One Fine Jay takes a peek under the hood of Twentyten, the default theme for WordPress 3.0 — which can’t be far away, since the current release is 2.9.2 — and apparently it assumes a hell of a lot:

Twentyten uses conditional logic in loop.php that references Category names such as Asides and Gallery. Not a bad idea, except the installation does not populate those Categories. I’m certain that there can be safeguards to overwriting existing categories when this happens for an upgrade, but if you’re going to take dibs on category names, at least populate those names or have a friendly (yellow) reminder up top that tells users “in order to make the most out of your theme, please create categories with the following names: Asides, Category, YourMomsKnickers.”

I suspect I’m safe, since my existing category names cover a range from inscrutable to indecipherable.

Then again, the theme I’m working with dates back to the Cretaceous period, so I may run into other problems when 3.0 insinuates its way into the Dashboard.

This juxtaposition, snipped from TweetDeck, just struck me as funny:

Got that, old people?

And he still doesn’t have time to go rifling through your data:

When you have that level of access, users become paranoid that you’re pilfering through their computer, looking at their “stuff”. My “official” answer was always that, well, it wasn’t their computer — it was the government’s. Even today, every time I log on to my computer, a big banner pops up and reminds me of that fact. It also states that anything I do can be logged or monitored. People have a sense of personal ownership and privacy when it comes to the computer that they use on a daily basis, but it’s not so.

The “unofficial” answer, however, might surprise you. Unofficially, none of us had time to look at people’s data. At my old job, three of us managed a domain for 6,500 users. None of us had the time (nor the incentive) to randomly select someone’s workstation and browse the contents of their hard drive. People would get so bent out of shape over the fact that I had the ability to peek into their My Documents folder or their network home drive and thumb through their documents, but the reality was we were way too busy to be doing that. And when we did have moments of down time, the last thing I wanted to do was look at someone else’s vacation photos or search the network for small pools of mp3s.

My access level at work is “Seated at the Right Hand of God,” but I don’t have time to browse everyone’s machines. I can barely keep my own box updated. Then again, stupidity of a flagrantly blatant, or blatantly flagrant, nature will be noticed. We had one lost soul who one afternoon installed LimeWire on her work box. Now there’s nothing inherently evil about LimeWire, but she was using it as ductwork to load up her iTunes folder, and files of dubious provenance often contain Really Bad Stuff of the sort one does not want on a corporate network. Still, I might not have noticed it except that she had iTunes sharing turned on, which meant that all this stuff materialized one day on my machine. I mentioned this in passing to the powers that be, expecting that a tech would remove the offending files. Instead, the poor girl was subsequently frogmarched to the curb.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s this: you can probably get away with more than you think, but less than you’d like.

The Secret Service is apparently running on something worse than Windows:

A classified review of the United States Secret Service’s computer technology found that the agency’s computers were fully operational only 60 percent of the time because of outdated systems and a reliance on a computer mainframe that dates to the 1980s, according to Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn.

“We have here a premiere law enforcement organization in our country which is responsible for the security of the president and the vice president and other officials of our government, and they have to have better IT than they have,” said Lieberman, who is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

I worked on a mainframe in the 1980s, and we had way better uptime than that. Then again, we could still get parts and service, even for the old monster drive systems that weighed as much as a small car and held as much data as a box of floppies.

By the end of the decade, I’d downsized to a System/36 with a whopping 200 MB of DASD. Nowadays, of course, we have files bigger than that.

Oh, and it’s “premier,” unless the agency is brand-new, which it ain’t.

“We will protect our revenue stream at any cost.” Including, it appears, the cost of one’s credibility. Get a whiff of this:

The Indonesian government’s policy… simply weakens the software industry and undermines its long-term competitiveness by creating an artificial preference for companies offering open source software and related services, even as it denies many legitimate companies access to the government market.

Rather than fostering a system that will allow users to benefit from the best solution available in the market, irrespective of the development model, it encourages a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations.

As such, it fails to build respect for intellectual property rights and also limits the ability of government or public-sector customers (e.g., State-owned enterprise) to choose the best solutions.

That’s the International Intellectual Property Association, recommending sanctions against Indonesia because Indonesia, to keep costs down, is encouraging the use of open-source software, rather than fork over cash to IIPA members. “Fails to build respect” apparently translates to “fails to pay tribute.”

And of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg:

It turns out that the [IIPA], an umbrella group for organisations including the MPAA and RIAA, has requested with the US Trade Representative to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its “Special 301 watchlist” because they use open source software.

What’s Special 301? It’s a report that examines the “adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property rights” around the planet — effectively the list of countries that the US government considers enemies of capitalism. It often gets wheeled out as a form of trading pressure — often around pharmaceuticals and counterfeited goods — to try and force governments to change their behaviours.

There is nothing particularly unusual about this: it’s standard-issue, Econ 101-level rent-seeking, justified by the usual Lofty Motives. But I can’t bring myself to shed any tears over the deleterious effect on Steve Ballmer’s lunch money wrought by some Jakarta bureaucrat installing a Linux distro.

(Via Fark.)

Occasionally Trini would ask me for programming tips, except they weren’t really programming tips in the first place, since obviously she knew the language better than I did. What she wanted to know from me, generally, was “Does this flow make any sense?” It’s possible to make things work — which, in some shops, means “Hey, it compiled!” — without those things actually working in the manner originally intended. We have code that seems to date back to Leonardo, and not the Renaissance man, but the badly-animated king; the best advice I could give her, generally, was “Read these, and then don’t do that.”

And don’t follow Toyota’s lead, either, Jerry Pournelle seems to be saying:

In the various [Niklaus] Wirth languages starting with Pascal the goal was to have the compiler catch incipient bugs: it took longer to develop a program that would compile, but once it did, it was likely to do what you expected it to do. Unfortunately the computer hardware of the time wasn’t up to huge programs in strongly typed and highly structured languages; it took a long time to compile a new addition to a program. The programming world turned to C and its derivatives, and in the early days a C compiler would compile almost anything, including very tricky uses of pointers and type changes.

I don’t know what language Toyota has used to develop its drive by wire programs, but I would bet reasonable sums that it wasn’t Ada or one of the Wirth languages.

The Director sums it up this way:

To make it easier for people to become developers, they made it easier to write software. To deleterious effect.

“It compiles,” she says, “but it still looks wrong.” Her instincts, I suspect, were sound indeed.

Countering the conventional wisdom, Marcel allows that Twitter might not actually be a complete waste of time:

I’ll use it for links, or observations too pithy to blog. (Because, you know, one mustn’t have an unpublished thought…) But I’m not using it on my cell phone. People will just have to wait for status updates until I get back to the house. And how does Twitter (d)evolve? Next year Amazon will present a new service where users just grunt at each other. “Yo! Huh? Lookit. Ungh! Heh.”

They’ll have to pay Glenn Reynolds royalties for at least some of that.

Eventually, there will be a smartphone device that attaches directly to the synapses, bypassing consciousness completely. With a little bit of development, the Two Minutes Hate can be whittled down to a matter of milliseconds.

In case typing BRB or FYI or even TTYL was too much of a strain for you:

Stephen Totilo of Kotaku reports:

The Fast Finger keyboard was made for people, mainly children, who are not yet comfortable with the QWERTY layout of most keyboards. It’s also made for people who’d love to use just one button to type TTYL, L8R or BRB.

I saw this keyboard at Toy Fair 2010 in New York City … in one of the aisles that had educational games for kids. The keys on the Fast Finger keyboard are laid out in alphabetical order, though a press of one button can rewire those keys to work in the standard QWERTY order instead. As you can see, it’s simply a matter of the keys functioning based on the white characters printed on them or the red ones.

Well, okay, if you say so. I don’t think it’s such a swell idea to inflict non-standard keyboards on the youngsters — they’re going to have to get used to the real thing soon enough — but I suppose this might be marginally useful for kids who know the alphabet only because they can sing that damned song.

And there are no keys for OMG or BFD. WTF?

Don’t take your Rails to town: now we have COBOL on Cogs.

(Decompiled from the Identification Division by David Fleck.)

Google has decided that FTP is no longer worth the bother to them:

FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

Apparently they’re not planning to outsource it to China, either:

[W]e will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users.

That much, at least, is true.

You may remember this from a year ago:

I’m still fiddling with CA’s desktop package, which is a notch down from the top choices but which so far has yet to brick my system. (Don’t laugh. I managed to brick a fricking mouse this week.) CA has one nice plus: a spam-blocking system that integrates into (sigh) Microsoft Outlook. And the newest version has one small but annoying minus: at bootup it drops something onto the taskbar that reads “CA ISS Dashboard” which doesn’t do a thing except eat up screen space; you can’t even right-click it out of existence. To clear it off, you have to open up their full-sized desktop interface and subsequently close it, which is a waste of time if you’ve automated all the major functions.

By May, they’d fixed that, and just in time for subscription renewal, they announced a brand-new package, which I duly installed. Bad mistake. Regardless of what your previous settings were, they install exactly what they damn well please, which is every single option, with the security level cranked up to NARROWED SPHINCTER.

And then it sent me an alert on my network card, fercrissake.

“Oh, hell no,” said I, and ran the uninstall. Which, of course, failed. I had to back up two days in System Restore to retrieve the old version, which I then expunged from the system.

I had fifteen days left on my subscription, which I will lose. I don’t care. I wouldn’t have cared if it was fifteen years left. You do not pull this crap on my desktop.

In general, I defend romance novels — yes, they’re unrealistic, but reality is overrated — though once in a while I find something like this and the porcupine in me crops out:

A computer programmer can only find love if he’s built like a bodybuilder and quits computer programming to become a “hip Beverly Hills record producer.”

Now they tell me.

Oh, well. I knew the job was dangerous when I took it, Fred.

John Lunde, to the Instant Man, on the subject of the allegedly-declining geek population:

This is something I foresaw when home computers quit being shipped with BASIC: <10 PRINT “HELLO”> seduced a generation. When finding out if programming is interesting costs a couple of hundred dollars up front (and weighs seven pounds), though, not many will try. Not that it has to be BASIC, of course, but there ought to be some ‘easy’ language supplied with home computers to inveigle potential geeks.

Of course, on some of those machines, notably the Commodore 64, if you wanted to do much of anything you had to work in that machine’s flavor of BASIC, and machine-specific commands don’t translate too well across platforms. That said, I used to rewrite Applesoft BASIC stuff to work on the 64, and it wasn’t that difficult; then again, I also had a COBOL (!) compiler for the 64, and I wasn’t worth a hoot at COBOL.

Jenn doesn’t see a problem, though:

This is only a problem if someone wants it to be. Javascript doesn’t require anything beyond a browser and a text editor. Python and Java are both freely available (and free even). Even QBasic is still available as a download. The problem is that computers have gone from being something semi-mysterious and a serious business tool to being something you carry around in your pocket. There isn’t any real wonder left to them and so kids don’t explore them like they used to.

The alternative may lie in MMORPGs:

Other options if your kids are into games are Lua which is is used in World of Warcraft and Linden Scripting Language in Second Life (of course in Second Life you have to watch them constantly so they don’t fall in with furry Gorean slavers. Keep them in the kid friendly areas).

Given the sheer participation levels of WoW and Second Life, it’s hard to imagine we’d ever run out of geeks, unless you buy into the stereotype that they just don’t, um, reproduce.

The nearest printer cartridge to the old work desk is an HP 56, and the packaging claims that it’s good for ~520 pages, subject to the following qualifications:

Tested in HP DeskJet 5550 Color Inkjet Printer. Average based on ISO/IEC 24711 or HP testing metholodogy and continuous printing. Actual yield varies considerably based on content of printed pages and other factors. For details see www.hp.com/go/learnaboutsupplies.

This isn’t particularly heinous in and of itself; anyone who’s been within door-opening distance of a car in recent years already knows that Your Mileage May Vary, yadda, yadda. But calculating miles per gallon isn’t so difficult, since you know how many gallons you’re using. How many milliliters of ink are you using? Nowhere on the HP 56 package is there a reference to the actual liquid volume. (Last I looked, it was 19 ml, but that was three years ago; I am loath to open up a brand-new cartridge just to see if they’re still bothering to put this information in the usual tiny print.)

If Lexmark had its way, you wouldn’t know these things anyway:

Lexmark International Inc., one company that sells the cartridges, argued in a recent letter that disclosing ink volumes would actually be misleading to consumers.

The cartridges, which Lexmark describes as micro-machines, can use varying amounts of ink based on print quality and the amount of ink deposited on a page, so a comparison based on quantity of ink would be misleading, the company says. And the cost of the ink is only a small part of the cartridges’ cost, the letter said.

“Treating these sophisticated machines as though they were mere containers for ink is inappropriate,” said Charles Kratzer, an attorney for Lexmark.

I’ve only owned one Lexmark printer, and it was about as sophisticated as a hatchet. Its paper handling, in fact, was about on par with a hatchet. Still, someone has to take the Malevolent Scum position, right?

I am less perturbed by this, though, than I am with the ink-monitoring “systems” used to make the machines more, um, “sophisticated”; they inevitably are set to give off dire warnings that OMG you’re almost out of ink! at the point where you’ve used maybe two-thirds of the contents. Not even the most alarmist low-fuel light in any car I’ve ever driven is that pushy. One reason I’ve retained an old HP 720C all these years is that the only warning it gives is the only warning that means anything: the print is starting to look like crap.

Still, if the states want to regulate this sort of thing, let ‘em try. I don’t think it will do much good — except maybe for Kodak, largely an also-ran in the printer biz despite having genuinely inexpensive ink. (Try $15 for a color cartridge, $10 for black.)

Why are we constantly beset with malware and other horrible digital excrescences? Too much tolerance for things that go wrong, maybe:

We’ve become an eight-cylinder SUV society. For all the nonsense we babble about global warming and how worried we are about it, we’ve become a culture in which we just press the gas down when we want to go somewhere, and we really don’t care about the imperfections in the system that makes it all go until the bill for gassing it up again is ten dollars higher than what we’re used to paying. And then, we don’t fix anything until the power steering makes a godawful squealing sound or the transmission conks out. Then we bitch and cuss about how it cost three thousand dollars and the mechanic must be out to screw us over.

I’ve had one transmission rebuilt. Then again, it was a two-speed Powerglide, which is about as complicated as a Waring Blendor.

Still, I’m not sure this is the answer:

I will expand the government to start a Bureau of Malware Damage Compensation. It will be responsible for filing civil suits against these guilty parties and placing liens on their property and income. It will accept and validate claims for anti-virus software licensing, computer services, and time lost by the victims, and as the proceeds of these liens are collected, it will compensate them.

Which is admittedly easier than, oh, say, creating a digital buzzbomb which will trace these evil little scripts to their evil little masters and setting off an explosion in their evil little shorts, but it’s a hell of a lot less gratifying. And if I have to scrape things off a hard drive, I want the culprit to suffer before I want him to pay; I want his attitude adjusted in such a manner as to make his testicles flee halfway up his abdomen at the very thought of trying that crap again. (If there are in fact any women writing malware, make the appropriate alterations.)

Some of the WordPress guys are floating the notion of “canonical” plugins:

Canonical plugins would be plugins that are community developed (multiple developers, not just one person) and address the most popular functionality requests with superlative execution. These plugins would be GPL and live in the WordPress.org repo, and would be developed in close connection with WordPress core. There would be a very strong relationship between core and these plugins that ensured that a) the plugin code would be secure and the best possible example of coding standards, and b) that new versions of WordPress would be tested against these plugins prior to release to ensure compatibility. There would be a screen within the Plugins section of the WordPress admin to feature these canonical plugins as a kind of Editor’s Choice or Verified guarantee. These plugins would be a true extension of core WordPress in terms of compatibility, security and support.

If that’s the objective, why not just incorporate them into the core and be done with it? Because if you have government-approved canonical and non-canonical plugins, J. Random User is simply going to assume that canonical is better, whether it is or not:

When only 75% of users at a WordCamp are using the latest versions, we have a problem. Using a simple extrapolation — of course, not a statistically perfect method — of that number, assume 15% of the market is running outdated, insecure versions of the software. That’s a huge problem, considering the number of WordPress blogs out there. While I strongly believe that it’s one’s responsibility to maintain and update a site, that assumed number is that of irresponsible blog-owners who present a danger not just to the reputation of the WordPress community but to the general online health of all online people.

These same lazy people are the ones who won’t be bothered to pick a plugin based on how it performs. They’ll reach for the closest solution accessible and go with it. In today’s plugin/theme marketplace, the market leaders may not be the best of best of the very darned best, but they come close. In tomorrow’s canonical marketplace, the majority of users won’t be bothered to move beyond that which is canonical. Why would they, when those selfsame plugins and themes carry not just the approval that a theme is safe, but that it’s endorsed by and is considered “official” by the WordPress leadership itself?

But … but … their intentions are good!

This whole we-know-better-than-you-do attitude pervades every aspect of contemporary culture and most aspects of contemporary American politics. If you don’t consider it insulting, I suggest that you aren’t paying enough attention.

Smitty reveals some of the secrets of maintaining a WordPress blog:

I ratcheted down my resolution to 800X600 and confirmed the email reports that, yes, this blog is slammed to the left side of the screen.

To work on this, I save the blog locally, open that copy in the browser, get out the BFH, and tweak the .css.

Except that there is enough voodoo in the .css for the page to thumb its nose at me. So your indulgence is sought. I’m still standing up my local LAMP stack so I can break this thing in a blatantly irresponsible manner without any anguished screams peeling down at me from out along I-70. One can blog or one can geek, but I know of none doing both simultaneously. Hats off to those who are more graceful task switchers than I.

CSS has pretty much always been voodoo to me; I comprehend maybe twenty-five percent of it on a good day, which for this purpose is defined as “any day I don’t have to bring out the BFH to fix something.” Fortunately, traffic around here is low enough that anguished emails about how farging horrible the site looks are few and far between.

On the other hand, I finally persuaded this ancient theme to accept up-to-the-minute widgets, whereupon I discovered that the widgets I might have actually used, I’ve already essentially duplicated in the sidebar the old-fashioned way.

It’s like road rage, except at the keyboard, says Amba:

A desktop is a minivan or SUV, a laptop a sedan or coupe, an iPhone or BlackBerry a sports car. The screen is the windshield. The keyboard is the gearshift and steering wheel. The engine is your brain. Slow-loading sites are traffic jams or stoplights. Don’t you curse and swear at the keyboard or keypad just the way you do behind the wheel? The only difference is, you can’t see the competing drivers and you don’t have a horn. Maybe computers should come with horns for the self-expression of frustration, which is how drivers use them 90% of the time anyway.

At the moment, I’d settle for a better windshield washer.

The one difference here is that you can seldom determine why it is these flipping Web sites are coming up so slowly, whereas finding the culprit for any given traffic jam is simply a matter of catching up to the front of the line. And if he’s been flattened like Wile E. Coyote after a plunge off the edge of the cliff, it seems churlish to yell at him: he’s suffering enough, I figure.

Google’s PageRank is as inscrutable as a person’s FICO score, and if you make your living on the Web, you’re influenced by both whether you like it or not.

This “enhancement” to PageRank may not make you like it any better:

I just came across a very unpleasing revelation to end the year however it’s just part of every blogger or webmaster’s life to be hit by Google once in a while or maybe frequently for some.

The Google pagerank of this blog has been stripped a notch and is now down to 3 from the previous 4 which isn’t giving me a totally happy face to end the year. My other friends’ blogs have also been stripped with their page ranks however I’m not going to tell who because it’s up for them to find out.

Google’s nasty caffeinated algorithm had finally taken its toll and is mercilessly affecting sites on shared hosting as they have advocated page loading speed as an added factor to rank in 2010. I’m not surprised that is this going to happen however this exaggerated move isn’t helping the web but it’s killing the content delivery networks especially blogs the benefit of ranking for highly relevant page positions that provides more quality content than static pages.

The PageRank scale runs 0 to 10, so a drop from 4 to 3 might be considered significant.

Fort Hard Knox has been similarly hit:

Ft. Hard Knox’s page rank just dropped to 4/10 from 5/10 where it has been nearly two years. I think part of that has to do with the fact that we’ve been going through a little transition in the last few months, and have not been posting as much original content that other bloggers want to link to.

For my part, I’ve found that I’m pretty much incapable of guessing which posts will generate links or even comments; it’s probably a good thing that I take a relatively dim view of trying to game the system, because plainly I wouldn’t be good at it.

Which is not to say that massive link dumps like The Other McCain Full Metal Jacket Reach-Around don’t help; McCain’s sporting a highly-respectable 6 these days. Of course, he’d like another point or two — who wouldn’t? (Besides her, I mean. She has two sites, a 2 and a 3.)

As for optimizing one’s page-loading speed, I’ve done just about all that I can: unless I’ve linked to an audio/video file lately, everything originates here except the Twitwidget, the SiteMeter, and the little Green thing, which actually comes from the host anyway. (I generally avoid hotlinking other people’s graphics, preferring to store my own copy.) There’s a WordPress gizmo to tell me how much of the RAM on the shared database server is going to support this site: it runs around 25 MB of a possible 90 unless I have a bunch of runaway PHP processes going on, as I did New Year’s Eve for a couple of hours. (Weirdly, this seemed to be triggered by Google’s spider, which apparently stumbled into a trap of its own making and thrashed the server enough to cause it to have, in its own words, “gone away.”)

Still, I try not to take this stuff too seriously. I hit 6 once, dropped back to 5, and have settled there ever since. I have no idea what my credit score is, however.

Julie R. Neidlinger contemplates OpenID:

I went to my files to see if I actually had an OpenID account, and had the fortune to personally discover one of the reasons why the concept of a universal login is the Holy Grail of the Internet: I didn’t have an OpenID account, but a MyOpenID account.

Seriously? What is the point of that? I wondered, forseeing some kind of GoDaddy-esque domain seller explosion of OpenID offerings, such as MyOpenID and OurOpenID and OpenIDs andOpenedID and IOpenedMyOwnOpenIDBusiness.

The idea of a universal login is nice for personal convenience’s sake, and also so that Tim LaHaye can have additional material for his Left Behind series. However, I’m not willing to pay $25 for the privilege, which is what OpenID asks. Using Google everything, at this point, has worked well enough for me, though I know I’ll be in a world of hurt the day Google removes the “Don’t Be Evil” mask and reveals themselves to be the sulfur-infused Internet Beelzebub that they likely are.

No one’s asked me for $25 for an OpenID account yet, but I can tell you what my Web host thinks of it with regard to WordPress installs:

As described in a blog-post, this plugin can be misused and you will be a target of CPU overuse spam. Your server will be instructed to initiate numerous (and continuous) PHP instances to pr0n/3rd-party websites, in order to extract the fake OpenID user’s name & email information, which will consume CPU minutes and slow down your website.

And spammers are at least as sulfurous as Google on the Internet Beelzebub scale.

A letter from out of the past (December 1987):

I am interested in making a list of the most common passwords chosen by users. I’d like to see if anyone knows of any studies that have been done (I vaguely recall hearing of at least one such study). We are writing a program to check for poor passwords on our systems.

Which drew the following response:

At one time “Susan” was reputed to be the most popular American choice. I recall a British clipping citing dogs’ names as popular passwords. However, since many prudent system managers now insist on randomly generated pronounceable passwords, your study might be dated.

Today, sysadmins and such prefer unpronounceable passwords if at all possible. I’d been online for about three years back in 1987, and I never quite understood the assumed popularity of “Susan” as a password; presumably it was simply a reflection of the fact that it was almost all guys on the wire back then.

Apparently, though, we’re over Susan: this 2008 list of the 500 worst passwords doesn’t mention her at all, and Twitter won’t block a registration using “Susan” as a password, though they’ll block “Angela” and “Samantha.”

I still use HP 45s at home, so I consider this graph highly pertinent:

Besides, it gives me a chance to bring up this post from five years ago:

The common comparison, of course, is with Dom Perignon, but since not even The Donald buys Dom in 42-gallon barrels, we decided to do the math one more time. An HP 56 cartridge (black) for the DeskJet I use at work runs $35 and contains 19 ml; one liter of the stuff — 52.6 cartridges full — comes to $1842. Multiply by 159.05 liters per barrel, and you’re looking at $292,900 for a barrel of ink.

The HP 45 cartridge contains 21 ml, so the comparison is off, but not by much.

The 3M fluid, incidentally, is a refrigerant.

(From ReflectionOf.Me via the Consumerist.)

The desire to get stuff over the Internet without paying for it is exceeded, I believe, only by the desire to see humanoids without clothing, which at least partially explains why about every other month or so, somebody on Yahoo! Answers wants to know why he can’t get his very own domain without going through an existing registrar and paying some actual money.

I have had a stock response for this: “Apply to ICANN to be a registrar, and you can have all the domain names you can stand.” Still, they persist, and I got to wondering: what does it cost?

This is what it costs:

· US$2,500 non-refundable application fee, to be submitted with application.

· US$4,000 yearly accreditation fee due upon approval and each year thereafter.

· Variable fee (quarterly) billed once you begin registering domain names or the first full quarter following your accreditation approval, whichever occurs first. This fee represents a portion of ICANN’s operating costs and, because it is divided among all registrars, the amount varies from quarter to quarter. Recently this fee has ranged from US$1,200 to S$2,000 per quarter.

· Transaction-based gTLD fee (quarterly). This fee is a flat fee (currently $0.20) charged for each new registration, renewal or transfer. This fee can be billed by the registrar separately on its invoice to the registrant, but is paid by the registrar to ICANN.

I suspect this discouraged the last questioner: he’s deleted his inquiry entirely.

Global Network Navigator was the first Web site with clickable advertising; it was, like seemingly everything Webulous in the 1990s, associated with O’Reilly. (In 1993, this is what a commercial site looked like.)

After a couple of years, O’Reilly sold GNN to AOL, which eventually mothballed it but held onto the gnn.com domain, just in case.

This appears to be the case.

I’d bet anything that Lileks found this when he discovered he still had a bookmark for it after all these years.

I got home last night to hear a bizarre whirring coming from the far corner of the living room. Fortunately, there’s not a lot over there that’s capable of emitting a whir, so finding the culprit was pretty simple.

Apparently a combination VCR/DVD player was in its death throes; a motor was turning, but nothing was moving. There was no disc in the drawer. (The display actually read NO DISC, which turned out to be accurate.) There was a tape in the slot, but none of the transport controls had any effect, and Eject was fairly instantaneous, meaning the tape probably wasn’t wound around the head in playing position.

I hadn’t used this particular unit in about a year, so I’m not horribly put out about its demise, but salvaging the tape reminded me how much I hated the transition to on-screen menus. I couldn’t eject the tape until I started the unit, fired up the TV set, and then dropped down a couple of menu levels to make sure the tape section was selected; both Open/Close buttons, on the front panel and on the remote, apparently default to the DVD side. Which explains why I still have my very first DVD player, circa 2001, hooked up to the HDTV box: it doesn’t second-guess my every button push.

I’ve kvetched before about the Oklahoma Road Conditions map put out by the Department of Public Safety, but it’s at least readable, if not exactly optimized for the latest and greatest.

And then, reports Jeffro, there’s Kansas:

You are using an unsupported browser. Please use one of the browsers from the list below.

I was then informed that the site was optimized for the Microsoft or Macintosh operating system.

This gets the reaction it deserves:

So, let’s see if I have this right. A site set up for travelers to check the road conditions isn’t capable of displaying on mobile browsers — which would be what any traveling traveler would use? So, what am I gonna do — fire up my laptop and hope for a wireless connection somewhere? I don’t have an air card. Maybe after I’ve slid into a ditch somewhere that happens to have an unsecured wireless access point I can go online and see where I screwed up.

The iPhone probably has an app for that, dammit.

My garage was built in 1951, three years after the rest of the house; the garage-door opener is clearly newer than that, but it’s pretty much an antique just the same. After six years, the aftermarket remote control failed — a new battery did not restore it to health — and I ordered a new one, same brand, pretty much the same model.

Now if you remember these old village-smithy openers, the actual remote code is set by a bank full of DIP switches, extremely easy to work but presumably very difficult, or at least very expensive, to duplicate in miniature.

And if you remember old IDE drives, they came with a couple of jumpers, which you had to set with a pair of needle-nose pliers to identify which drive was which to the controller. A genuine pain in the neck, but generally you only had to do it once.

Now copy that pain, paste it to the size of a remote control for a garage-door opener, and multiply it past all understanding: there are fourteen jumpers, each of which can be set in one of two positions. I wound up having to move eight of them and discard two others to get it to work. A genuine pain in the neck. I hope I never have to do this again. Then again, this opener’s days are probably already numbered: the guy who works on my door has warned me that parts supplies have long since dried up. (We’re talking seriously obsolete here.)

There was a time when that meant something worthwhile:

I don’t want to sound like I’m making a paean to some imaginary bygone age here, but there was a time when the general assumption of society was that the average adult American male was at least minimally mechanically competent: garages had timing lights in them and drug stores had vacuum tube testers, and patching an inner tube or setting the gap on a spark plug were not lost and arcane arts.

The microchip has freed us of many things and transistorized electronics are amazingly rugged compared to their fragile forebears of bygone days. The idea of “fixing” a radio or TV is foreign to us now, and the underhood areas of modern cars are shrouded in plastic fairings that practically scream “No User Serviceable Parts Inside” (and with the first spark plug change not scheduled for 100,000 miles, why would there be?) and unless you’re some kind of weirdo bicycle hobbyist you’ll probably never clap eyes on an inner tube, because even your riding mower’s gone tubeless. These days one can get a reputation as “handy” for being able to plug a video card into your computer’s motherboard.

Of course, when these amazing solid-state components become slightly less solid, the expense is considerable. Not so long ago, you could get a set of spark-plug wires for somewhere in the two-digit range; the big thing now, though, is individual ignition coils, which perhaps can be had for a shade under $100. Each.

And I don’t trust anything to sit in an engine for 100,000 miles, especially if it’s involved in explosions.

(According to her service record, which predates my ownership by several years, Gwendolyn is on her second set of replacement plugs. They’re averaging a hair over 50k, which is about as much as I’d be willing to risk. Besides, they’re $12 apiece, and as is typical with a sideways V-6, the back three are damned near impossible to get to, which discourages more frequent changes anyway.)

The title comes from There, I Fixed It: Epic Kludges + Jury Rigs, which offers further evidence of the post-competent society.

Inspired — who wouldn’t be? — by The Bloggess, I typed “i” and a single space into Google’s search box and waited for the auto-suggestions.

And they looked like this:

At no time, incidentally, did I feel lucky.

Oh, if only all of life were this predictable: there will be a scheduled period of downtime on this site around 10 pm due to a server relocation, by which is meant “take the machine out of the old rack and put it in the new one.”

I expect no problems, but you never know for sure.

Update: Move postponed. They didn’t say why.

Further update: 12 November, 8:30ish.