trog's haus

My brother and our mate spent about four hours on Monday night running through the Monty Hall Problem trying to wrap our heads around the numbers. My brother was convinced that Deal or No Deal was the same problem as Monty Hall. Our mate was convinced otherwise; I tended to agree with him based on my initial thoughts, but having some experience with the weird unintuitive nature of the Monty Hall Problem I deferred a decision until I’d thought about it some more.

This culminated in the creation of some PHP scripts to run a few zillion trials of both problems. The one for Deal or No Deal was quite simple to conceive and it seemed pretty clear almost straight away that it was not the same thing, especially after I started working on the Monty Hall version. Fortunately I found someone else had already done it in PHP so I just played with that.

Anyway, it’s probably obvious to anyone that knows a lot about conditional probability, but they’re not the same problem.

If anyone cares, the PHP script for the Deal or No Deal stuff is up here.

f you ever need to take a screenshot of a website then CutyCapt is probably worth a gander:

CutyCapt is a small cross-platform command-line utility to capture WebKit’s rendering of a web page into a variety of vector and bitmap formats, including SVG, PDF, PS, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, GIF, and BMP.

Doesn’t seem to be able to pick up Flash objects though and save them (which makes sense, as it’s just a simple renderer based on WebKit), but it’s still pretty handy.

A quick and nasty tip to removing (some versions of) Windows Live Messenger from the command line:

1) Start -> Run -> cmd.exe

2) msiexec /x {508CE775-4BA4-4748-82DF-FE28DA9F03B0}

I just got an email from Akamai announcing the launch of their Open Video Player initiative. I was immediately interested as this is something that I think the Internet really needs, because at the moment we’re mired in a horrible mesh of closed-source, proprietary systems like Adobe Flash and MPEG-4. With Microsoft pushing Silverlight as an alternative, the landscape isn’t really shaping up to look any better.

Unfortunately, despite the wording of the email and the official website with gratuitous use of the words “open” and “standards”, the end result appears to be nothing more than a bunch of resources to help you make generic video players using the same old proprietary technologies we’re using already – Adobe Flash and (heh) “Micorosft” Silverlight.

They also throw around the term “open source”, and have a SourceForge page for their Open Video Player (which includes two download options, Flash and Silverlight).

Now, there’s pretty much fuck-all documentation on the website about it – their “Resources” link in the menu just gives me a page full of videos that no sane person will want to watch. There’s no FAQ and their blog and forums links just go to their (as yet almost unused) SourceForge pages. A quick glance at the documentation and downloads seem to indicate there’s just a bunch of pre-defined classes and methods for getting video working relatively quickly, as well as a bunch of interfaces to (unsurprisingly) Akamai’s services.

I’m not exactly sure what they think is the standard they’re attempting to create here though. This looks like a thinly-veiled attempt by a bunch of commercial partners to increase their proprietary lock-in on one of the fastest-growing parts of the web – video.

Adobe already rule the roost with their system, so they get some sheen from being associated with this new “open, standard” system – having a solid, free, open source player (that hooks into Akamai for content distribution) can’t hurt them. Microsoft get more exposure for Silverlight, which they’ll start pimping desperately soon, no doubt. And all the other media and advertising partners get exposure as well for their various products and services.

And, of course, Akamai seem to get the most out of this by having a stack of players pre-programmed to support their network. So kudos to them for this as a marketing exercise. But bullshit has to be called on their attempt to try to declare this as a standard.

This “initiative” does nothing to help the web standardise on video. It MIGHT mean a more standardised experience for users as there will be more people using these free players. This, in itself, is a commendable achievement – releasing robust and flexible Flash and Silverlight applications as open source (although it should be noted that I can’t find any mention of what license these things are released under; it’s not included in the Flash download and I can’t see it on SourceForge or anywhere on the official site) will help a lot of people add video into their site.

Of course, if you’re making video and want people on the web to see it, you’d be mad not to use Flash at the moment. It has the highest install base, works on a pretty wide variety of systems, and (as much as the mass market gets used to anything in software), people are used to it. So the Flash player might be worth a gander anyway, but just don’t delude yourself into thinking you’re doing something opens and standards based because big companies just because a big company told you that you are.

The real standard

For those of that that are still holding out hope for a truly open video experience on the web – the HTML specification draft now includes a tentative mention of a new VIDEO tag, and the goal is purportedly to ensure that their recommended standard is completely open, to the point of using open source and non-proprietary codecs like Ogg Theora for video and Vorbis for audio.

A quick Google search indicates a few people (like this guy have gotten Theora working in Firefox, and Opera have been strong proponents of it for a while now.

Still, there’s opposition to it. Nokia made a fuss a while back by opposing inclusion of the Ogg stuff in the video tag (here’s some commentary about it).

But at the end of the day, it’ll be best for users if we have a truly open standard for web video – Akamai’s initiative is not it.

A quick wrapup of Oktoberfest, reproduced directly from my forum post on AusGamers.

Weekend before last I went to Munich for Oktoberfest, which is this quaint local custom where people in Germany invite everyone else in the world over and try to kill them with beer.

I didn’t really know a lot about it when I went there, other than the beer part, so I was quite surprised to rock up and walk around it – the outside bit has an Ekka/Show feel, with rides and heaps of food stalls and all sorts of stuff going on. It was absolutely packed to the bejebus (it was Saturday lunchtime by the time we arrived) and there were drunk people around, but also lots of families with their kids which I thought was a little weird.

Some of our friends had gotten there at 9am so they could get into one of the beer “tents” early (they’re not really tents as you might imagine – they’re basically massive buildings that can fit several thousand people and supply them with beer while they dance and sing and spew). We checked out where they were but there was a huge line, so we wandered off to an outdoors beerhall out of the actual fest area and had a beer and a bite to eat there (if you don’t like pork, avoid Germany).

We wandered back a bit later and met up with some other mates and got into a beer garden sort of area. Within about 5 seconds of stopping to look around, a dude came up to us and offered us beers (there were hundreds of people all around us – the custom is to tip well and so with the sort of ruthless German efficiency you might expect, as soon as these guys see a target they zoom in and offer beer). We sort of expected him to be gone for ages and were again amazed when he returned in seconds with 5 or 6 steins. Very cool.

This process repeated for a couple of hours until we decided to try to get inside the tent. We were pretty well toasted by this point and managed to bullshit our way in, despite the best efforts of the crowd (who we pushed in front of like jerks) and the security guards (who were doing their best to stop anyone else from coming in because the place was packed).

Once inside its an amazing sight. The tents are huge, stretching off into the distance and just jam-packed with people standing up on the tables singing, waving around massive beer steins, drinking, and the occasional (but rare) fight. Everything sort of got blurry at this point, but I suspect it was quite fun; we jumped up on a table and grabbed a stein and sang along with crazy German drinking songs coming from the huge band somewhere in the hall.

I didn’t actually get many decent photos – basically after a couple of beers I’d pretty much forgotten that I had my camera. The beers are served in steins that hold around 1 litre of beer, so it’s pretty hard going. I actually woke up the next day with bruised hands (amongst other things) from holding the steins and waving them around. We only had one broken stein incident when one of my mates tried to cheers someone a little too enthusiastically – they’re hard to break; they’re made of thick-ass glass and are quite heavy.

I forgot to get a photo of the area behind the tents – basically a grassy hill where everyone just goes and sits down – just covered with people that have wandered outside and passed out completely and utterly. There were quite a few maggot people wandering around but overall everyone was really well behaved, which I was very surprised about. The presence of German police was probably a big factor – these guys are scary looking dudes and I’m sure they’re on top of their game at this event, instantly aware of any problems and swarming in to take out people that look like they’re going to cause problems.

German beer is made under what they call the Reinheitsgebot, or the German Purity law, although there have been a few changes since it first came about in 1516 (!!!!!) and their beer is fucking awesome. You can drink a ton of it and it tastes great and the hangover effects are surprisingly minimal (theories I have heard are because of the lack of additives/preservatives etc in the beer – which I could believe).

We also did the compulsory (imo) trip to the Hofbrauhaus to try their awesome beer (it was a pretty significant WW2 place with Hitler doign a bunch of speeches there; it’s pretty amazing to think of the history in some of these places). The city itself is also pretty awesome with some great old buildings and cool restaurants and stuff.

I have a Gmail account which is based on my real name. Since the advent of the Internet, I realised just how common my real name is around the world, which really should have come as no real surprise – but for some reason it did.

Gmail doesn’t pay attention to full stops in email addresses. That is, alicebob@gmail.com is the same address as alice.bob@gmail.com. This was reported ages ago and has been the subject of a lot of discussion, because it seemed like a bug – why would you want to get email that’s not addressed exactly to you?

At least one other person bearing my name has signed up for a Gmail account. Not an unreasonable thing for them to do. They no doubt got through the sign-up process with few problems and managed to create a Gmail account.

Or at least, they think they did. Unfortunately, they also think their email address is the same as mine (albeit with a full stop in the middle of it somewhere). Not a real drama, until they start giving that email address out to friends and family and using it for things like hotel reservations and business.

After all my time on the Internet, I’m long accustomed to getting email that I don’t want. I get literally hundreds of spams a day to my work and personal addresses that I ignore more or less completely.

However, emails like this tend to bust through my spam filter, because they’re often very similar to actual emails that I’d get myself. They’re definitely not spam, but they’re definitely emails that shouldn’t have made their way into my inbox.

I go to pains to NOT read these emails, and almost always hit reply to let the sender know (after a quick check to make sure they’re not spam that crept through) that their email was misdirected. When its a personal email or something from a business contact, I usually get a reply thanking me. But when its an automated email from a mailing list or some other non-human sending process, I’m a little bit torn about what to do.

I don’t really want to get any more emails from here, but often my only recourse from an automated email is to click a link in it that takes me to some sort of online profile, helpfully logging me in to someone else’s account. While there’s probably no real damage I could do (I’m sure, for example, that I couldn’t get my alternate namesake’s credit card details), if I was a little more malicious I could probably at least make his life a little uncomfortable or embarrassing.

Needless to say, I don’t want to do that. I just want the emails to stop. So this raises the question – can I ethically (and legally) claim some ownership of emails that are accidentally sent to an address that – while it isn’t mine per se, is still delivered to me – so that I can try to make sure the sender knows they’re sending it to the wrong person?

Case study:

My alternate namesake created a profile on an international dating site. He, no doubt, put in all sorts of personal information into this site. I could have probably gone in and messed with his profile and made him a she-male seeking furry companionship or something, but instead I went through this arduous and painful process of trying to contact the site through normal means to ask they take me off.

This process took weeks – they floundered around for a while trying to verify it, told me they’d removed me, I still got emails every few days, floundered around again, etc.

It would have been vastly easier for me to just log into the guy’s profile and delete his account. But I couldn’t do that – even though he’d used my email address to (somehow) create a profile, it wasn’t my account.

While I went through the process then, this guy just keeps signing up for services using my email address – thinking it’s his. I’m getting all sorts of stuff I don’t want. At some point, I’m just going to start deleting them, meaning they’ll go into a black hole until he finally figures it out.

I’m sure this is happening to a lot of other users. It’s crazy how much personal information I could have obtained from this guy without him even having the slightest idea about it – if I was maliciously inclined.

Obviously, you should be careful when deciding when to give someone your email address – the last thing you want is spam or more useless crap filling it up. But remember – also be careful that you’re giving it to them correctly, because it’s probably worse that your personal and private information is going to someone completely different.

David Harrison of the UK, I’m talking to you.

(Further – as a web developer-type, I find it somewhat objectionable that several sites have let this guy sign up to various emails and services without first verifying his email address.)

Revision3 got back to me and have confirmed that their content is still indeed released under a Creative Commons license.

It should be noted again though that redistribution of their “early access” releases – the shows made available for subscribers – is still strictly forbidden by their license agreement. In the interests of keeping the free content coming it’s obviously in everyone’s best interests to respect this policy.

Revision3.com is one of the biggest content creators in the burgeoning “Internet TV” market. They create and distribute a variety of popular shows, including Diggnation (as in digg.com, the pervasive social bookmarking site), PixelPerfect, Internet Superstar, and many others.

The Revision3.com site originally sported the Creative Commons logo – you might’ve seen it around:

This logo implies that the works on the site are made available under a Creative Commons license. While there are several different types of CC licenses, the most commonly used license is one that allows redistribution of content. This is extremely handy for us in Australia, as it means ISPs can easily mirror their content to make it available for their users usage-free. This is kind of a big deal, as any Australian broadband user will tell you, and I suspect will become a bigger deal for people in the US as they clamp down more on wild bandwidth usage.

Recently the site got a big overhaul – I don’t know when; I only visit it every couple months when I see they have a new show, and the Wayback Machine only goes back to August 2007.

Conspicuously absent from the new design – the Creative Commons logo.

Closer inspection also reveals the Creative Commons information is now not available in their content RSS feeds. I am not sure if it ever was, but I have a vague recollection it used to be – backed up by the fact that the RSS XML includes a references to a Creative Commons namespace. However, the feed doesn’t appear to be using that namespace at all – there’s no license applied to the relevant sections of the RSS document.

Some Googling also reveals that there has been a bit of angst from the Revision3 guys towards redistribution – part of their revenue model is to make episodes available early via a private access system to paying subscribers. However, it seems some dastardly types would get those early release videos and then distribute them publicly, citing the Creative Commons as their reason for doing so. Legal issues aside, it’s obviously a douchebag thing to do, and it’s unsurprising that Revision3 took legal action to try and stamp it out.

A quick read of the the Terms of use for the revision3.com site doesn’t really mention much about the content. It does specifically mention that you can’t redistribute “member only, not publicly released downloads” – hopefully putting a stop to people leaking those subscriber-only early access videos.

There’s one reference to Creative Commons:

By uploading, submitting or otherwise disclosing or distributing Content of any kind at or on the Site or otherwise through the Services, unless source quoted, you represent and warrant that you own all rights in the Content and you agree that the Content will be subject to the Creative Commons Public Domain License, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/. All of our non-member downloads comply with creative commons 2.5.

(Emphasis mine).

This raises the question of what exactly constitues “non-member downloads”. It seems that is it probably the video content that we’re after, but it’s just a little bit too vague, especially in the context of a legal agreement.

The current situation and the net result of the above is that, at least to my eyes, the licensing of the Revision3 content is now more nebulous than it was previously, simply because of the removal of the Creative Commons logo.

While it is possible that they’re trying to distance themselves from the Creative Commons license with a view to better control and accounting of the distribution of their content, it seems that this is. It’d also be a huge shame, because it would probably dramatically decrease their audience, the size of which is arguably a direct result of their distribution model.

Last week I emailed Revision3′s official contact address to try and clarify this position – as yet I haven’t received a reply, so I have emailed them again today (from a different address, in case spam filtering was an issue) and I have also posed the same question publicly on their forums.

A follow-up to my earlier post about problems with the Linksys WAG325N ADSL modem device – after going through a couple of hours of Live Chat with the Linksys team, they have finally admitted defeat and asked me to send it back in, as it seems a hardware fault is responsible for at least the 10mbit fallback problem.

Several other users are still reporting the problems; some have also sent theirs back only to get another faulty unit and have to send it back again – so hopefully at some point in the process we’ll end up getting working units.

I am hoping there’s just a bad batch of these things out there and it’s a relatively simple hardware fault that can be magically fixed. This is my first time buying Linksys hardware so needless to say I’m a little disappointed; I’m especially not looking forward to sending this back and being without a modem/switch/wifi device for the duration.

I bought a Linksys WAG325N a month or so ago, after using a borrowed one for a while and thinking it was pretty good. Aside from the fact that I bought it brand new from Harvey Norman and it had clearly already been used (someone else had already set it up in the admin panel), it works pretty well except for two bugs that are present in the latest firmware (v1.00.11) – one of which I would call ‘critical’.

The two bugs have been documented on their forums:

1) Ethernet ports intermittently fall back to 10mbit mode, requiring a restart of the modem
2) Windows Mobile wireless devices cannot connect.

Both of these problems disappear if you roll back to a previous revision of the firmware (I’m using 1.00.06).