Then I discovered that the WP people had put out an iPhone app, so…I had to test it…and this is the first post I write on it :)

I still need to figure out a few things about how this thing works, so I may even start posting more often now :)

Oh! It seems like I broke the categories for the blog when I upgraded WP to get support for the iphone app…I think they are all fixed now, let me know if something is still broken after you read this post

Friday night, the 22nd, Iron Maiden brought their show to Monterrey, for the first time in over 10 years (tho…the previous two times they were in town was in the Bruce-less era, which in my book doesn’t count :) and it was everything I expected it to be and much more.

I last saw Maiden live 20 years ago, when I was living in the US, and all 4 concerts were great, but…I finally understand why Edgar keeps telling me that there’s no concerts in the world as fun as a concert in Monterrey…damn, it was the best concert I’ve ever been to, and I’ve been to many.

For starters, Maiden decided to go right ahead and start without an opening act. A piece of a couple of their studio recordings over the sound system while the whole place was dark was all the introduction they needed to get the best musical night of this town in the last 30+ years started (Queen was in town in ‘84), and the crowd was ready….damn if it wasn’t…there wasn’t a single moment of crowd silence from the moment the studio version of Aces High started playing on the speakers until they turned on the lights of the Arena at the end of the night.

The set was made up of 16 songs, 15 of them classics from ages past, with “Fear of the Dark” being the only song not from the first 5 albums, lasted around 2hr, and the crowd sang *each and every song* with Bruce, non-stop, interacting with the best frontman of metal the whole time…I’ve never heard a crowd as loud as this one, and I’ve been in concerts with 3 or 4 times as many people in the US (the official count was 11,500 people at the Arena). Jumping, screaming, singing, the crowd was *on*, through the entire thing, and Bruce and the rest of the band was eating it and loving it. There were a couple of moments during which the band was just standing on stage, looking at the crowd as the “Maiden! Maiden! Maiden!” chants rang loud and hard, with Bruce shaking his head slowly and looking at his bandmates, with a face that said “damn, this is what the whole deal is about!”.

One thing that I noticed (and that Edgar, with a much better ear than me, agreed with me about) was that the musicianship of the band has improved with age…yes, it’s been 20 years since last I saw them live, but…even vs. their live albums, Adrian Smith, Dave Murray and Janick Gers were fast and crisp, Nicko McBrain was powerful and clean, Bruce Dickinson was The Showman as always, able to draw the crowd into his world with even more “it” than back when I last saw them, and Steve Harris….well, Steve is just Steve, the best concert bassist there’s ever been, IMNSHO.

The one small (very small) black spot in the whole thing was that they didn’t play one of my favourite songs, “Flight of Icarus”….but, outside of that, the night was Perfect, with a capital P.

Iron Maiden proves, once again, that they are the undisputed kings of metal concerts, nobody comes even close.

I hope Maiden follows on Bruce’s promise, that they’ll come back again, to an even larger place…even if it means I’ll have to take 3 days off work to stand in line.

Long live the king!

It’s a *long* interview, with several very interesting questions and even more interesting answers by Bruce…in his inimitably funny-but-ouch style, with jewels such as:

[...]users will always be a problem, and the only real solution is to limitthe damage they can do. (Anyone who says that the solution is toeducate the users hasn’t ever met an actual user.)

I have to agree with him…users can’t be fixed, only contained, like an epidemic.

Go read the interview, it’s well worth the time. If you really have time, read the links he posts too, well worth most of them, particularly the one linking to Bruce’s interview of Kip Hawley, head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA)…if you are short on time, that’s a link that you should read.

Now…I think of myself and most of my friends as geeks, and I see nerds as socially-inept geeks (yes, most geeks *do* have social graces…we just tend to be extremely choosy :P :) and I’m not really sure if I agree with Rands on the use of the word “nerd” for the stereotype that he’s talking about…the mere fact that he’s writing as if talking to the SO of a nerd makes me think he’s more refering to geeks than nerds…and that’s why I think it’s sorta relevant to this blog :)

I particularly had fun reading the section he titles “Advanced Nerd Tweakage”, in which he tries to advice the SO about how to make it so she can use her nerd’s quirks in her own favor, so as to get the stuff she may need from him…pretty clever stuff, actually :)

Anyway, go read it, it’s, at the very least, fun reading :)

Meanwhile, I found this one through Cofradia, a mexican geek portal that some times even has good stuff, like this post. Go read it, do the whois mentioned there…funny as hell :)

The article is made up of 3 main posts:
Hacker Economics 1: Malware as a Service
Hacker Economics 2: The Conspiracy of Apathy
Hacker Economics 3: The Next Wave of Malware

It’s an interesting view of what the professional black hats are into lately…and it’s scary as hell.

There’s also a few sidebar pieces that complete the set, from Key Malware Terms, to a view Inside a Hacker’s Site: Screenshots…I think the whole thing is well worth a read, specially if you are responsible for the security of data for your company or even just your family.

Brian’s post Microsoft’s Stealth Update Backfires for Some Users is worth a read, specially because he points at some workarounds for those that are affected by this problem.

Now…you see why I love Free Software? :)

And interesting it is. Carlo takes 10 very popular negative myths about FLOSS and then proceeds to trounce them, and trounce them good. Among the myths, he talks about:

Myth #1: It’s a Linux-vs-Windows thing.
Myth #3: Big companies don’t use Open Source software.
Myth #4: Open Source software is hostile to intellectual property.
Myth #6: If I give away my software to the Open Source community, thousands of developers will suddenly start working for me for nothing.

There’s, of course, 6 other myths, and there’s intelligent and interesting debunking of each of the ten, including sources for data and all the nice stuff that makes for the kind of fun debate in which negativists end up pissed off and with nothing to say…just the kind of stuff I love :)

So…go read the article, it’s worth your time…besides, it’s still gonna be a few days until I have my next book review ready, so you’ll need something to read and ponder until then :)

I know I’m a few days late for the celebration, but it’s part of life lately . On the other hand, better later than never :)

There’s not much for me to say about this, mostly because Pam Jones and the other groklawsters have already said it all…go read about the whole deal there, there’s several articles already:

• Texas Shows an Interest in the SCO Bankruptcy
• SCO Receives Nasdaq Notice Letter, Gives Tibbitts Raise and Bonus 1 Day Before Filing for Bankruptcy
• More Details On What Happened At the Hearing — New Filings, New Report
• First Word From the Bankruptcy Court Hearing - Update 2Xs - Meeting Darl, New Filings
• SCO 10Q: Doubts It Can Remain a “Going Concern” If It Has to Pay Novell Significant $$
• The Media on SCO Bankruptcy

That last article has links and commentary on several articles on the media, which can give those that haven’t been following the whole saga some insight into what’s going on :) Oh, and the image links to another article too, on one of my favorite blogs :)

Read em up and enjoy :)

I had never read any of Rick Dakan’s stuff before, so I didn’t really know what to expect. He’s actually an interesting author, with pretty good character development, interesting ideas, easy-to-read style and interesting plot twisting abilities…I’m gonna have to go look for more of his stuff :)

The book is an interesting mixture between geek fantasies about making it big with a startup and Hustle (one of my favorite TV shows of all times :) There is, of course, the required hot babe, but, unlike most adventure fiction, there really isn’t a bad guy in sight…or, better said, all characters are bad guys, including the protagonist…it’s all just a matter of degrees.

It all starts when we meet our protagonist, Paul Reynolds, sitting in a bar drawing and sketching, trying to exorcise his anger. He’s one of the founding partners of Fear and Loading Games, a game design startup based on the storyline of his indie comic book, as well as on his character designs. Why would he be so angry, you ask? Well…his partners just decided to kick his ass out of the company because they see him as a slacker. Computer geeks are obsessive in the way they face work, 90hr weeks being almost vacations, all-nighters being regular things and so on, but…artistic geeks are a whole different thing, or at least Paul is.

Then we get to meet the story’s hot babe, with her “hair cut short and spiky, was died a magenta so bright it nearly glowed”….every geek’s dreamgirl, right? :) Chloe draws him into conversation, getting him to tell her why he’s fuming, and then offers to help him get back at his partners so he gets what he deserves from them, instead of just the two months of severance pay that they will offer him after kicking him out on the street. She comes up with an elaborate scheme to get a lot of money out of them, with the help of some of her friends, and Paul decides that he’s game.

After that fortuitous bar meeting, we get to follow the adventures of Paul and Chloe as he gets even with his former partners…at least we follow that story for the first few chapters…after that, the story gets really crazy…and interesting enough that I had a hard time letting go of the book before finishing it :)

I don’t like to spoil books, as you’ve probably figured out from reading other reviews here, but in this particular case that practice makes it so the review will have to be a lot smaller than usual, because…anything said about this book would be a plot spoiler…all I can say is that it’s a very fun story, with all the elements necessary for a book to be worth recommending and reading more than once. And for 5 bucks, it’s a steal, so…go buy it, you won’t regret it :)

For the last 10 years or so, I’ve been an independent consultant, helping small companies upgrade from windows to linux, and then giving said small companies the support they need in the rare occasions when their linux servers go nuts.

The problem with this job is that…the support part rarely happens. Linux is such a good OS that when you set it up right, it’s stable as all get out and doesn’t break down. A client of mine has a server that I installed for him almost 10 years ago, and it has been rebooted 3 times in those 10 years…it’s never had a single problem, those reboots where power-grid related. With that kind of stability, it’s a great choice for the client…but it sucks for the consultant that lives off the support lol!

A week ago or so, I was invited to work with one of the oldest linux consulting companies in town, in a very interesting project…and decided to accept it.

The problem is that the job means a lot of time, starting early in the morning….and like most geeks, I hate mornings! I’ve been sleeping from 6 or 7am to noon for the last 10 years…adjusting to an 8am wakeup time is hard as all hell :)

So…that’s my excuse lol! I’ve been working on a project that I can’t talk about yet, and I’ve been having a hard time adjusting to the schedule….but it all should get better next week, if my body cooperates lol!

BTW, I’ve read a very good book (thanks for the recommendation, Handy! :) and I’ll try to write a review during the weekend, if I manage to wake up at all before monday morning :)

So…now you know why I haven’t been around lately :)

And even with their warchest, they still got a No.

Vote closes on draft ISO/IEC DIS 29500 standard 2007-09-04 A ballot on whether to publish the draft standard ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML file formats, as an International Standard by ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) has not achieved the required number of votes for approval.

That comes form ISO itself :) You can read the whole ISO press release, as well as Microsoft’s spin on it (”Strong Global Support for Open XML as it Enters Final Phase of ISO Standards Process” is the title of their press release), trying to make it seem like a No is a good thing which implies strong support by the world.

And this is even after it tried to buy the vote of many national organizations, and after many MS supporting organizations made a mess of things in countries that seemed to be ready to vote No, like happened in Mexico (the unofficial vote count was 70 No votes and 50 Yes votes, but it ended up as an Abstention due to a lot of shenanigans that MS alies pulled during the voting meeting last Friday…and yes, I voted No).

Read the Groklaw piece about it, as well as the various articles about the crap MS and its legions tried to pull in different countries during this vote…it’s refreshing to know that even with all of that, ISO voted the right way.

Also, read the comments for other people’s tales of mechanical virus replication.

Always check your pins before and after use :)

The whole thing starts with his buying iWork 2008 (the office-like suit for OSX) and reading about Pages ‘08 (the word-equivalent) having:

Pages ‘08 supports industry-standard formats, so you can easily open documents created in other word processing applications and share documents with others. Whether they’re using a Mac or a PC. Import your Microsoft Word documents into Pages ’08 with ease. Whether they’re Microsoft Office 2007 (Office Open XML) or earlier Word files, Pages will open them. Pages imports not only the text, but also the styles, tables, inline and floating objects, charts, footnotes, endnotes, bookmarks, hyperlinks, lists, sections, change tracking, and other elements of your original Word document.

So, he guesses that means he can actually open a .docx file and do stuff with it, right? Wrong.

The ECMA people decided to publish the OOXML standard in both PDF and docx…since it’s a standard, it should be accessible for anybody, right?

Well…when Stephen tried to open the ECMA-376 document on his Pages ‘08 “standards supporting” application, he got warnings and then realized that the document in docx didn’t look much like the PDF of the same document.

Figuring out it was probably a production problem (two different sources for the two different formats, for example), he asked a friend who has MSOffice 2007 to download the docx and the pdfs and compare them…and…it happens that opening the document on MSO2k7 renders it *exactly* like the PDF rendered for both Stephen and his friend.

Uhm…so…the standards support wasn’t, was it?

The thing is….standards support is a marketing term, and has nothing to do with standards conformance which is a whole different beast.

According to ECMA-376, for an application to be in conformance with the OOXML standard:

2.3 What this Standard Specifies
To address the issues listed above, this Standard constrains both syntax and semantics, but it is not intended to predefine application behavior. Therefore, it includes, among others, the following three types of information:

1. Schemas and an associated validation procedure for validating document syntax against those schemas. (The validation procedure includes un-zipping, locating files, processing the extensibility elements and attributes, and XML Schema validation.)
2. Additional syntax constraints in written form, wherever these constraints cannot feasibly be expressed in the schema language.
3. Descriptions of element semantics. The semantics of an element refers to its intended interpretation by a human being.

2.4 Document Conformance
Document conformance is purely syntactic; it involves only Items 1 and 2 in §2.3 above.

• A conforming document shall conform to the schema (Item 1) and any additional syntax constraints (Item 2).
• The document character set shall conform to the Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646-1, with either the UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding form, as required by the XML 1.0 standard.
• Any XML element or attribute not explicitly included in this Standard shall use the extensibility mechanisms described by Parts 4 and 5 of this Standard.

2.5 Application Conformance
Application conformance is purely syntactic; it also involves only Items 1 and 2 in §2.3 above.

• A conforming consumer shall not reject any conforming documents of the document type (§4) expected by that application.
• A conforming producer shall be able to produce conforming documents.

So…Pages ‘08 isn’t an application in conformance with the standard, it just “supports” the standard…which actually means whatever Apple’s marketing department wants it to mean.

And what’s the problem with Pages not being in conformance with the standard? Well…Microsoft’s Tom Robertson (GM of Standards and Interoperatibility) says that ECMA-376 should become an ISO standard because there’s “support in products from Novell, Corel, Apple and others.”…if Pages is a taste of what the others are doing, I really don’t want to see what unofficial or partial support are like!

Stephen’s article has much more meat to it than this synopsis, and makes the case pretty clear…say no to OOXML if the only reason you are voting yes is because applications not-from-MS “support” it…it’s, at best, a hallucination of a fevered mind.

Well, I guess the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America organization read that comment by Chris too, because they nailed Scribd with a DMCA takedown notice. Perfectly fine, right? Well…no, not really. Why? Well, because from what BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow (a pretty good SF writer himself) found out, the SFWA set itself up to be nailed on court by a whole lot of people by not doing things right.

The SFWA decided that they’d send a takedown notice about all works by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg that were published on the site…so far so good…except…they didn’t take the time to actually see which works by those two authors were on the site; instead, they just made a search for the names and every file that contained the name of either of the authors was added to the list they sent Scribd…and as Cory said:

Included in the takedown were: a junior high teacher’s bibliography of works that will excite children about reading sf, the back-catalog of a magazine called Ray Gun Revival, books by other authors who have never authorized SFWA to act on their behalf, such as Bruce Sterling, and my own [Cory Doctorow's] Creative Commons-licensed novel, “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.”

The problem with the halfassed job SFWA made is that they have exposed themselves to be sued by all the people whose works were published to Scribd knowingly and whose works were taken off the site because of being included on SFWA’s list, because courts have been pretty harsh on people and companies that abuse the DMCA.

As you read further down Cory’s post, you’ll realize that he’s pretty damn upset about the whole thing, not only about the fact that SFWA (he was president of it at some point in time) put itself on such a stupid position, but because, as he says, SFWA is attempting against Cory’s livelihood, because he depends on his publishing his works online as his advertising to sell actual paper books…and his readers aren’t happy about what happened with Scribd:

…the page that used to host my book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom now reads, “The document ‘Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom’ has been removed from Scribd. This content has been removed at the request of copyright agent Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.” Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was the first novel released under a Creative Commons license, and I’ve spent the past four years exhorting fans to copy my work and share it. Now I’ve started to hear from readers who’ve seen this notice and concluded that I am a hypocrite who uses SFWA to send out legal threats to people who heeded my exhortation.

So…not only does SFWA do stuff it isn’t entitled to do (Cory has told them several times that SFWA is not entitled to do copyright enforcement for him), but actually affect the pocket of its members by destroying their reputation by their stupidity…nice, ain’t it?

Go read Cory’s article at BoingBoing, it’s well worth the time invested.

So…now, if you care about security and decide to buy a fingerprint reader from Sony, your security gets busted up, how’s that for a helping hand?

The Sony MicroVault USM-F fingerprint reader software that comes with the USB stick installs a driver that is hiding a directory under “c:\windows\”. So, when enumerating files and subdirectories in the Windows directory, the directory and files inside it are not visible through Windows API.

That comes from Mika Stahlberg, from F-Secure, who discovered the fun Sony is having cracking the security of users everywhere.

In other words, you need to use non-standard tools or a different OS, like Linux, to be able to see the directory that Sony’s software is protecting, but anybody who knows the name of the directory can write to it and execute stuff from it…so…if you write your cracking software so it sticks its files in the Sony protected directory, you can be sure that most people will never be able to find it…how fun, uh?

So…what is Sony going to do about this one? And what’s people going to do about it this time? Or the next time? Because I’m pretty damn sure that Sony is not going to learn, they’ll keep trying to pass stuff like this through, hoping that one day they’ll be able to get away with it and do only-$DEITY-knows what.

As the chants of “Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate!” echoed through, 67 Daleks gathered, with their human beings inside, to set the record for the most people in a Dalek costume to ever get together in one place. Even BBC News took notice, and there’s a very nice Flickr set of the event.

For those of us who are Doctor Who fans, seeing so many Daleks together in a single place is a thing of fun and enjoyment…all hail our new overlords, until we get exterminated!

Found via BoingBoing.

The fun part about it was that the doctor discovered, while checking out the current problem, that I have a degenerative problem in L4 and L5, most probably due to bad posture at the computer for many years, and that I was lucky it didn’t show up earlier, due to my changing my posture about 4 years ago.

According to my doctor, he sees a whole lot of people with back problems resulting from a bad posture at the computer, due to the fact that most of us just don’t pay attention to how our desk, computer and body interact with each other, because it doesn’t actually hurt…until it’s too late to do much about it.

I’m talking about this because I found a pretty damn good article by Jeff Atwood about Computer Workstation Ergonomics today on my RSS feed, and thought that it’d be a good thing to share with my three readers. The post includes pictures and a lot of good pointers about how one should approach those long hours that most of us spend at the computer every day….had I known all of this 15 years ago, I’d probably have avoided the stupid painkillers I’ve been taking lately and that the doctor says I’ll probably be taking for the rest of my life.

Go read the article, and, most importantly, apply the principles given therein to your own working area…it’ll save you lots of pain and money in the long run.

Back in March, 43 years old Randy Couture returned from a year in retirement and took on a fighter who was 13 years younger, 6 inches taller, 42 pounds heavier, and almost 12 inches longer in reach, for the UFC Heavyweight Title…and destroyed Tim Sylvia through 5 rounds of total domination.

Forward to Saturday, August 25…and Randy is back in the octagon, defending his title at age 44, against a guy who is, again, over 15 years younger, 30 pounds heavier and who just came from destroying Mirko “CroCop” Filipovic, considered by most as *the* premier heavyweight striker in MMA today…and Randy destroyed Gabriel Gonzaga through two and a half rounds, to earn a TKO.

This guy gets better with every fight, and he’s been fighting for ten years now…he’s got 24 fights in those ten years, and 15 or 16 of those fights have been championship fights. Yes, he has lost…but he has also won. When almost all your fights are with the very very top of the foodchain, you win some and you lose some, it’s only natural. He’s the first fighter to get championships in two divisions (heavyweght and lightheavyweight) in the UFC, he’s the first (and only) 3 time heavyweight champion, he’s two time lightheavyweight champion…and last night’s was probably one of his best 3 or 4 fights, ever.

As cliche as it sounds, Randy is like wine…he gets better with age…and Father Time will have to keep forgetting about catching up with The Natural…this guy is immortal.

Right now, I can only see one fighter being able to give Randy a fair fight, and that’s Fedor Emilianenko, long considered the best fighter in the world, bar none. And…truth is….I wouldn’t bet against Randy even in a fight with Fedor.

WAR RANDY!

But if the WGA server(s) say that the OS is an illegal copy, some of the functionality gets disabled, such as Aero (the “pretty” interface for Vista) and DirectX, the 3d acceleration system that MS developed. This “reduced functionality mode” is then enjoyed by the user until such time as the WGA program determines that the OS is legal. Of course, every illegal copy of Windows XP and Vista out there is still functioning as if it were legal and the WGA service were actually functioning, which means…Pirates 1 - MS 0

All of this means that *every* legal copy of XP and Vista out there has become useless for gamers this weekend (most modern games don’t work without DirectX), and probably for some specialized non-game-related things, like 3d rendering.

And, of course, MS has put all they have available to make it work again….by Tuesday, August 28. Yup, the WGA service is offline until Tuesday.

I understand Microsoft’s desire to keep “piracy” under control, since they lose a lot of money from it (or so they say…but that’s a subject for other days), and the only people they trust is themselves, so they decided to centralize authentication to servers under their own eye…which we all know is calling for trouble.

Single point of failure is a curse in any IT system, and this is probably the biggest SPF ever implemented with malicious forethought. And, unlike decently designed security systems, its failure mode isn’t in favor of the user, but in favor of the company. In an access control system, if the authentication server dies, all doors go into open mode by default, unless the implementer of the system has changed the parameters for some particular access points. That avoids small problems like leaving people locked in their office for days.

But MS decided that if the OS can’t authenticate with the WGA service, the user should be locked out of some functionality, since it’s always the user’s fault, right? Yes, they do it because the evil pirates would otherwise make it so the OS would never be able to connect to the WGA service and the authentication scheme would become useless, but…that should tell them something about their choice of anti-piracy measures, right? But no, that’s not how MS thinks.

Anyway, enjoy your crippled-by-design OS during the weekend and beginning of next week…and hope and pray that they actually fix it by Tuesday as they said the will, otherwise, no games until who-knows-when.

Meanwhile, I’ll go enjoy my noncrippled OS and do productive stuff during the weekend :)

UPDATE: WGA Servers seem to be back up, tho there’s no word about what the problem was or if it’ll end up happening again. The good thing is that the MS tech support people were being pessimistic in their estimate of when it’d be fixed.