Udo's Techblog

Most high-profile wind turbine failure ever

Sometimes days come with their own themes. Today's theme is mass stupidity and media, at least for me. Now, I'll be the first to greet our new galactic overlords and all, but they definitely have to show up for real first. By that I mean hard evidence and if at all feasable a nice fireside chat with a bug-eyed little gray guy. It's all the more disappointing then - considering the implications of Fermi's formula - that ET isn't showing up, except in badly manipulated photos on the cover of shady tabloids (is there any other kind). Oh, and invariably, red neck-type citizens with a healthy lack of education or intelligence are the only witnesses available. But the audience just eats this crap up.

And because the degree of research and truthfulness required for the average news article is even lower than the IQ of the audience, it doesn't matter any more that we now have CNN reporting on strange UFO lights and what looks like a typical fanblade fracture is now officially attributed to a collision with a clumsy extraterrestrial flight in Conisholme, Lincolnshire.

Removing defective genes does not give you super powers

My mother calls, because she saw on TV how "they made a fetus immune to breast cancer", with the bonus of explicitly stating that aborted fetuses were used in the process. Give me a fucking break, what an epic failure on so many levels. So there is this family where everyone gets breast cancer, because they carry a dominant gene defect causing cancer to happen at a fairly young age. This is common. Genes mutate (that's what they're supposed to do), while many mutations are next-to neutral in consequence, some are really bad and produce offspring that are severely impaired. And the breast cancer predisposition defects are quite well researched nowadays.

Anyway, this family decides that they just have to have their own kids. You know, because there is just no other option known to humankind. And because they're a rich family living in an industrial nation that is ever more becoming like the society portrayed in Idiocracy, they can now indeed churn out "healthy" little spawns with a little help from the local biotech company. This is thanks to a technique where the defective gene is actually removed from the ovum, which is then replanted to develop naturally. Contrary to what has been suggested in the media, no fetuses or abortions are required anywhere in this horribly expensive and obscenely unjustified enterprise.

Next comes the claim that removing the defective gene causes immunity from breast cancer, also possibly x-ray vision and the ability to read minds (stay tuned to The Sun, Bild, and Pravda for more updates). This is total nonsense, of course. While the defect may be removed, the myriad other things that can go wrong inside a cell in order to become cancerous can still happen. This procedure does not produce super humans, it produces individuals with a more normal cancer risk. Contrary to what Heroes might have led you to believe, there are no mystical switches in the human genome that just lie there to be activated when the time comes for us to have magical abilities.

Blurry nomenclature causes sensational physics news

Exhibit C. Space.com runs an article that illustrates the failures and atrocities of modern science journalism quite neatly, it's about a crew of scientists who flew a balloon into the upper atmosphere once and measured strong radio emissions from an unknown source. As you can see, this alone doesn't merit a cool and sensational atronomy blurb, so it gets enriched with bullshit in equal measures by the original science team, 3rd party experts and the overpaid journalists who have to turn out this shit in ever-higher numbers so they can pay off the mortgage for the over-priced condo they acquired from some ripoff artist during the housing bubble, I guess.

Come on, let your imagination run wild, what can we do to make this horrible one-liner into a front page astro story? Right, let's make it into something the Average Joe can relate to. Let's drop this "radio emission" jargon stuff and replace it with "sound". Yeah, there's a loud, unexplained, mysterious sound in the universe. Or better still, make that a "mystery roar" (I kid you not, read TFA). With a poorly explained sound analogy we can fill at least 4 paragraphs with useless, pseudo-witty banter that makes sure a lot of people thoroughly misunderstand the nature of the thing.

Nice, OK, now we have a "mystery roar", let's make it a more current event. Like, breaking news style. Yeah, this is it:

There is "something new and interesting going on in the universe," said Alan Kogut of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Now we have implied that the universe has indeed just started sending mystery signals our way! Great, what was an unsubstantiated one-time measurement of radiation from the dawn of time has now been turned into a pressing new development.

What else can we do to completely butcher this thing, ensure our advertising dollars and give the researchers concerned a healthy boost when their budget is up for renewal? I'm out of ideas, and so were the editors of space.com - but we'll be back for more, I'm sure. But if you're looking for more stupidity, you can have a lot of fun reading the comments of that article. Incidentally, I liked the part where one poster suggested the sheer intensity of the radiation might imply a hitherto unknown interaction from outside of the universe (hey, why not, according to M theory it's at least possible), which is then followed by some physicist joker replying that it can't be so because radio waves move at the speed of light. See what happened? Physicist jargon is so utterly broken and misleading, they can't even communicate. Obviously the first guy was referring to things that are actually outside of our universe, but the second poster just assumed the concept of the "known universe" (the observable universe from our vantage point) had to be the same thing.


So, there you go. Three fine examples. I'm done for today.

This got me thinking:

[...] He lurked on Russian-language bulletin boards and followed instructions to download software that would allow him to participate in distributed denial of service attacks against Georgian websites. Some were simple webpages with a few lines of javascript designed, essentially, to press the reload button over and over. Others were slightly more sophisticated, written as .BAT files, but essentially using the same methodology. [...]

Out of context, I know, but the essence is that denial-of-service attacks are executed regularly by botnets, malicious websites, and even dedicated political nutjobs. Why isn't there some internet protocol option that the affected server can use to signal routers that it has stopped accepting packets from a certain address? Enormous amounts of bandwidth could be saved at the ISP even before attack packets reach the open internet. So this is the idea:

1. Server gets hammered, sends signal to its operating system to ban an IP address.
   
2. OS sends ban signal piggyback with the last return data along the chain of routers
   
3. each router on the way can optionally observe the ban signal and implement it
   
4. next time, the attacking system is blocked from reaching that destination early in the chain
   

Of course, the ban shouldn't last longer than a few hours at most. But heck, even a few minutes (to keep local storage requirements for routers low) would be plenty enough to reduce the impact of those attacks - considering that each system can send well over a hundred malicious requests per minute. The potential for abuse is not really significant, since the user is only banned from reaching that particular host, but users behind public proxies will effectively be screwed.

To be honest, I didn't think Palm was even still in business, but sometimes circling the drain can be a great wake-up call for a company that still has potential, I guess. Enter the Palm Pre. It just now came out and people all over have already commented it to death. So there's just one short point I'd like to make from the developer's perspective:

Developing for the iPhone is kinda fun. The development invironment is powerful and enjoyable, and the power being able to use Objective-C for OpenGL-based applications (!!!) on a mobile device is beyond cool. However, when you just want to do a quick list-sort-of-app with minimal data entry and net connectivity, you're inevitably stuck wondering why you have to do so much boilerplate code for so little functionality. Is it nice that you can link all sorts of complex object behavior with a single entry in a listview? Sure. But it gets old fast, especially if you're required to jump through these hoops for the simplest stuff. Yeah, you can copy and paste, and have code generated automatically, but I really really despise frameworks that make me do that. Kinda like Java, but I digress.

Anyway, when you're developing apps for the iPhone you're likely to arrive at the point where you're wondering if it wouldn't have been simpler to do this entire project in 50 lines of HTML/JavaScripts and be done with it already. Of course, you can always build stuff for mobile Safari, but it has zero offline capabilities.

And don't even get me started on the App Store. I hate the idea that you can only run Apple-signed apps on your own frigging device. It's a disgrace. People moan about TPM, then they turn around to buy an iPhone and pretend not to notice. Hipocrites. 'Nuff said.

So here's this new Palm Pre, powering it is the long-awaited WebOS, and its applications are based on nothing more than HTML, CSS and JavaScript. They look beautiful and they'll be really easy and fast to code for. Of course you won't see cool OpenGL transitions, advanced UI elements, or even 3D games for the Pre anytime soon. But the majority of apps are not Jump'n'Runs, they're Twitter-style and Facebook-style forms with some local data and seamless online connectivity.

My first reaction was: why didn't Apple do exactly that? It would have been easy to give developers the option, at least. All the more so, since the iPhone is clearly the superior device on purely technical grounds. And in theory, Safari has pretty cool offline functions. The answer probably has to do with control. It's a lot harder to make an inert, signable package out of a web app without crippling it beyond recognition. And as an App Store hater, I really hope with stupid "business decision" will give Apple the beating it so richly deserves in that area.

This would be pretty funny if thousands of people hadn't irreversibly lost their data. Web startups die all the time, so it's easy to miss the real juicy stuff. Usually, funding runs out, unanticipated legal problems develop or it's just that nobody cares about the service. But it wasn't any of these that killed Journalspace.

The incompetence of the Journalspace team, especially the 3rd-party admin who got fired ages ago for stealing and then sabotaging customer servers, is the material of mythic, truly epic, mind-blowing Fail that I'm sure people will talk about in allegory for a long time. For several hours at least. Here's what happened:

Journalspace was run off a single self-administrated server (OS X on a Mini apparently) and the team's single and only backup strategy was, get this, having two hard drives that continually mirror each other. No other backup or data security plan was in place. So there it sat, that lonely little Mini box, in some corner in some datacenter, with its two hard drives that always - by design - have exactly the same content. You can probably guess where this is going. One unresolved

DROP DATABASE journalspace;

SQL command later, everything was gone. Just like that. Nobody saw it coming, nobody cared it was bound to happen some day.

I have some pretty bad business experience to look back on. I had my fair share of funding problems, sleazy-ass legal bullshit, and staggering incompetence (including my own). But this takes the top of the list, easily. I even understand when people back up their DB only every few days, or even weeks. For some scenarios that may even be appropriate. But when you start hosting a service where thousands of users are continously contributing their own content, content that they trust into your hands only, this is fucking inexcusable.

I also don't understand this obsession with having your own dedicated server running somewhere. It's always more expensive than any other option. And those boxes are always in worse shape than the professional hosting services offered by providers. And you have so many better options to choose from. Need high dynamic load capabilities? Go to MediaTemple. Need your own grid of on-demand virtual servers? Use Amazon. Need high availability? Ask HP or Google. Need extreme security? Go to one of those military-rated datacenters in your neighborhood. Running a site with an Alexa rank of 106,881 on your poorly patched Mac Mini in some guy's basement? Unbelievably stupid and wasteful.

Now the domain name is for sale on eBay, no doubt scheduled to be acquired by shady some spam master looking for a quick gig to make some ad dollars. And that's it. But this enormous failure raises an even bigger issue. All of us web service users, we're putting our data all over the web. We're spending hours each day creating that stuff, and it all is spread among some thick-walled data bunkers that may or may not go down forever in the near future. The problem is, there is no way to actually own your data. I can't archive my Facebook messages anymore than I can reasonably save RSS items I liked from Google Reader, or Forum posts I enjoyed. You'd think that in a world where we're spending so much time churning out all of this personal crap, we'd actually associate a value with that content. But we don't. We just put it out there and nobody cares when it's gone. A friend of mine didn't update her Spaces blog for a few months, now it's all been deleted. Gone, no backup, no support. If our stuff has no value, then why even invest the time writing, photographing or filming it? But if it does have value, why isn't there some kind of personal data hub where you can take care of all your online stuff, at least for the purpose of backup and accumulation?

This one has bugged me for a while, because in the many years from 10.0 to 10.5, Apple hasn't deemed it necessary to build in full FTP support for Finder. I can't for the hell of me conceive why. Even Windows can do it. So, if you're stuck and think it's your fault every remote FTP folder seems to be read-only, relax. It's not you. It's Finder. I guess someone could write a protocol handler to replace the built-in version, but somehow I couldn't find one.

Of course, there are tons of FTP applications for Mac, but what's been missing for me is the ability to open a remote text file directly in an editor without having to manage a local copy first. So here's another solution, sort of.

Sort of. It's both clumsy and nice at the same time.

Back in the olden days, you could compile and install a lot of Unix GUI apps on your Mac only because of the dreaded X11 compatibility layer. And if you ever did that, you'll remember it brought all the suckyness of X to the Mac, and then some. But our friends at Trolltech have made OS native rendering a priority now with KDE 4, so it'll run natively on OS X, Windows, and your toaster (I'm guessing).

But what's that to do with FTP and Finder?

Well, KDE does support FTP write access. That means any KDE application, like text editors, can open remote files directly. And nice OS integration means those apps look somewhat acceptable and support the standard Mac UI stuff. A nice side effect is that KDE comes with lots of other apps, and some of them are not completely worthless.

Go to http://mac.kde.org and download all the packages, install them in the exact order they appear on the site. (Why they haven't made one single package escapes me, considering you absolutely need all of them to run anything.)

Now, after installing all of that (you'll need about 1 GB of free space), you should be able to run the common KDE apps by calling them from Spotlight. Like Kate for example. Although I'd been happier if I could have used my beloved XCode for editing remote files, the humble Kate comes in a solid second as far as my favorite editors are concerned. Now, in any KDE app that supports the manual input of a file path, you can do this:

ftp://username:password@server.com/directory/file

and magical things will happen!

Update: or your could just use TextWrangler, which is a simple download and install. But, see, I think Kate is very sexy, uh sorry, I mean Kate is a very nice editor!

The first round of layoffs at WotC isn't really a big surprise to D&D gamers, but you have to love the brilliant bullshit speak Greg Leeds oozes out on this occasion:

Wizards of the Coast is well positioned to maximize future opportunities, including further brand development on digital platforms. The result of this consolidation is a more streamlined approach to driving core brands.

Yeah, it's not a good sign when a company gets rid of the people who actually design and make the product. That's not streamlining, it's the end of the road. You can't outsource the very core of your business and companies who do that lose the ability to turn out anything.

Aside from that, the reasons why Wizards of the Coast needs to "streamline" operations are undoubtedly all about the dreaded 4th edition of D&D. While it's predecessor had a complex set of rules and settings, providing a huge fascinating multiverse to explore, 4th edition is little more than a half-assed attempt at bringing bland trading card rules to pen and paper roleplaying. Due to its Open Gaming License, 3rd edition had a rich ecosystem of third-party content and it quickly became the standard RPG system - on the other hand, 4th edition is a locked-down and tightly-copyrighted work that doesn't allow people to contribute unless they are official publishers willing to pay the license fees.

But the absolute worst thing that happened when they designed 4th edition is not even about all of the above. See, the reason why people play D&D is largely because it's a framework for storytelling. Unlike gamers who play WoW, trading cards or miniature tabletop, pen and paper players are in it for the content and not game mechanics. Typically, a pen and paper system is successful only when it enables users to experience cool stories and settings, and 4th edition actually created a system which prevents that from happening.

It's easy to understand where they came from when they made that initial design decision for 4th edition: in order to grow not market share, but to grow the market itself, complexity must be reduced and the amount of effort required by players (and GMs) must be reduced. This is the lesson of World of Warcraft, a game that historically made MMORPGs socially acceptable for the mainstream.

So Wizards set out to make a WoW for pen and paper gaming. However, reducing complexity can quickly cut away the essential experience of a game. Blizzard succeeded because they were able to preserve the essence and the fun of MMO gaming for most players. Wizards did not. 4th edition actually introduced content and rules that are so nonsensical, they effectively disrupt the suspense of disbelief necessary to enjoy a good fantasy story. And that was their audience: players and game masters who wanted to enjoy a good piece of interactive fiction, instead of a glorified board game.

In 2007, Steve Jobs took a bold stance against DRM. Of the big music companies he said:

Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

Now, reality shows Apple's actual choices are quite different. According to this Wired story, the new MacBooks won't play videos purchased on iTunes on displays that have no DRM. This is the kind of stuff we were railing against Microsoft about, when all of these "protection schemes" were still theoretical. Now it's coming for us, and one can safely assume this is just the beginning of the lock-down. Of course, actual pirates will be just fine. And if you're default DVD usage pattern includes re-coding your purchased movies to a free and archivable format, you'll also be fine but then you're in violation of the abomination that is the DMCA (or your local equivalent). The only ones who'll have problems with this are the people who purchase and use videos in accordance with the law. Way to go, Apple, you're sure starting to screw up very badly here.

Update from Alley Insider:

Either way, it's going away, according to MacRumors. A new update to Apple's QuickTime software removes the anti-piracy feature for standard definition movies -- which, right now, are the only movies available for rental on Macs. Makes sense, because as MacRumors notes, the copy protection is only meant for hi-def content. And for now, you can only rent hi-def iTunes movies on an Apple TV set-top box -- not a Mac.

After alienating the rest of my audience (yes, all two of them) with politics, it's back-to-technology time!

BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow reports how the FarCry people are utilizing automated content generation to alleviate the load on content designers. Finally, this idea is getting some traction!

Take World of Warcraft, for example. There is a whole army of people who do nothing but design quests, buildings, plots, creatures, zones and everything else. The bigger the game gets, the more it costs to produce new content, because it's all interlinked and has to balanced out. The last expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, introduced literally thousands of new "get me three rat tails"-style quests. Apart from economics, a huge part of what makes MMORPGs like WoW less like actual worlds and more like treadmill social games is that this content has to be re-used over and over. Millions of people play the same storylines, and even when looking at individuals, there is a lot of repetition. You kill the same named mob over and over again until it finally drops something worthwhile. You keep clearing the same dungeon again and again with your raiding party. In a way, it's even worse than pre-canned single player RPGs, because there you can at least keep the illusion that a story is taking place for you only. And the good ones don't respawn unique mobs, too. But in a MMORPG, they have to, because of the way the whole experience is designed. The only way to simulate uniqueness and quench the creeping sense of repetition is to introduce even more carefully-designed static content, so players can at least have the illusion of meaningful choice.

Pit against this static concept a dynamic world, where the mobs are actually living entities with their own agendas, where the environment actually responds to actions of players and mobs alike. A world where creatures have their own dynamic ecosystem, where NPCs build their own societies, settlements, cities and dungeons. Every single one of them has a unique history. When they're killed, they stay dead - with all the consequences. If an important mob is killed, what will happen to its followers and minions? What really happens when war sweeps over the land? How does a landscape slowly change as an evil necromancer is setting up shop in the dungeon below? It's pretty hard and unrewarding to explicitly design these highly dynamic scenarios, to speak nothing of fiscal impossibility. Those questions can only be answered by a real simulation.

I postulate that the simulation, while undeniably complex, does not have to be especially pedantic and overwrought in order to deliver some pretty cool results. The simpler the rules of the game are, the more dynamic and surprising the interplay of all the entities can become. While it doesn't necessarily mean that balancing factors and design decisions will not be necessary, I suspect that a self-balancing world is achievable and fun to play in. At least, it would be for me, because WoW is definitely not the way to spend my time...

Disclaimer: I know, this blog has to stop descending into matters that aren't really tech-related, but on the other hand it seems I have given up on delivering a focused message a long time ago. Anyway, Obama won, stuff happened and I need to vent a few things before finally moving on.

I believe in the promise of true democracy. Being a self-governing people does not mean the biggest and loudest group gets to push their ideas on everyone else, instead we have to struggle against selfishness to make the best choices for all of society and that includes every person living in it. Sometimes it is easy to forget that every single voice matters - but it does. Democracy is an idea that remains fundamentally unfulfilled and it requires, it mandates us all to never stop trying to improve ourselves and the world we live in.

I believe in freedom. For a society to be free, all of its people have to be free as well. Freedom includes a number of concepts that allow each and everyone of us to choose the life we want for ourselves, as long as it doesn't come at the expense of others. But freedom is not just a cumulative list of bullet points, it also implies a host of things that we need to be free of, such as inequality, oppression, violence and persecution.

As a scientist and humanist, I also believe that everyone has the right to make decisions for themselves, that includes the right to have an abortion - but more importantly it also requires access to contraceptives, starting with science-based comprehensive sex education. I believe that, in order to progress as a society, we need to make science our top priority. I believe religion has no place in science, and it should not play a role in the spending of public funds, or any other government activity for that matter. In order to be free to exercise freedom of belief (or non-belief as it may be), we need to be free from any form of state religion.

I believe privacy is a natural right. I believe in the separation of church and state. I believe every child has a right to a science-based education. I believe you should have the whole array of medical services available to you, regardless of your financial status. And yes, I believe that free access to information is just as much a self-evident right as the ability to exchange knowledge and opinion online.

As such, it should come as no surprise which candidate I supported in the US presidential election. I happen to think McCain is a decent guy even though the style of his campaign has been anything but exemplary. But the truth is, it doesn't really matter how nice (or heroic) John McCain is, or even how incompetent Palin might be or how horrible a job George Bush might have done. In the end, the Republican party platform itself remains the complete antithesis to every conviction I have outlined above.

America now has elected someone for president who I hope not only stands for those values, but will start to reverse the trend of the last years that marked a clear departure from the ideals of a free people. In a sense, America has the luxury to go back and forth between extremes, one election can steer the country either back to the dark ages or towards radical progress. Here in Germany, there is no party that clearly represents my democratic values, just as there is no party to represent the values of Sarah Palin. There is only endless bickering, we are stuck in meaningless exchanges and at the end of day, nothing is accomplished besides perfecting our new rightless surveilance state. We live with a political landscape that does little else besides keeping us busy, so we don't notice that our democracy is dying before our eyes. For German politicians, status quo is a way of life, and this is reflected in the media as well. But, like many countries, we just subscribe to changes coming from Washington DC. If America makes a swing towards democratic values, so will Germany. In time.

Yes, it's Election Night on Udo's Techblog - and like everybody else I'm already hooked on CNN even though they apparently have gotten rid of the exit polls and as of right now are just reporting meaningless filler on a 30-minute endless loop until this sucker is finally called in a few hours.

Anyway, the one thing they actually do report is what seems to be wide-spread election tampering across the board. Voting machines not recording votes, machines marking your vote as McCain regardless of what box you checked, and registered voters have apparently been removed from the list so they can't vote at all, and it looks like a load of people didn't get their absentee ballots. Couldn't this whole thing be handled over the net?

It seems fitting to me that CNN asked the same question just now, and the person they invited for this was some guy from Citrix - a company that made ridiculous sums of money by selling their VNC clone to companies on a large scale disguised as a groundbreaking innovation, condemning millions of users to slow, crappy and interrupted computing experiences. So tell us, Mr Citrix Guy, when can we expect to be able to cast our vote online? Well, the answer comes back as a stream of barely intelligible generalisms, and I'm paraphrasing this out of my ass into a language that makes more sense: not before the public sector spends a few billions on pilot studies conducted by my company, and even then there will be huge technical issues blah blah blah.

It astonishes me that we only get to hear from these people, instead of, say, guys and girls who actually implement the web as we use it everyday. Where is Google, Microsoft, Facebook? Anyone? Bueller..?

There is no question we'll get web voting some day in the future. And I can see now how it will work, based on the country you're in:

In the US: Votes will be cast using a Windows-only plugin. Only IP adresses from the continental US will be usable, screwing a lot of absentee voters, and you won't be able to vote from a Cogent line. 60% of all votes will automatically be recorded for the Republican candidate and there will be no way to tell whether your vote was counted at all. There will be three highly ambiguous checkboxes to cast your vote for either of two candidates.

In Germany: Voting will be done via a Java 1.2 client that has a download size of 780 megabytes and will only run on either a Windows version that won't come out until two years after the election or some ancient Debian release from the dawn of time. Months before you can even log in, you'll need to complete a registration process that requires you to provide 5 different types of legal identification and the filling-out of 12 paper forms at 3 different governmental offices spaced equally all over town. You will also have to buy a biometric scanner from Siemens for 250 Euros that can only be connected to your computer by a Telex line.

What will electronic voting be like in your country?