This is a seasonal update on an old post here http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/04/14/happy-easter/ which was all about Easter being good. Sadly, in the interest of balance, it has to be matched by a post that tells you Christmas is rubbish.

This is obviously not true if you are under 12. The judgement can go either way for the next 6 years or so. After that, it is basically a rubbish holiday, made bearable only by watching under 12 year-olds enjoy it.

(And that enjoyment is marred when you realise that the most innocent children can be successfully turned into grasping consumer monsters, after you’ve spent a few years teaching them that greed is good and will be annually rewarded.)

It’s not even on the date of the winter solstice. It’s a few days afterward, so Christmas is sneakily trying to pretend it’s not really a pagan midwinter festival. Come on. This just shows that priests couldn’t even be bothered to work out the date of the midwinter solstice properly. (Hint to the Christian hierarchy, megalithic circles may be the way to solve this problem. It’s apparently worked before.)

This is a time of year when you have to wake up in the dark and come home from work in the dark. By definition, this is extremely depressing. Imagine what it’s like at the North Pole. There must be about ten minutes of daylight for those poor captive elves who have to make and pack all this consumer trash. Does anyone care about them?

It’s the middle of the winter. I like the idea of a big feast to take your mind of that. Why did we turn this natural response into a festival the run-up to which is so stressful that we need a fortnight to wind down?

Who thought we’d feel better about the cold and damp and darkness if we started spending all our money? Even getting into debt, so we can give away our money – having first transmuted it into novelty slipper sock and “designer” label deodorant form – mainly to people who don’t need it. Or, at least, who wouldn’t need it if they weren’t also becoming indebted in the process of giving away all theiir money. This seems to me to be a definite misunderstanding of the whole rich man and eye of the needle thing.

Any holiday from work is normally welcome. Why do the work holidays you get at Christmas come when you don’t need them? Boxing Day? Why? Even more redundant are the free days between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve. There is nothing to do in this week except regret how much you’ve spent/eaten/drunk in the week before Christmas – when you would have actually welcomed a holiday so you could shop/drink/cook and eat the odd foods that are required at Christmas. (If these ritual food items are so good, why doesn’t anyone eat them at any other time?). Bah humbug, etc.

There are websites celebrating naff Christmas things. http://www.uglychristmaslights.com/ has photos of decorations that are not in fact particularly ugly (though the site is) but which laugh in the face of all those adverts that tell us not to leave our TVs on standby because of global warming. There are obviously people who would choose to be reincarnated as Blackpool, if they were Buddhists.

There are some Christmas things on http://www.worldofkitsch.com/features/kitschmas2003/index.html, although I thought I had invented the concept of Kitschmas, so I feel a bit cheated by this site’s very existence. I am baffled by “Or, you can discuss kitschmas in the chat room and messageboard. “. Are there really people who want to discuss naff Christmas things with other people? Well, if there are, this is clearly the place for it.

Oh blast, I want to go there now, just to see what they talk about. And sneer, of course, as I am doing here …… There is something intriguingingly circular about going to a web forum just to sneer at people who are meeting just to sneer at naff things. Ha, start sneering at me now and we will have achieved escape velocity, thus opening up a wormhole to an alternative sneer-powered universe. Where you can power a TV on standby by merely thinking of the sort of music they have listed in their Kitschest music quiz. (Beegees, Abba, Village People, and Odyssey, if you are interested. Who are Odyssey? No, on second thoughts, its better not to know.)

http://www.worldofkitsch.com/features/kitschmas2003/treegame.html lets you decorate a virtual tree to excess. (Don’t bother, except in Internet Explorer. It will just sit there if you try it in Firefox)

I know this blog tends to “poke fun” at technorati a lot, but right now it deserves it.

After being told that Technorati was playing up (see http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/11/28/technorati-tech-support-needed/) I thought I would check it out myself and see what it produced.

Visiting the links about this blog page (obviously where my main interest lies 🙂 ), I thought I would check out what Technorati thought about other blogs which linked here and what it described the site’s profile as.

Trying the standard search which looks at blogs linking to a site (http://www.technorati.com/ search /http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog?cc=xrw7n395cr) was a total non-starter on IE. I tried this link (by clicking the link and by pasting it into the URL bar) several times, almost every time I got an odd windows error message saying “Operation Aborted” and IE returned to the about:blank page it likes so much. One time I got through, I ended up with a page which said “Sorry, no blogs link here.” Strange as at the top of the page it said “14 links from 6 blogs.”

Curiousity got to me and I checked the URL in Firefox. This was even stranger in some respects. I had a few page not founds then all of a sudden a hit! The page appeared but without the “Sorry, no blogs link here” malarky. Firefox claimed that while the site still had “14 links from 6 blogs” there were actually 19 links (Sorted by freshness) and then procedes to show 18.

Amazing.

I tried the “» View my profile” link but after ten attempts (five each IE 7 and FF2.0) which only got operation aborted or blank pages, I gave up. I don’t have that much patience even looking for pure hubris.

Well, if this is the face of Web 2.0, I cant wait for the bubble to burst.

My PC is often eccentric and Internet Explorer sometimes seems to have its own agenda, but the way Technorati has been behaving in the past few days defies even my capacity for denial.

I have managed to get it to behave normally about one in twenty tries. Almost all of the rest of the time it just dies on any search, giving the sort of useless error messages that might as well say “It’s broken. I have no idea either, sorry.” A few times, it manfully tried to give me search results but couldn’t sustain the effort beyond the first page and belatedly did the dying thing again.

Long after it has come into existence and disappeared, I read in MD that there the first online bodybuilding competition had been held. (Won by a lad in a weird blonde wig.)

Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t the existence of Photoshop mean that anyone could win one of these competitions?

This blog complained in January 2006 about how bad search engines are. This post will raise that one by about a grand. If anything, they seem to be getting worse.

I had offered to try to find someone’s email address online. Assuming the person was too canny to put their real name (to avoid spam) but might give some signs of their presence in forums and so on, I tried various search methods. The first thing that I discovered was that there seem to be no legitimate directories in which you can find people. Where there used to be White pages and People finders, there are basically none worth using. I can see that spam has made people unwilling to leave their email addresses ripe for the plucking but this seems ridiculous.

I did straight searches for the name (quite an unusual one) and found one forum post containing this name in Google. I continued searching using other search engines and what you would assume to be more productive versions of the name, (such as just the first initial and surname) and actually found that even the forum post that I had found the first time wasn’t brought up by any other searches.

So experimentally, I tried searching for other names, including the name of someone who I know was found through the Internet by an old school friend a couple of years ago, when the internet was clearly a much more naive and open place. No results. I then tried searching for a name that had appeared in this blog. I found this blog but only a cached version. I did not find the article to which the blog had linked, although this is still available online.

So, to test Google, I searched for the headline of the article to which I had referred. I enclosed the text in quotes to stop it from bringing up its first choices – a string of web addresses where any of the words appeared anywhere in any order. (The blog article had came up on page 2) No results, this time, except for where the headline was quoted in this blog – cache version only.

Not believing my eyes, given that I had the article open in front of me in Internet Explorer, I assume that the site for which I was searching is just not indexed by Google. It is a local newspaper site for a pretty sizeable UK city. It gets public funding. Can it really have been so inept in its SEO practice that Google can’t see it? Are googlebots so inadequate that they can’t see a site which supplies many GB of text?

The article is nearly a year old. I thought that maybe Google feels impelled to cache anything this old to save its search time. However, this doesn’t explain why most of the presented results went back 7 years and came from very obscure rural journals, when I put a couple of phrases from the headline in quotes.

There are lots of sources online that claim to have some idea about the logic that underlies Google (et al) ‘s search methods. Bullsh. There is no logic to it, as far as I can see, after empirical testing.

Tragically, search engines are not just getting poorer at delivering meaningful results, they are increasingly clones of each other, so that you get the same garbage, in the same order, from half a dozen. There must be a solution?

I don’t want to turn my part of this blog into a Wire fan site but it’s not easy. So, to keep the fanaticism under control, I’m going to list a few watchable to good recent US tV series that we need to have in the UK, and not just on obscure cable channels. (Just bear in mind that nothing is fit to wash the feet of the Wire.) Any contributions/disagreements/ suggestions of alternative programmes are more than welcome.

Heroes: really good. A Guardian Guide piece suggested it was good partly because it doesn’t take comic book superheroes you already know and mess with your own expectations. It creates a whole new set of really interesting heroes, some of whom are evil. The netcam “model” with the evil murderer inside her is great. The chubby Japanese lad, Hiro (geddit) who can mess about with time and space is great. The Mutantfinder general who turns out to be actually trying to save his daughter is slimily chilling (so, good) And so on. It’s the current number 2 on my US TV list.

Numb3rs: I’ve already written about this. The plots are getting sillier and the resolutions lamer and the family values stuff is threatening to choke it even more than usual. But- it still gets interesting Math into the story lines and it’s always watchable.

Smallville: Always watchable. Clark plays the dumb farmboy so well you want to siphon mind-enhancers into his kryponitestream. Lois is pretty good. She has remade the Lois role in a completely unfamiliar way. Lana is more like the traditional Lois, both visually and in her character. Lana’s acting range is still stuck between simpering and looking hurt at “secrets,” but I’ve got used to her and she’s consistent. Chloe is also good, still the nosiest would-be reporter on earth, with hacking skills that would put her in the top 0.0001% of computer users. Jimmy Olsen hasn’t been in it long enough to wipe the memory of the comic book and old TV series Jimmy Olsens so I can’t really take to him. Prep school bully turned millionaire avenger, the Green Hornet is a new twist and is Lois’s current boyfriend. Lana is bizarrely having Lex’s child but it’s really Zod’s. Lex and Mr Luthor are just brilliant.

Stargate and Stargate Atlantis: Am missing them both. Where have they gone?

Eureka: Silly but engaging premise, a town populated by geniuses. Silly but engaging programme.

Invasion: Pretty compulsive but they seem to have dropped it. Lots of fish.

Dead zone: That’s on here. It’s almost always watchable. I suspect they’ve dropped this before ever getting to the resolution.

Law and order.x: Elevator Inspectors’ Unit. I made that up (I didn’t, the Simpsons did.) All varieties are good even when ludicrous.

High spots: Vincent D’Onofrio in Criminal Intent – the most ludicrous but completely engaging overacting you have ever seen on TV. Set off by the extreme matter of factness of his partner, Eames, in the series. So they are a sort of Mulder and Scully (from when the X-Files was still good) but taken to extremes. Plus, Detective Goren is the exact opposite of Mulder in credulity. My favourite partly because it is both silly and shrewd.

Traditional Law and Order– always good, Briscoe was the true star, of course, but it has always had great parts, sometimes engagingly played by really surprising people, Like the early Law and Order detective who was a central characters in a wierd angels/avengers series – a dead pair of fighters against the Morlocks in the war between heaven and hell, in a series called something like Dead and Alive. (I said something like, not that that was its name, because I’ve forgotten it ) The fact that Ice T plays a detective in Special Victims Unit gives it an wierd underlying comedy value. He is certainly no worse in the part than any of the other actors but it’s quite hard to take him seriously as a continuously morally outraged Special Victims cop.

Which brings me back to the Wire, given that Method Man plays Marlo’s chief assassin (and is really good in the part) Bah, I’ve come full circle. I think that’s covered it for even remotely current things.

I am resisting my overwhelming compulsion to discuss the Wire until my hands seize up from RSI.

However, I have recently resurfaced from complete immersion in a few episodes at once and can’t put a stopper on this altogether. The last time that I was swept up into a world populated by so many diverse characters, who are true-to-life and extravagantly over-the-top at the same time, was when I read Charles Dickens as a child.

Especially in Series 4, the Wire’s world of hypocrites, self-serving officials, cheats, villains, child criminals, abandoned urchins and flawed heroes is a modern mirror for Dickens’ depiction of the world of the Victorian underclass.

A Carnegie Mellon University study of anti-phishing toolbars has concluded that they are all pretty pesh.

Reports produced by  SmartWare & 3sharp –  companies that turn out to have been funded by Microsoft and  Mozilla – had claimed that Firefox or Internet Explorer 7 were great at detecting fake urls.  No prizes for guessing which company funded the report that came up with which finding. 

Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh – in a study funded by  rather more disinterested organisations including the US National Science Foundation and the US Army Research Office - looked at ten browser toolbars: Microsoft Explorer 7, eBay,Google, Netcraft (Mozilla), Netscape, Cloudmark (Mozilla), Earthlink,  Geotrust’s TrustWatch, Stanford University’s Spoofguard and McAfee’s SiteAdvisor.
The best performers were – Earthlink, Netcraft, Google, Cloudmark, and Explorer 7 – but these found only 85 percent of fraudulent websites.  This is a good score but far from paerect and coul;d give you a false sense of security. None of the others found more than 50  percent. McAfee’s SiteAdvisor ignominiously failed to identify any phishing sites.(Source:  TECHWORLD)

From the Register-

The police and Home Office demanding legal powers to insist that every CCTV camera in Britain (of which there are supposedly over 4 million) be upgraded so it can provide good enough footage to be used as police evidence and be able to host technologies to identify people automatically

Scary.

Adding to some of the odd things about technorati, I am going to revisit some complaints that have been made previously. Are blogs dying under the weight of spamblogs?

Let’s take lomography as an example. This is an interesting topic and you would think there were more than a handful of people who were obsessive enough about this that the blogsphere would be well populated. As a counter weight “Lomography” returns over 30,000 hits on flickr, with lomo generating over a hundred thousand hits. People are obsessive about it 🙂

A search on technorati (http://www.technorati.com/ tag/ Lomography) turns up some interesting results. Sadly, you have to wade through some real dross until you hit an actual page about lomography. When I did the search just now, only four of the first ten were not single page advert blogs (eg Pinhole lomography.com) which appear to serve no other purpose than try to get you to buy something (or worse are just an inbound link farm).

Of the four which were legit one was the previous post here (http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/11/19/digital-storage/), which although it is excellent ( 🙂 ) it isn’t really about lomography – it just has a link to Technorati search on the topic.

Well the web 2.0 may well be the social networking phenomenon to change the web, but so far it is a marketing scam of massive proportions.

Technorati tags: Lomography, Cameras, Digital Photography, Editing, Effects, Technology, Technorati

Flickr tags: lomography, lomo

This is getting repetitive. Technorati, once more, is being weird. The last post here (http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/11/19/digital-storage/) has shown up on technorati within 2 minutes of the post being made. Previous ones took more than two days.

It makes less than no sense to me. If anyone has any idea how technorati decides which pings to honour and which to ignore – please, please, please let me know.

Well, as my recent interest in digital photography has taken off lately I have found myself reading some of the “idiots” guides available on the net.

While, generally, these have been helpful – before reading them I had no idea what the different f-stop values meant and the like – there are some odd misconceptions being bandied around.

I really get the feeling that these books are written by people who are actually wetfilm enthusiasts but are trying to convert themselves at the same time.

The main thing which interests me are when they have a list of “pros and cons” comparing digital with wetfilm. l love these! You almost always see some reasonable examples mixed in with what is (in my opinion of course) the nonsense.

Things like being able to take a bazillion photographs (effectively unlimited storage, you can just copy them off whatever memory card you are using and use it again) are a massive pro on digital cameras. Compare the utility of going out for the day with a roll of 36 exposure film compared to a 1Gb SD-Ram card!

Also, with digital cameras you get the chance to review your photos there and then. So when you take that memorable photograph you don’t have to wait until you get home to realise you had your thumb half over the lens and the image is lost for ever – you can check and reshoot as often as you want.

The pro of digital cameras which really gets me is the storage. Often books and articles will be filled with the benefits of using digital media to store pictures. They will go on about how the picture will never fade, you can make unlimited copies and all will be identical and how the digital copy will remain intact, with no loss of quality for ever.

This is nonsense. While it may well be technically true, it hides an underlying falsehood. In work, on the wall, is a picture taken in 1898. This picture is 108 years old. It is black and white, and a bit faded around the edges but I can look at it. Anyone who walks past it can look at it. I could copy it if I wanted, although the bright light may further degrade it. This is the wonder of wetfilm pictures.

Now take a digital picture. Imagine for the sake of argument I had a digital picture that was a mere ten years old (one tenth of the age of the photo on the wall). It is in the JPEG format which is good because we can still read JPGs but it was archived onto a 5.25″ floppy disk. Well that’s that then. I have nothing which can extract data from a floppy disk like that any more. No one I know has anything which will do it. I could take it to a specialist retailer and have it done for me – but what specialist equipment is needed to look at the hundred year old photograph.

Now moving close to the modern day, I have a digital picture which is only three years old. It is JPEG, which is good but for archiving purposes it (and some others) were zipped onto five floppy disks. Again this is a big problem for me as my PC has no floppy drive. My laptop doesn’t either – and my mobile phone certainly doesn’t. Once more I have no method of accessing this image – which is only one twentieth of the age of the one at work, without purchasing more, specialised, equipment.

This problem continues on many levels. For example, JPEG photographs are a “lossy” format so some picture quality is lost no matter how hard you try. As a result of this, some camera manufacturers allow you to take RAW pictures, but this adds a new problem. You then need specialist software to view the pictures (and convert them to JPG etc), which kind of defeats the point. Also, not all camera manufacturers have compatible RAW formats so there is little reason to be confident that the RAW data you have today will be viewable next week.

In addition to this, online storage services aren’t much better. You may think uploading all your date to Flickr/Google/Whoever is great and solves all your backup issues but it doesn’t. What happens if you lose your account details? What happens if your host decides to charge (or charge more) for its services? What happens if they fold and get rid of all the data? However you look at it, its gone.

In all, while there is good reason to think digital has advantages – I am not convinced long term storage is really one of them.

(note: The pictures here are just nice ones I found on Flickr – I did not take them myself)

The Guardian (Friday 17 November) reported that it had cracked the super-secure biometric passport in under 48 hours by using brute force password cracking and an RFID reader costing under £200.

This is, of course, the technology that will be used on the ID card, except that the ID card will have infinitely more personal information that can be be read by anyone with enough cash to buy a reader and a copy of a password cracker. Not that anyone with hostile intent will need to go to that trouble when everyone’s most private information will be available to a quarter of a million health service employees at the touch of a keyboard.

To be honest, the passport reading wasn’t quite as much of a victory over the password encryption technology as the Guardian presented it as. They said there was no capacity to change anything on the embedded chip but the article pointed out that it left the passwords open to cloning, as demonstrated by a German a month ago.

The Guardian article made the excellent point, which can’t be repeated often enough, but which never seems to get through to government – these ID technologies will be a godsend to identity thieves. They will be no major obstacle to terrorists or organised crime – in fact they may represent a revenue stream. They will threaten the liberties of everybody else.

Stourhead Lake in Autumn Sunlight,
originally uploaded by etrusia_uk.

Fantastic weather for this time of year.

Well, Technorati is up to its usual tricks. The interesting links post (http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/11/16/interesting-links-3/) is still not visible on Technorati, two days after it was posted.

Bah.

I wish someone would write a better blog-indexing service. Still, if I really hated it that much I would write one myself…