My Little Corner of the Net

Going Black

Written by Kodiak on 01/18/2012 — Leave a Comment

Nearly 16 years ago the web went black in protest of the anti-indecency provisions of the Communications Decency Act. Intended to protect minors from indecent material, much like the way existing FCC regulations limited when and to what extent certain topics that were inappropriate to minors could be broadcast over the air, the provisions of the CDA were unnecessarilly broad and ill-defined. Opponents worried that the bill would limit the ability to publish medical information or classic literature over the Internet due to the vague wording of the provision.

Opposition to the CDA sparked a web-wide protest in which thousands of sites changed their backgrounds to black on the day the bill became law. Even big players at the time, like Yahoo, took part.

The indecency provisions of the CDA were eventually ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and the day that came to be known as “Black Thursday” drifted off into an obscure memory. I’ve thought about that day from time to time since and I’ve always wondered if something like that could happen again. In 1996 the web was a new frontier. We connected with our 14.4Kbps modems and exclaimed that “even company X has a website” as we typed the company’s name, followed by a dot-com into Netscape Navigator and watched the animated GIFs slowly load on the page containing little more than a solid colored background and some Times New Roman text.

It was a simpler time back then, a time when corporate web presences were being built by the company’s IT guy (except we didn’t usually call him an IT guy back then), not the company’s marketing department. A time when a website was a nice-to-have, not a company’s main revenue stream. Today’s web, with corporate style guides and teams of people who do nothing but track a site’s analytics in order to ensure the company is receiving the maximum ROI, could never pull off such a feat again…or so I’ve thought.

If you are reading this on the day I’ve posted, you’ve probably noticed that my site is black. Today, January 18, 2011, I am taking part in a similar web protest to the one that happened in 1996. I’m joined, too, by some of the biggest players in today’s web like Wikipedia and WordPress who have both blocked out their sites with JavaScript overlays for the day, and Google which is displaying a large black box in place of its ususally colorful logo.

Today we protest two bills currently being considered in the House of Representitives and the Senate: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PROTECT IP or PIPA). The bills intend combat online piracy and counterfeiting. These two issues that need to be addressed in some way, but unfortunately SOPA and PIPA are not the way to do it. Driven by entertainment industry lobbiests, SOPA and PIPA would give broad powers to the government or, in some cases, to rights owners to effectively shut down any site that is suspected of pirating content or distributing counterfeit goods while providing immunity to them when they screw up. The bills reek of unconstitutionality and threaten to destroy the Internet as we know it.

Imagine, as a web publisher, having your content removed from Google—or having your advertising revenue withheld—simply because a company that you reviewed unfavorably simply ordered Google to do it. Imagine, as an Internet consumer, not being able to access YouTube because someone demanded that your ISP block it on the grounds that there my be something infringing on it. Imagine, as a service provider, having to monitor your non-authoratative DNS cache to ensure that your users can’t get to a site because manufacturer has a hunch that the site might be selling knock-offs of their products. If SOPA and PIPA get passed, it looks like we can expect any of this to happen. Good bye First Amendment; good bye presumption of innocence! It was nice knowing you.

Please get involved to ensure that SOPA and PIPA do not pass in their current forms. Please write to your Senators and Congressional Representitives and urge them to vote against these dangerous bills. Need help getting started? Visit americancensorship.org to find out more.

Posted in Current Events, General, Site News, Websites | Tagged , , , , , ,

Awesome Android App of the Day: Sound Manager v2

Written by Kodiak on 09/28/2011 — Leave a Comment

The original Motorola Droid (and possibly other Android devices, though most what I’ve seen has been specific to the Droid) seems to have a bug. For whatever reason, lots of users report that the vibrate on notification feature of their phones stops working for no apparent reason. That means that, when the phone is set to vibrate, they get no notification (beyond the LED flash) of text messages, emails, instant messages, or any other alerts that the phone receives. The phone continues to vibrate for phone calls, and notification sounds are played when the phone isn’t on vibrate-only, but nothing happens on notifications when the ringer is silenced, even if all the settings appear to suggest that something should.

My phone began experiencing this problem well over a year ago. Several times I searched and searched, but though I found many discussions about the problem, no solutions were to be had. I even tried a hard reset of the phone but, with the old settings restored from the cloud, nothing changed.

The other day I finally had some luck. I found this thread on Motorola’s support forum and, along with it, a suggestion for Sound Manager.

Sound Manager screen shot

The main Sound Manager screen which allows you to set any of the phone's volumes in one place.

Sound Manager allows you to control all of the device’s volume settings (system, ringer, notification, media, alarm, etc.) in one convenient place. A tap of the menu button brings up a “Vibrate Settings” option which, after choosing “vibrate whenever possible” under the notification settings, solved my notification problem!

Another potentially useful feature of Sound Manager is the ability to schedule volume changes to occur at different times. So, for example, you could set your phone to not ring while you’re normally in bed. Since my phone is in vibrate-only mode 90% of the time, though, this feature isn’t all that useful to me, especially since you can’t schedule vibration changes. If you could, I’d probably set it to not vibrate on notifications after 11:00 so that my phone won’t buzz all night as our systems send their nightly maintenance emails. Still, this app fixed my bigest complaint about my phone, so it definitely gets props from me.

See Sound Manager v2 in the Android Market.

Posted in Android, General

Ten Years Ago

Written by Kodiak on 09/11/2011 — Leave a Comment

Ten years ago today was a beautiful fall day as I recall. I was 11 days into my new career, and I got up and left for work, just like any other day.

I had been at work for maybe half an hour when my phone rang. It was my co-worker Carol asking if I had heard anything about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center. I immeadiately went to cnn.com. It took several minutes for the site to load, but I finally got a video stream open where I watched video of a plane, just as Carol had described, flying into the side of one of the WTC buildings. It was 9:03 and, at first, I thought I was watching a recap, but I became confused because it still said “live” on the screen. The video was choppy and I recall the audio being unintelligible, so it was hard to tell what was going on.

Carol then showed up at my office and we walked to the staff lounge down the hall, where there was a TV. Several people were already gathered there and it didn’t take long to confirm my fear that the video I had just watched was a second plane crash. I believe I was still watching as we learned that the third plane had crashed into the Pentagon, the south tower of the WTC collapsed (which we witnessed live), and that a fourth plane had crashed in Shanksville.

The rest of the day is a blur. I remember returning to my office and tuning my radio to a news station. I also remember my then-twelve-year-old sister emailing me to make sure I was OK, as since she didn’t know where Rochester was in relation to NYC. I distinctly remember that I didn’t get a whole lot of work done that day.

Its hard to believe it already been ten years.

Posted in General

Rochester Reference in Glory Days

Written by Kodiak on 08/17/2011 — Leave a Comment

Glory Days has always been one of my favorite Springsteen songs. With it stuck in my head, I got thinking about the video and decided to look it up on YouTube. I vaguely remember the video from watching it on MTV and Nick Rocks when I was a kind—I distinctly remembered the baseball field at the beginning and the band singing in a bar, but that was about it.

I was probably too young to notice the advertising behind the stage the last time I saw the video, not that I’d have had any clue what it was back then since I didn’t live in Rochester yet, but there’s a big Genny sign on the back wall! I wonder if Genesee Brewing Company paid for that to be there if it is was just coincidence?

Posted in General

Awesome Android App of the Day: Swype

Written by Kodiak on 08/02/2011 — Leave a Comment

As a little kid I used to love to finger paint. Finger painting is a great, natural way to express yourself and I loved how the paint felt in my fingers.

One of the things that I like about the Android OS is how customizable it is. Even some of the most basic features, like the on-screen keyboard, can be changed. And in the case of keyboards, there are several options. I’ve tried a few and found some obvious improvements to the default, but none that really seemed great. That is, until my friend Kelly introduced me to Swype.

Swype isn’t just a keyboard app, it is a whole new concept on text entry. At first glance, it looks like any keyboard, but as you start to use it, you’ll realize it’s something else. Drag your finger from key to key and Swype figures out what you want to say–with surprising accuracy, too.

Sample images of a Swype keyboard

Image from swypeinc.com

Swype is currently in beta and isn’t available in the Android Market. Instead, head over to the MySwype page and sign up for the beta program. You’ll receive an email within a couple of minutes with a link to the downloaded. Simply register your device in the installer and Swype will install, then you can to activate it via the Language and Keyboard Settings panel of your device. You’ll probably have to turn on the “unknown sources” option in the Application Settings panel as well in order to allow the non-Market install.

Swype is said to help speed up your typing, and I can see it doing that. Initially, though, it is a bit difficult to get used to–I am probably an above-average touch typist who uses a keyboard all day, but even I had trouble remembering where some letters when I broke away from the typical muscle memory of typing and started dragging my finger. With a bit of practice, though, I seem to be getting better—and I’ve only been using it for a day.

Wanting to challenge the app, I tried several words that were long and/or complex and Swype got most of them on the first try: “Czechoslovakia,” my co-worker’s first name, “Xiuli,” and my last name, “Pitoniak,” gave it no difficulty at all. It didn’t get my hometown, “Belchertown,” on the first try, and it doesn’t seem to know swear words (yes, I have the mentality of a second grader, I tried entering swear words). Fortunately it is really easy to add new words to the dictionary and, after adding “Belchertown,” it gets it right every time. After “Swyping,” Swype also provides a list of possible matches above the keyboard that you can select from if it doesn’t get your word right on its first guess. You can also use the keyboard in a more traditional manner when necessary.

Random Swyping brought up “ectoplasm,” which I found humorous given my love of the movie Ghostbusters. Swype had no problem with “Ghostbusters” either.

Unfortunately, Swype is most accurate when when you are more dilligent with your actions. When entering one or two words into a search box, it works fine. When trying to enter quotes from The IT Crowd some of the results were more humourous than the quotes themselves. Swype also doesn’t automatically capitalize proper nouns which is kind of annoying (it does capitalize the first letter of lines and sentences automatically, though). It is still in beta, though, so hopefully this will improve as the application matures.

Although it is still i Beta, Swype seems to be stable and well worth checking out. It’s currently free to use, but I suspect that will change when a stable release comes out. I could find no information published on what the cost of the final version might be. Nonetheless, with a few more tweaks to its accuracy, Swype could be well worth whatever the publisher might decided to charge. Now…if they could just simulate the feeling of finger paint on my fingers…

Posted in Android, Belchertown, Cool, General | Tagged , , , , , , ,
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