Jason Creighton's Blog

Why are blogs web-based? We’ve had mailing lists and NNTP since the dawn of time, and Trackback/Pingback are basically reinventions of cross-posting and the “References:” header.

So why web-based? Why don’t we string together some NNTP servers into a non-usenet network and hand out “newsgroup” names in some standard way. (“country.first.middle.last”?) Then if I wanted to post about something somebody else said, I’d just reply and cross-post it to my blog. Then we get the functional equivilent of comments, RSS, trackback and pingback for free.

So why is it this way? Why do people love the web so much? Why are we trying layer state on top of a stateless protocol? Why are we trying to make desktop applications in browsers with “AJAX”? Would it be so hard to design a protocol that’s actually designed for UI? It’s okay to reinvent the wheel if the current one is square. In our haste to be able to use the web for anything, have we doomed ourselves to having to use the web for everything?

The web has its uses, certainly. But it’s not the protocol. It’s just one. Just a nice way way of getting data from point A to point B. And HTML is just a markup language. It’s amazing what we’ve been able to do with it. But I tire of kludge-up web “applications”. I tire of trying to craft a meaningful UI around the limits of HTML/HTTP. I and think, “there must be a better way!”. But sadly, right now, it appears there is not. As they say, “that’s life”.

# posted by Jason Creighton @ 11/29/2005 04:22:00 PM 1 comments

After you get Linux running on a digital music player, the next logical step is to get Doom running on it.

# posted by Jason Creighton @ 11/09/2005 11:03:00 PM 1 comments

Yesterday, I bought Switchfoot’s latest CD, “Nothing is sound”. What I do with all my CDs is immediately make a copy of it, so the original can stay safely in its case, and it’s a CDR that I don’t care about that gets thrown around in the car. When the CDR gets a scratch, I clone off a new one, thus giving my CDs a kind of Duncan Idaho immortality.

I don’t have a burner in my Linux box, so I popped it into my parent’s Window PC to copy it. A window popped up and asked me to agree to a license. I thought “Oh, they’ve put a music video on the CD”, and clicked agree. With no futher prompting, a progress bar marched from left to right, and then I was told that my CD-ROM drivers were to old to read the CD, and that they had been updated, and all I needed to do now was click a little “Reboot Now” button, and the “Enhanced CD” installation would continue after a reboot.

So I rebooting, thinking this is probably some DRM crap but wanting to give them the benefit of the doubt. Big mistake. After the reboot, I copied the CD, put the copy into a CD player and got…static. I began thinking thoughts about the recording industry that, while unprintable, are, in my opinion, completely true.

Whatever patch (“patch” is actually too kind a word. “virus” is more accurate.) was installed, it disabled any sort of digital audio extraction for that CD. I couldn’t even play it a standard player. (Other, standard CDs could read fine, so that’s one thing they didn’t do wrong.) They probably have some little player that gets around their malware, but I didn’t try to find out.

So I ended up ripped the CD with cdparanoia on my Linux box, and copying the wav files over the network and then burning them. And I ran system restore, and after that, I could play the CD in Winamp and probably could have ripped it fine.

I went back and actually read the EULA. It actually says all that will happen if you click agree. So, I was warned that malware was going to be installed on my computer, I just made the mistake of thinking that Columbia Records were not evil corporate weasels. I wonder what their home life is like. “Hi honey, how was work?” “Great! I just screwed millions of legitimate customers!”.

Lesson of the day: Don’t run Windows. If you do run Windows, disable autorun. Programs from major record labels are not to be trusted.

# posted by Jason Creighton @ 11/06/2005 05:34:00 PM 1 comments