

  If we were the sort of "jurnalist" who lay about sunbathing in brief red bathing trunks and playing the accordion, we too could probably have become an international man of love and won Web fame.

  But no, this sort of thing doesn't happen to a site run by a toad. Perhaps we should get somebody to steal the site. That' after all, is how Turkish bachelor Mahir Cagri achieved sufficient notoriety to attract 50,000 visits per minute, and sufficient fame to launch a range of merchandise.

  Go ahead. Somebody. Rip us off! Please! And send us some red bathing trunks. XLT (Xtra Large Toad) size. But brief.

  Posted by cw at 04:55 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack