Russell's Blog

One of the wonderful things about web applications is that they can be available 24-7. They can sit there and quietly do their jobs -- taking orders, billing credit cards, assigning work orders, or whatever -- even when the office is empty. That's one of the main reasons one would go to the trouble of putting a web front end on something in the first place.

So, the question of the evening is, does the UC Davis registrar know this?

Um... no.

This is a completely automated process. If you do this during the daytime, it just goes ahead and populates a table in whatever chthonic legacy database system that is swaddled in this blob of early 1990's vintage web programming. It's not like having the office open at the time actually helps.

Attention Amazon.com shoppers! It's 4:45 Central Time, and Amazon.com will be closing for the day in 15 minutes! Please complete your order before the site is disconnected for the evening. We will open again tomorrow at 8:30 A.M. Thank you for shopping at Amazon.com!

On the upside, at least it doesn't complain that my browser isn't supported. Yay.

Back in May 2007, I decided I'd try writing a Wikipedia article. I can't remember why I was seized by the impulse. I think I was supposed to be studying for something, and I'd already cleaned the bathroom and organized my closet. I pondered for a some time on the problem of selecting a topic obscure enough not to have a page already, and yet not so obscure as to become a target for the dreaded Deletionist clan of Wikipedians.

And lo, the Tasty Bite page was born. Looking at the page traffic, I fear that it will eventually become my most widely read piece of writing.

Well, they are pretty tasty. Oh, and those very mediocre pictures? I took those myself, and then consumed the contents of the pouch. Also, my friend Srijak says there is no such thing as "Bombay Potatoes," but he eats them too.

I finally got fed up with the pathetic official Android release from T-Mobile, and rooted my G1 and installed the CyanogenMod firmware. Cyanogen feels about twice as responsive as Cupcake! It's like a whole new device.

Also, the tethering app is awesome. It turns your G1 into a WiFi base station and routes traffic from WiFi to 3G. Since I'm still waiting for broadband at my new apartment, it's a lifesaver.

I suppose tethering (and rooting the phone) technically violates T-Mobile's TOS, but I'm convinced that T-Mobile will allow both sooner or later. It's just too awsome, and it would help them sell more contracts.

It's kind of difficult to abuse tethering anyway; it sucks down the battery very quickly, and the latency is significant. It's the sort of thing you'd only use in a pinch. Those happen to be the situations where a little benevolence or selfishness from a big company can shape a customer's opinion forever. T-Mobile seems to be more sensitive to that kind of thing than the other networks. I know they've got their reasons for banning tethering apps, but I think they could be convinced to change their minds. (You can download various petitions from the Android Marketplace.)

Openness is where Google and T-Mobile could really go after the unwholesome, anticompetitive and un-American AT&T/iPhone alliance. The open nature of Android is a step in the right direction, but T-Mobile needs to get its legal department on the Open Access bandwagon if it wants to press the advantage.

After all, if some random people on the internet can roll better firmware for the G1 than their in-house developers, isn't it a strategic business advantage to let them?

If you can read Hebrew well enough to find the right contact form on their damn web site, please tell Bezeq that the following IP addresses are part of a botnet:

84.109.41.197
84.109.105.38
84.109.42.218
84.109.105.30
84.109.105.218
84.109.120.173

That is all.

I wish the WiFi Alliance people would stop worrying about the maximum speed of the 802.11 family of protocols, and instead worry about improving cooperation among networks. When 802.11b was new and shiny, it was fairly unlikely that you'd have to worry about spectrum competition. Now, wherever you are likely to find one network, you are likely to find a dozen.

Usually, this kind of mess happens in residential areas, but I've seen it lab buildings also. I would be more than happy to route a few of my neighbor's packets on my network in exchange for less spectrum congestion. What is needed here is a protocol that would allow owners of clashing access points to decide who they are friends with.

Of course, this would mean that anyone who owned an access point would have to be able to assert common carrier status, which could have some interesting side effects.

One of my favorite bloggers died on Sunday. I didn't know anything about her personal life until today. She was fighting ovarian cancer with a poor prognosis, and died at 47. Her obit is in the New York Times.

She was probably the clearest, most readable and best informed voice on the mortgage crisis, period. She was also pretty much the only person who had anything positive or funny to say about it. Or, at least she set mood for the general commentary at "dry wit," when it easily could have been "catatonic depression."

From her platform as a co-blogger on Calculated Risk, she wowed people from Nobel laureates to analysts at the Federal Reserve. Pretty much everything I know about the details of the mortgage crisis I either know because she explained it to me, or because she explained it to someone else I read (e.g., certain Nobel laureate economists).

She had hoped to return to mortgage banking after the crisis and after recovering from cancer, but she made such a mark with her writing over the last two years that most people doubt that would have been possible.

One thing that makes big media so stupid is that they always turn to the same stable of pundits for commentary on complex issues. Unfortunately, most of these guys are not very bright and not very informed. But there is a solution. For every issue, even issues as murky and choked with dull tedium as the mortgage banking industry, there are people like Tanta. She was an expert straight from the trenches, but with a view broader than anyone could see from the ivory towers of academia or the skyscraper corner offices of industry. She was exactly the sort of person that major media outlets should recruit for beat reporting. The murkier the issue, the brighter such people can shine.

Alas, this particular glimmer in the gloom has gone out.

While I'm greatful that Peet's Coffee and Tea provides Wifi for people who buy coffee from them, I think their censorship software is very, very stupid. Take this salacious image, for example :

SonicWALL brilliantly flags this as 'Pornography.'

Seriously. This is a huge waste of everyone's time and money just to make sure nobody sees any boobies.

Well, now that Speakeasy has been acquired by Best Buy, I'm going to give up on it. I had such high hopes, but now I feel like an asshole for ever recommending them. The customer service has been rude and unhelpful (to my mother, no less!), the installation was painful, it's overpriced, and the actual service is miserably slow. And by slow, I mean like dial-up slow.

One thing I liked about dial-up service was the profusion of choices. There were dozens, and in some places, hundreds of ISPs. The ISPs offered lots of features and competitive prices. Now, the "choice" usually boils down to :

• Your friendly local cable monopoly, or
• Your friendly local telephone monopoly

Not unexpectedly, we pay high prices for crappy service. The monopolist providers cheerfully spy on us on behalf of quasi-legitimate entertainment cartels and clearly illegal government programs.

I want my choices back. There are a lot of smallish local DSL providers in LA, like Pacific Online and LA Bridge. Has anyone out there had any experiences (good or bad) with smaller DSL providers?

Hu Jintao wants to cleanse the Internet of objectionable material. Evidently, the Internet is full of foul language, pornography, and worst of all, upsetting politics and strange spiritual stuff. On one hand, I feel a great deal of sympathy for the Chinese people, who will see their hard-earned cash wasted on an initiative that will only serve to brutalize them.

China's Internet policy is already responsible for the political incarceration of large numbers of Chinese citizens, most of whom are probably staunch patriots (perhaps with unpopular opinions, though). Expanding state control over the Internet will only accelerate this. To some extent, human nature is irreducibly subversive. It is a necessary part of healthy human psychology to be somewhat resentful of authority. Resentment of authority is a necessary aspect of self-preservation. Increasing state surveillance will of course turn up more subversive thinking. Perfect surveillance would reveal that all of us are subversives, and the remaining few who are not suffer from serious cognitive disabilities. So, if Hu Jintao wants to lock down the Internet, he's going to have to lock up an awful lot of people.

On the other hand, as a patriot of my own country, Hu Jintao's calls to "purify" the Internet bring a smile to my face. If China is successful in its efforts, which is no certain thing, they will destroy their own patch of the Internet. Sure, they will still have a high-tech national computer network, but it won't be the Internet with a capital "I." It will be something else -- something much, much less valuable. No interesting services will survive on this "purified" Internet. The content will be just as interesting and as valuable as Party-controlled television. Meanwhile, Americans can continue building new and interesting things.

America has ceded its dominance in industry after industry to China. Hu Jintao's "purified" Internet is a guarantee that America will keep its dominance of Internet technologies. Unless, of course, our indigenous Internet purifiers succeed.