I’m so #*&@*$! frustrated with websites which limit the range of characters I can use in passwords.

I’ve adopted the fairly standard approach of creating three username/password pairs: one for high security sites like banks, one for medium security things like gmail, and one for low security sites. This means I only need to remember three sets of things, and if one is compromised, it only compromises sites at similar security levels.

I choose reasonable passwords for each. E.g., fairly long (more than 10 characters), mixed case, including digits and special characters.

However, this only works if all sites accept passwords that are that good. Or, if you’re willing to compromise password strength, it only works if there is a password, any password, that all sites will accept.

Unfortunately there isn’t such a password.

I use sites which variously require:

• No more than a 5 characters. (Think PIN.)
• No fewer than 6 characters.
• Must have a special character.
• No special characters allowed.
• Must have a capital letter.
• Only numbers allowed. (Think PIN.)

So there is no single password which can work across these sites.

You’d think that all bank sites (at least) would allow long passwords of any characters. However banks are typically the worst, frequently requiring a PIN (exactly 5 numbers). (For some reason, their website passwords must also work at ATM’s.)

So not only am I forced to use a less secure password, I’m forced to create more passwords than I need (and than I can remember). So I’m forced to write them down — another insecure practice.

Why are there ANY websites today which disallow long passwords made up of any characters? (Since passwords should really be stored as secure hashed values of the strings, never the actual cleartext, any length string of any characters should easily be allowed.)

Portland has a streetcar.

You can walk as fast as the streetcar. So if the streetcar isn’t there to pick you up exactly when you arrive at the stop, you might as well walk; the streetcar will never catch up with you.

But I always believed that, should the miracle occur that the streetcar is there waiting for you, you should get on. I discovered I was very wrong.

One day while riding the streetcar, we got stuck because of an illegally parked car outside a hotel. The car was slightly blocking the tracks. From talking with the streetcar driver, apparently this happens very frequently outside this hotel!

It turns out that, even though we were stopped, right next to a sidewalk, with no immediate hope of moving, the streetcar driver is not allowed to let us off (since we weren’t at an “official stop”). But neither is she allowed to call the cops to have the car ticketed or towed. (Did I mention she said this happens frequently !!!)

She did what she said she always does: called her Tri-Met boss who called the hotel to ask that they try to get the car moved. And 15 minutes later someone moved the car.

Now think about this for a moment.

I suspect the hotel will never do anything to prevent future abuse. Why should they? They get a nice phone call from Tri-Met when it happens, and the hotel patron apparently finishes their checkin before moving the car. Very convenient for the hotel.

But what about the 20 people held hostage inside a parked Streetcar?!?!?

Instead of being forbidden to call the police, why isn’t the Streetcar driver required to call the police? Why isn’t the car impounded and, in addition to the car owner, the hotel fined or rebuked? I bet that would ensure the hotel clearly marks the parking spots and that, when a new guest enters the hotel, the staff rush to them to ensure they haven’t illegally parked their car.

Oh, and Portland is going to extend and add additional streetcar lines because it’s such a success.

Music composed by computer, made to match whatever human composer style is wanted. And it’s pretty good.

The software does musically-intelligent pattern matching. You can read an explanation and listen to various compositions.

This was written by David Cope, professor emeritus at UC Santa Cruz.

Science meets theater meets fun. How do they make it so fun?

http://www.radiolab.org/ or on iTunes. From WNYC – NY Public Radio.

I just noticed that amazon.com is selling DRM-free MP3 downloads, either individually (from $0.89) or as albums (from $4.99). And their downloader helper app automatically adds them to my iTunes library!

Sweet.

I was happy when Apple announced DRM-free downloads, but the reality has been that few, if any, songs I want are available from iTunes DRM-free. :-(

But Amazon’s selection seems good. All of it is DRM-free. And prices are comparable or cheaper than iTunes’ DRM music. (iTunes’ DRM-free music costs even more.)

Try this out quick before Apple decides to “enhance” iTunes to prevent it.

Hallelujah! I figured out a solution to my previous rant about iTunes removing podcasts from my iPod before I wanted.

With the iPod plugged into iTunes (7.4.3.1), navigate to your iPod (under Devices). The displayed page typically shows the “Summary” tab; select the “Podcasts” tab. I was using the Sync “all new” setting. When I change it to the “all unplayed” setting, I get the behavior I want: It leaves podcasts on my iPod until I have played beyond the end. (At which point iTunes will display a non-empty “Last Played” date for the podcast – but only in the Libarary / Podcasts screen, not the Devices / my iPod / Podcasts screen.)

The key here is that:

• “new” means never started listening to
• “unplayed” means never finished listening to

This appears to be the opposite of what Apple’s FAQ states:

If you are syncing podcasts automatically to your iPod, do not set the Podcast Preference in iTunes to keep only your unplayed episodes. If you select this setting, listen to part of a podcast on your iPod, and then sync, the podcast will disappear from iTunes.

And this seems to be because at some point Apple changed their terminology from just “unplayed / played” to “new (unplayed) / not new (unplayed) / played”. (See this thread.)

And why is it I can never find all these useful postings until after I’ve figured out the solution? Once I know the solution, I know the right search terms to use. Just like you can’t use the dictionary to learn the spelling for a word without already knowing how to spell it.

iTunes now has the iTunesU section where universities can post content, typically class lectures. It allows universities to have a more organized and branded presence in iTunes than just a collection of podcasts.

But let’s be clear. These are still, at heart, podcasts.

That’s not bad; in fact, it’s good. Because the capabilities provided by the podcast mechanism fits perfectly with what a lecture series needs.

Listeners need a way to subscribe so that they automatically receive new lectures in the series. They need a way to listen to a long lecture that allows interruptions and remembers their place so they can return to it. And they need a way to remember which lectures they’ve listened to and which they haven’t yet heard. Exactly what a traditional podcast accomplishes.

Why then do hardly any iTunesU downloads avail themselves of any of these featuers?!

(Insert expletives between every other word in the preceding sentence.)

I.e. why can’t all iTunesU offerings do the following?

• Offer downloads through regular podcast subscription.
• Check the Remember playback position option.
• Check the Skip when shuffling option.
• Have them show up in the Podcast list until they’ve been completely listened to. Then have them disappear.

I am soooo frustrated every time I download from iTunesU and forget to manually check Remember playback position and Skip when shuffling. I seem to repeat this scenario endlessly: I listen to half of a 90 minute lecture on the bus going to work. At work I listen to music (occasionally shuffling from songs into another 90 minute lecture – oops). Then on the bus home, I discover that I’ve lost my place in the morning lecture. (But universities must think that a fit punishment for not enjoying the lecture in a single sitting.)

Some will be quick to point out that, because the universities assume I wont want their downloaded lectures automatically deleted from my iPod or iTunes after I listen to it, I must not want a traditional podcast. While this might be typically true for an enrolled student taking the class for credit, I believe it is typically not true for the rest of the world.

My point is to give us a choice. Why not make the lectures available both as a traditional podcast and a new pseudo-podcast? (Will you at least enable the Remember playback position and Skip when shuffling options? Who would not want that??)

My understanding is that this is not a limitation of iTunesU, but a choice made by the particular iTunesU author. And that even though none of the universities I listen to enable these features, there are some who do. I.e, it is the choice or inexperience of the university which causes this.

If it’s inexperience, I’m surprised Apple doesn’t do a better job of giving guidance. Ditto if it’s choice, actually.

A cool Windows tool is Clipboard Text Scrubber.

Do you copy/paste only to discover that waaaay too much font/size/formatting was carried with it? When all you really wanted was just the text? (Copying from web pages or Word docs to email is when it most happens to me.)

This tool transmogrifies the clipboard contents to remove any formatting, leaving just the text. It can be configured to happen automatically or on-demand.

It has some problems. When automatic scrubbing is enabled it can get into an infinite loop when remote desktop is involved. That’s why I leave it configured for on-demand.

It’s free, but donations are welcome.

http://www.binaryfortress.com/clipboard-text-scrubber/

As a Harry Potter fan, I’ve been going through withdrawal since J.K. Rowling completed her book series.

Many are searching for other books to give them that quick fix. Here’s one I found that I like.

Present day. Large metropolitan area. Picked on kid discovers wizards are real and living among us. They have their own culture existing within our own. Then kid discovers she is a wizard too. She is joined by another budding young wizard and together they fight to save the wizarding world from the most evil wizard there is. Someone so terrible, they don’t even speak his name.

Sound like a Harry Potter rip-off? It did to me. Until I noticed that Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is copyright 1997 and this book, So You Want to be a Wizard, is copyright 1983.

And, like Harry Potter, thankfully this is a series. The ninth book will be published in 2008! And you can subscribe to early chapters of the new book.

Learn more at the official site or Wikipedia or the podcast, WizCast.

The canonical example of why we need IPv6 is so that every toaster can have its own IP address, thus enabling ubiquitous internet-controlled toasters. (See also examples using Windows and NetBSD.)

We here at Flaming Toasters thoroughly support this concept.

However, as a friend recently pointed out to me, when That Glorious Day arrives, we will face the potential of denial-of-service attacks against toasters.

In addition to heralding The Apocalypse, this will have other negative consequences. Imagine a toaster so overloaded with incoming packets that it can’t pop up the toast when its done. The toast would eventually catch fire, causing flames to leap from the toaster, resulting in an effect something like this.

We here at Flaming Toasters thoroughly support this concept.

Like individual songs, each playlist needs a checkbox to decide whether it gets sync’d to an iPod or not.

I have lots of playlists, only a few are relevant to my mobile listening needs. But I’m forced to scroll through a ton of playlists on my iPod to find the relevant ones.

It makes sense to have global (default) podcast settings. But you need to be able to override them per podcast subscription.

I’m talking about whether to download all new episodes, or only the most recent. And how many episodes to keep (all, all unplayed, or the most recent n).

I have some podcasts that I only want the most recent n (and n is different per-subscription!); others I want all unplayed. (I can see how some people would want to keep all episodes period.)

I always want to download all new episodes. Unless I happen to only retain the most recent one episode, in which case it’s equivalent, though unnecessary (and hence an unnecessary UI complication), to specify to download only the most recent.

This grates on me even more because the behavior is not solely dependent on the settings (like it should be), but also on whether you leave iTunes open all the time or not. Here’s what I mean: Configure iTunes to download only the most recent, and to retain the most recent 4. If you leave iTunes running all the time, you always have the most recent 4 published episodes. If, however, you only open iTunes once a week, and the podcast publishes daily, you’ll have 4 episodes, one from each of the 4 most recent weeks.

Currently I leave iTunes running all the time so I don’t miss things. This is frustrating because iTunes is such a computer resource hog that it slows down my system.

Is there any good here? iTunes does support per-subscription override for whether to auto-delete or not. That’s good.

In my iPod Nano I drill down through Music -> Songs and see all my songs sorted alphabetically by title. Good.

When I drill down through Music -> Albums -> All, I see all my songs sorted alphabetically by album order. OK; I can see that; especially since I can get an alphabetical list of all my songs using Music -> Songs.

When I drill down through Music -> Artists -> [Some Artist] -> All, I see all the songs by that artist sorted by album order. WTF?

How does it make sense that all songs for an artist are sorted in album order rather than alphabetical?

If I want to play all songs by an artist in album order, I can select play when positioned on Music -> Artists -> [Some Artist].

When I drill into [Some Artist] -> All, I’m trying to select a particular song. And when I do that for Jonathan Coulton, and see 74 songs sorted in album order, it takes me forever to slowly scroll to find a title.

Some would ask why I don’t just use Music -> Songs to select my song title. It turns out that searching though 1300 sorted songs takes about as long as searching through 74 unsorted songs …

What the heck is the algorithm iTunes uses for auto-deletion of podcasts? It removes them from my iPod too soon and deletes them from iTunes too late (if ever).

Previously I explained how iTunes deletes podcasts from my iPod too soon. In some kind of cosmic balance, it also deletes them from my computer too late (sometimes never).

I swear I can’t figure out the algorithm. After a podcast is removed from my iPod Nano, it seems it almost always remains in my iTunes forever. However sometimes it gets removed after awhile. I thought it might be removed when it downloaded the next podcast in the subscription, but there appears to be no consistent rhyme or reason. (A very helpful posting is here. Although even with this understanding, I can’t get the behavior I want/expect.)

The behavior should be:

Asuming my iTunes podcast settings are to “keep all unplayed episodes” (as opposed to, e.g., the last 5 episodes): Once a podcast is correctly removed from my iPod, it should be removed from iTunes after a user defined delay in days. (Default should be one day.) This gives the user a chance for the oops factor. (Alternately it could be immediately moved to an iTunes recycle bin which would allow undelete.)

UPDATE (11/9/07):  Other people are experiencing this too.

What the heck is the algorithm iTunes uses for auto-deletion of podcasts? It removes them from my iPod too soon and deletes them from iTunes too late (if ever).

It should not remove podcasts from my iPod if either of the following is true:

• I’ve never started listening to it.
• The current position is not at the beginning.

I.e., if I start playing a podcast and pause it before the end, it should not get removed when I sync. Yet it does because apparently iTunes honors the first criteria, but not the second.

I listen back-and-forth to my podcasts; I’m always in the middle of one, typically several. Because of this, I have to wait to sync with iTunes until I force myself to finish up all my in-progress podcasts, and then refrain from starting a new one until I can get to my computer. This is not convenient. And it seems so frickin obvious that I gotta wonder how Apple missed this. (Come on, they’re way better at UI than everyone else. Is this on purpose?)

If I start listening to a podcast and decide I don’t want to finish it (ever), all I need do is skip it. Thus (a) I’ve started listening to it and (b) it is positioned (back) at the beginning; it is ok to delete.

UPDATE: I found a solution to this.

I love my iPod Nano.

I used other MP3 players for years, shunning the iPod, because of Apple’s DRM. I realize this is imposed by the content providers, not necessarily Apple, but it has the convenient side-effect of tying consumers to Apple as well. (What?! Your competitors’ players don’t support your DRM scheme? How convenient.)

It totally pisses me off that a media mogul can force me to repurchase the same content in order to play on a different device. (This, the difference between “purchase” and “license”, sidesteps all your legal rights developed over hundreds of years; but that’s the topic for another rant.)

I hope Apple realizes that it was easy for me to move to the iPod only because I religiously restricted myself to MP3 files prior to this. (I.e. by avoiding any vendors like them.)

But now I’m basically chained to Apple. Why did I knowingly do this after years of disparaging iPod owners because of this?

A billion lemmings can’t be wrong.

Or, more specifically, the iPod interface is so frickin good that I’ll never want to change. And so I’ll never notice that someone else’s player doesn’t support Apple’s format or DRM scheme.

(The new iPhone UI further cements this; it is so natural and cool, including a nice browser interface that doesn’t require websites to author specifically for cell phone browsers. However, the new iPod touch, which uses this UI but lacks the touch wheel, can’t easily pause/play/skip/volume-adjust by feel when the iPod is in your pocket; seems Apple missed the mark on this.)

But all these negative feelings of mine are in the past. I want to make that clear. Because I’m about to blog all the things I hate about how iTunes manages the iPod.

I went to my first Jonathan Coulton concert last night.

Jonathan Coulton is a folk/pop songwriter/singer for the geek crowd with a weird twist: he’s talented. He’s like Paul Simon channeling Weird Al Yankovic, but he can control the throttle.

I heard my first Coulton song a couple years ago when a co-worker forwarded a link to Code Monkey. I loved it, but didn’t pursue it any further. Then my son started forwarding me links to more songs: Skullcrusher Mountain, Re Your Brains, and others. They were very funny, geek-friendly songs, and I loved them. So when I (finally) got an iPod, I subscribed to his Thing A Week podcast.

That’s when I discovered everything I knew was wrong.

Thing A Week is a collection of 52 songs, one a week, for a year. That concept alone is impressive. And of course, with that output rate, some songs were Not As Worthy as other songs; but surprisingly fewer than I expected.

The duds were the unfunny songs. Boring. I deleted most of them, but kept a few around that I kinda liked. I’d listen to them when I felt burned out listening to the funny songs. Then I found myself listening to those unfunny songs more. Then I found myself re-downloading the ones I deleted. Now I listen as much or more to these songs as the funny ones.

Thats why I was especially thankful at the concert. At one point, Coulton asked the audience for requests. The din was explosive. I could barely make out the titles being shouted, but those I could were the classic, funny ones. Then the room became totally silent as Coulton was trying to decide. And a lone voice said: “I’m Your Moon”. “Yes!” I said.

I’m Your Moon is a quiet love song with one lover encouraging the other who has been deeply rejected by the world. It’s one of my favorite Jo Co songs. The fact that it’s sung by Charon to it’s moon, Pluto, who was declared no longer to be a planet by the International Astronomical Union, doesn’t reduce the pathos for me.

Coulton chose that song. (“Because it’ll be a challenge,” he said. I’m not totally sure what he meant by that.)

I really enjoyed hearing Coulton’s voice and acoustic guitar, all at nicely reasonable amplification. (No earplugs needed! What’s up with all the other concerts?) On one song he shunned his guitar for his new toy, zendrum; very cool!

BTW did I mention all the songs from Thing A Week are available for free download from iTunes?

I encourage you to support Coulton by purchasing bananas, monkeys, or robots on his home page, http://www.jonathancoulton.com/.

One of my favorite podcasts is Grammar Girl.

When I write software, I’m used to following rules that are way more restrictive and unbending than mere grammar. But (almost always) software rules are consistent and make sense.

Not so with grammar. And since, for some reason, my customers are uninterested in reading my code, I have to resort to prose when I communicate with them. (Go figure.) And then I run into things like the following.

When a comma or period follows a quote (i.e., is not actually part of the quoted text), you move it inside the quote. However, when the comma or period follows a closing parenthesis, it is left where it is.

I would have at least expected the opposite. Since a quotation is trying to accurately represent what someone else said, punctuation and all, it seems wholly incorrect to change it.

(Thankfully, though inconsistently, the same is not true for an exclamation point or question mark following a quote; they remain with the part of the sentence – quoted text or not- that they belong with.)

In software you can’t move things inside or outside quotes just because “it looks better”. (See there! Without thinking I just put the period outside the quote.)

But I like Grammar Girl’s outlook on most issues. Plus her warm, helpful tone eases the stress during my commute. She’s just fun. And Squiggley and Aardvark rock!

“Combines elements of Monty Python, Harry Potter, Stephen Hawking, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (The Wall Street Journal).

A science fiction, tongue-in-cheek, fantasy, detective novel. Gives a whole new meaning to “getting lost in a good book”. I particularly enjoyed the off-handed way time travel paradoxes were dealt with. Given the literary and historical references, I suspect I would have enjoyed it even more (is that possible?) if I were better read.

With character names like Thursday Next, Jack Schitt, and Paige Turner there’s the danger of degenerating into puns (the Xanth novels come to mind) but it’s handled with nicely balanced restraint.

The great news is that this is the first in a series. More info at Google Book Search.

Finally!!! A glaring omission in Windows is fixed very elegantly with this add-on.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve cursed as I couldn’t rearrange the Windows taskbar buttons. (You can in IE, Firefox, … well everywhere else, actually.) Why Microsoft doesn’t support this type of obvious stuff is beyond me, but thank God someone has.

Every friend and coworker I’ve told about this has thanked me profusely, so tell your friends and bask in the undeserved glory.

It’s free, but I encourage supporting something as wonderful as this.

http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/taskbarshuffle.htm