Keys Corner

I’m not sure what made them choose the name they did, but if you need to read OpenOffice.org (OOo) files in a Windows or Linux environment and don’t want to install OOo, then Visioo-writer is what you need.

Although it’s probably not going anywhere, it’s interesting to see that 3 States in the USA have introduced resolutions to have George Bush impeached by the House of Representatives. The States are California, Illinois and Vermont, which together represent some 50 million American voters. The resolutions are not getting much coverage in the traditional media, but have been covered in several blogs.

More information in wikipedia, Scoop and alternet.org.

A number of well known artists are also publishing songs criticizing Bush, for example Neil Young.

If you suspect that a mail from your bank, PayPal or EBay (to name some of the more common vehicles for these activities) may not be the genuine article, you can check at antiphishing.org or, of course, report a suspected phishing or pharming attempt. The website also provides a good definition of both terms, if you aren’t sure exactly what they mean:

Phishing attacks use both social engineering and technical subterfuge to steal consumers’ personal identity data and financial account credentials. Social-engineering schemes use ‘spoofed’ e-mails to lead consumers to counterfeit websites designed to trick recipients into divulging financial data such as credit card numbers, account usernames, passwords and social security numbers. Hijacking brand names of banks, e-retailers and credit card companies, phishers often convince recipients to respond. Technical subterfuge schemes plant crimeware onto PCs to steal credentials directly, often using Trojan keylogger spyware. Pharming crimeware misdirects users to fraudulent sites or proxy servers, typically through DNS hijacking or poisoning.

Ruth has been keeping me busy photographing her dyeing and optimising the images for her blog and for sending to the Quilt University recently. She’s picked up enough HTML to be able to format her posts on her own now, so I’m aiming to teach her a bit about Photoshop next

I also have been setting up a wireless alarm for the house (everything’s got to be wireless these days!), as there have been a couple of series of break-ins in the neighbourhood recently. It’s not fully commissioned yet, but only because I didn’t want be mounting the external siren on a public holiday (most of the rest of the time it has been raining here). It’s got an interesting specification – apart from the usual siren it can be programmed to dial up to 6 different phone numbers and tell the person at the other end that you have a break-in, fire, or if you have a panic button, that you have been attacked or have a medical emergency. Each component is tamper-proof – if someone tries to remove a cover or the complete component the alarm goes off even if the alarm isn’t armed. (I hope it works reliably, otherwise our relationship with our neighbours may not remain as harmonious as it is at the moment!)

I found the starter kit on offer in town for 360 Euro, which I think is a pretty reasonable price (full price is 400 Euro).

If you read the comments to my previous post, you’ll have seen that Volker invited us round to look at the Sonos set-up which he’s testing at the moment. A demo really is the best way to appreciate the kit, the hand controller is a little larger than an iPod and makes it easy to link the units in several rooms to play the same music, or if you prefer and the rooms are not all open plan, you can listen to completely different playlists in each room. Like an iPod, the nice thing is that you can display the album covers on hand unit’s display, which makes the selection process more like browsing your physical albums.

I’m not going to rush out right now to invest around 1000 – 2000 Euro, but if I can arrange to get the kit at US prices or the prices here drop a little, you will almost certainly find that we using a Sonos system here too within 12 months.

You can read much more about Volker’s experience with his installation on his blog. A good place to start is with his last post on Sonos, which links to the earlier ones.

The Independent reports that English is approaching the million-word milestone. Now, the largest edition of Duden (the authoritive German language dictionary) contains about 200 000 words, and in French there are between 25 000 and 100 000 words, depending on who you listen to. The million word total comes from an American consultancy called Global Language Monitor.

So what are all these words in English? Well, according to the Independent:

Up to 20 per cent of the words used by Global Language Monitor come from hybrids such as Chinglish and Japlish. Words from Chinglish include the business terms “drinktea“, meaning closed, and “torunbusiness“, meaning open. Bushisms such as “uninalienable” and ‘misunderestimate’ are included.

And presumably, non-Bushisms such as “Bushism“? Oh – and by the way, in case you think I made up the word in the title of this posting, Google returns over 500 hits for it.

The only way to load a virus onto a Mac is supposed to be to trick the user into agreeing to install the malware with root or admin priviledges. So when the following window popped up during an update to Adobe Bridge after installing Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0, I was unsure whether I should provide my password, or kill the application that the window was being displayed from. A quick Google search for OLSUpdater.app didn’t return any information at all.

So I let the window sit there for 10 minutes. The Adobe update didn’t continue, so I concluded that although there was no indication that it was so, the window was probably related to the Adobe update and input my password, after which the update finished. (Having dug into the Applications folder, I suspect it is an update for for a plug-in for Bridge, called ols – I have no idea what it does, however)

C’mon guys, Adobe is supposed to be staffed by professional developers. Don’t make us guess whether or not we should provide you with a password during the update – this screen should be clearly marked as being part of the Adobe update.

With some reluctance, I have to admit that Volker is almost certainly right to say that the Sonos music system that he’s been testing recently has an excellent WAF (wife acceptance factor):

I pay a lot of attention to the way she adopts technology. There are a number of things that clicked immediately. One of them was digital photography. It was very liberating to practice without incurring additional cost. Hard disk recorder for TV, an automatic transmission in the car, heated seats, all of those were used immediately. Other things just fell to the wayside. Like the video recorder, the MP3 streamer, an iPod (!). But now the Sonos: She “got” it the first minute. Without looking twice she accepted the controller, and unlike me, never looked at the Mac or PC client.

Certainly Ute’s reaction to the technological examples he gives matches Ruth’s almost 100% – Ruth really still prefers a film camera. Not that I disagree with his reasoning, but at 1149 Euro for a starter kit, it is a trifle expensive. I’m pretty sure that Sonos or a system with similar functionality is where we will end up, but for now we’ll wait and see how the price develops and whether the competition in this area comes up with anything even better (we use a considerably cheaper Roku SoundBridge M1000 for now to stream music to the stereo, but the functionality is nowhere as complete as that of the Sonos kit).

Mission was completed in Iraq three years ago this May. Now Bush feels it is time to take out Iran and save it from itself, according to the New Yorker:

A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”...

...One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites.

What indeed are Bush and Rumsfeld smoking?

Nine thousand years ago, people were having their teeth drilled and filled. Remains found in Pakistan show that in one case, a person had had three teeth filled, another had two holes drilled in the same tooth. And the practice spanned a period of at least 1500 years.