Contest to increase your Google Pagerank

Check this out: http://www.boomerinthepew.com/2009/02/win-a-calfskin-version-of-the-esv-study-bible.html

The poster is using a contest to increase his page rank. Genius. He says he currently get’s 300 page views a day, but by having all of his readers post the link to their own blog I’m sure this will skyrocket. I’m guessing several thousand people will view the page, and a couple hundred will register. (39 comments so far) For $240 (if he had to pay full price for the bible, and it seems like it was given to him) I feel this is a great investment.

I’d suggest this tactic to others hoping to increase their traffic/readers/pagerank.
1. Establish a base set of readers
2. Buy/get a valuable prize
3. Have readers post link to blog to register for contest, and comment with link to their blog post (forward and back links really help pagerank)
4. Give away prize to someone
5. Enjoy the vastly increased traffic and pagerank of your site

At least this guy doesn’t have ads all over his site so it currently doesn’t look like its about money and it is about getting people to read the blog.

Use Firefox 3? You’ll need to Vacuum the database once in a while.

So, fancy new Firefox 3 uses a sweet new database to manage all your history & bookmarks. Which can make for awesomely fast bookmarks and awesome bar usage for the first little while. The only problem is that the database in use is Sqlite3, which has one minor problem for Firefox 3 users: it becomes clogged with dust.

Well it isn’t actually dust, but stale indexes, and the like. The solution is to Vacuum the database.

On Ubuntu you’ll have to navigate to your Firefox profile folder in a terminal. So launch a terminal.

cd .mozilla/firefox/
ls

Now look for a folder called “(randomcharacters).default”
For example it could be called “1g8uequb.default”

cd (folder name above)
Now copy the line below to a text file because you’ll have to shut down Firefox to complete the next step.

Shut down firefox and run the following command.
for i in *.sqlite; do echo "VACUUM;" | sqlite3 $i ; done

It won’t output anything if it runs correctly and should take a minute or two before it returns you to the terminal. If you get a “SQL error near line 1: database is locked” then Firefox is still running. Wait a second and try the command above again.

Launch Firefox up again and appreciate the new found snappiness.

Taken from: http://www.gettingclever.com/2008/06/vacuum-your-firefox-3.html

Top 9 worst uses of Windows

So, PC World Austrialia just published an article on the “Top Ten worst uses of Windows“, but they are quite wrong in one aspect, Locomotive control systems.

Normally I would have just skimmed through the article, but when I hovered over the link to the Locomotive Control System (number 5 in the list) I noticed that it linked to the QES-III system from Qtron-Wabtec.  Which just happens to be the company my Father used to work for and the system he designed for them.

It definitely doesn’t run windows. I remember him telling me about the custom real time operating system/application he programed for that system and about the positively tiny/slow processor in the system. I mean the graphing calculator I had in high school was faster then that processor. But that doesn’t really matter at all when it came to locomotive control systems, as it was plenty fast enough for everything it needed to do.

2-3 years ago my father started his own company, TMV Control Systems, as a partnership with Brookville Equipment Corporation, a railway supplier in Brookville, Pennsylvania. He’s developed a new locomotive control system for them and it’s being integrated into everything from passenger locomotives, rail yard switching locomotives, streetcars, and sweet new multi-engine fuel saving locomotives.

So yeah, it is definetly possible that Microsoft inflitrated other locomotive control systems suppliers but not Qtron-Wabtec (with the QES-III) or TMV Control Systems.

UPDATE:

• Article reposted on network world: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/29644?ts
• And on slashdot: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/11/003251

Google Browser Sync has been discontinued

Hello Peter Cannon,

As you do not have any easily accessable method of leaving comments on your blog I’ll respond to your post via this post.

In response to your post: Firefox 3 not supporting GoogleSync, I give you this piece of news: Google Browser Sync Discontinued, No Firefox 3 Support.  Sorry, There will never be a FF3 extension.

Lifehacker does give you some recommendations for replacement products.

Hopefully your blog does do linkbacks or this “answer” will just be lost in the blogosphere.

Firefox 3 Download Day

So, as mozilla just DDOS’ed themselves with this whole download day thing, you can’t actually access their site to participate. Unless you bypass their fancy webpages and go straight through their awesome mirror service.

Firefox 3 download link

That link will automatically send you to a local server and allow you to download firefox 3 and contribute to the amazingly huge bandwith bill mozilla is racking up.

Enjoy!

(Of and to be offical you have to download it before 1:00 pm tomorrow. The offical 24 hours started today at 1:00 pm Toronto time)

Construction/Building Industry & Free Software Development

So, what do the construction/building industry and free software development have in common? More then you’d think.

I was thinking again about git, and what an awesome concept it is. (Read everything you can find about it, it’s genius, but it does take a while to wrap your head around) Basically it provides for a common way of referencing content and its history and makes distributed development easy. It blows any previous source code management software out of the water.

I’ve always thought that through the use of computers there are two main stages of any application or “workflow”. First there is 1-to-1 transfer of the pre-computer concept to the computer. This is like Microsoft Word. (It’s really just a fancy typewriter/ sheet of paper) (think about it) Then after a while someone looks at what is really needed for this process and what computers are actually good at and there is a paradigm shift. Suddenly we have wiki’s, and google docs, and other “word-processing” programs which really have no similarity to anything pre-computers.

Git is like this, Linus looked at what was really needed, and what computers can do and came up with a new paradigm shifting application / storage method.

But what is really cool is that almost every problem that the creation of git eliminated also affect the construction industry. The Linux kernel (git’s reason for existence) is developed by many different people in many different parts of the world with different skill sets and allows for seamless, easy collaboration of all the work done. The typical building project is also designed by many different people in many different parts of the world (ok, usually not world wide, but at least across the province) but with the huge difference of the complete and utter lack of true collaboration.

Well, ok. I’m being a little harsh. The construction industry does collaborate, but when you compare their collaboration (hundreds of different copies of everything, long drawn out meetings, hundreds of man hours of checking and rechecking specifications and drawings) to the free software development collaboration (git-pull) it’s seems like the construction industry is from the dark ages.

The first step in solving the construction industries problems is a standard interoperable digital format for building information. (Proprietary Autodesk formats need not apply.) This will be like the programming language for building information. Then we put this information into a git repository and just like magic, your not in the dark ages anymore. Easy collaboration, cryptographically signed releases, full change log, etc.

I really think that a NBIMS (National Building Information Model Standard) implementation on top of a RESTful python + hadoop/couchdb + git backend would turn the construction industry on it’s head and be a major step in the right direction. Lets start claiming back the estimated 25% cost of non-interoperable software/data currently used in every single construction project across the globe.

Psst, Microsoft. Let me tell you a secret…

Had past problems with buggy released software? So much so that it is acceptable (possibly even recommended) practice for businesses to wait until you release your first service pack before they purchase your application(s)?

Well I’ve got the solution to your problems. Just name the initial release of your software Service Pack 1. Then people don’t have to wait for you to release it because it ship’s with the product.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080218-windows-server-2008-will-ship-with-sp1-installed.html

Watermarking

Lately we’ve been seeing a trend to discard DRM in digital music. Steve Job’s prominent post about how Apple only uses DRM because the music industry forces it, Amazon.com’s new DRM-free music store, and several major music labels defection from the DRM bandwagon. This really should not be surprising as DRM is a logically flawed and really never worked. (Tell me of even one album where mp3 rips are not easily available on some p2p network) (ok, a popular album that people care about)

What is interesting about this is an increasing popularity of “watermarking” technology. At its simplest watermarking means adding meta data to the digital music file so that copies can be tracked to their origin. What this means is, if you download a music file from a provider using watermarking they embed some form of unique tracking id into the file. When you copy the file to put it on your iPod, and your laptop, and your backup disk, etc each one of these copies retains the tracking information. The reason for this is when a mp3 file shows up on some p2p network they can trace back to who originally purchased the file.

This starts to sounds like a reasonable solution. I mean no one likes their every move tracked, but this seems to be a reasonable way to allow people to their rights of fair use and still provide a means to prosecute those who are breaking the law.

Lets walk through some of the things that will be needed for this watermarking to work.

• Based upon proven public key cryptography
  • For watermarking to really work we need to make sure that the only one who can produce a valid watermark is the seller of the files, and that we can verify that the watermark has not been tampered with. If this were not true, someone could easily create a new watermark changing who “owns” the file, or filling it in with useless information (i.e. Jane Doe, 1234 anywhere street, etc). The provider of this technology must provide the same level of trust that digital certificates currently provide. Remember we are talking about something that could potentially be used to put someone in jail, we need to be able to trust the data. No possibility of forgery is acceptable. Oh, and security through obscurity is a myth.[1]
• Completely Transparent to the User
  • There is no way to enforce that digital music players play only watermarked media[2], so we must include the watermark in the existing file. But we cannot put it in an obvious position (the id3 tags for instance) as this will be insanely easy to blank out. So the watermark must remain completely transparent to the user, and this is where the idea fails. All that needs to happen is two different users to compare the file they bought to find out what the watermarking process changed. By writing random data to those locations we could easily ruin the watermark, or even worse, make it look like someone else purchased it. Someone may be able to create an algorithm that somehow changes almost every bit in the file to hide the watermark, but this is computationally expensive (i.e.very un-scalable) and will eventually be broken as well.

So I don’t think watermarking will work. It will either be as user unfriendly as DRM or it won’t be able to be trusted, making it useless. What I do bet is that the music industry will still continue to be greedy and will jump on whatever trend will make them the most money.

Want to start a digital watermarking business with me? I foresee a year or two of incredible growth and then being dropped like a newborn giraffe when people clue in.

~Peter

[1] Seriously people. The whole idea of security through obscurity cannot ever be proven. It completely relies on speculation and unknowns.

[2] Ok, you may be able to enforce watermarking through a new file format that builds the watermark into its analog to digital conversion method, but I bet a million dollars that it will fail. People will stick with existing file formats, or with other ones that do not have such purposes built in.

laptop, python, zurch,

Laptop

So, my laptop died. Well, not really, just the hard drive, but as is contains all the data and that data is what makes it my laptop, it’s kind of useless. It’s sitting behind me, flatlining with its hard drive on the desk. Maybe I should cover it with a white sheet? I’m still hopeful that I can recover the data from it somehow, but the hard drive is junk now.

Cool thing I learned though, most modern hard drives are S.M.A.R.T. enabled, which means they actually collect quite a bit of useful data on their usage patterns. Just pull a “apt-get install smartmontools” and a “man smartctl” to see what I’m talking about. (only people with a real OS try this) My broken laptop hard drive has ~12,000 hours of use (= 1.4 years), and ~1,800 power cycles (= restarting you computer everyday for 5 years). Yet the S.M.A.R.T. diagnosis says its healthy, just that some of the sectors are corrupt.

The Ironic bit of all this is every time someone tells me about data loss or hardrive failure I just scoff at them and say “All hard drives fail eventually. You have to make backups if you care about your data.” Guess who didn’t make any recent backups?

Python

No, not the snake, the programming language.

I’m really a poser hacker. I can talk the talk but when it comes down to it, the most coding I’ve ever done was some math quiz games in qbasic 15 years ago. (10 GOTO 10) So I’m learning Python. ( import os, sys, worlddomination) It’s often called a scripting language because it is interpreted at runtime, but as it is compiled to byte code and run in a VM it’s kind of like Java. But whatever, it’s really popular and it can do anything, and you’re l33t if you know python.

Oh and my mother bought me a sweet python programming book for christmas. (“Sweet gift! Exactly the one on my indigo wishlist. How did you know?”)

I was using my l33t python hacker skills to program a python function to use canada411′s reverse phone number service to retrieve names and addresses from a given phone number, but as this voids their terms of use (“You may only use our data in the way we want you too. If your doing something cool or web 2.0 ish you need to pay us more.”) I got my hands slapped with a 24 hour ip address ban. Kind of cool. I wonder if they ban based upon number of searches from an ip, or based upon the fact that I was checking every possible number within a range…. Oops.

www.zurch.on.ca

Good news though, our churches website is finally getting redone. (check it out before it’s updated, vintage ms publisher generated html) (shudder. The church has hired someone and he’s putting together a wordpress powered site for us. Should be awesome.

When it’s done lets all google bomb it with “Zion United Reformed Church of Sheffield, Ontario“. Oh wait, that’s what it is. Whatever.

Awesome

The future of DRM? Scary.