Fortunately there was an easy, if rather roundabout fix available: simply email the files to my Gmail account, and use the option there to open them with Google Docs. Bingo!

However, the announcement that really put the cat amongst the pigeons has been that the core development team may now be promoting what were formally called canonical plugins, now known as core plugins following the unpublished results of a poll in December. It appears that whilst attempting to address a genuine issue, the very idea of having plugins that stand in the limelight with an official stamp of approval has incensed many community plugin developers.

Some really excellent debate has been held which has, amongst other things, revealed that the initial go ahead for core plugins will be very limited; just three plugins, including an old, out-of-date plugin, a chunk hived off from the core, and a newly developed plugin. Nevertheless, the potential for these core plugins to have wide-reaching effects on the plugin development pool, create stagnation in the community and a greater top-down hierarchy is something that in the eyes of many developers and enthusiasts, has not been addressed.

The Pros

Most of the people arguing in favour of core plugins have the same ultimate motivation as the core developers. They don’t acknowledge the potential negative side-effects of the move, and if they do, they don’t consider them to be negative.

• Reliability. Perhaps the biggest driving issue for this move is that of plugin reliability. Most WordPress users will have come across the problem of using a plugin to such an extent that a site essentially relies on its features, or may even have been built around it, only to find that the plugin developer has got bored of his project, and the next version of WordPress breaks it entirely. Finding a suitable, working replacement may take a lot of time and effort, but will not guarantee that the situation won’t repeat itself.
• Security. Stemming largely from the above phenomenon, users making use of plugins that are no longer maintained by their developers find themselves loath to update their WordPress installations for fear of having their sites fall apart should those plugins no longer be compatible. They voluntarily take the risk of running an out-dated version with potential, known security flaws, unnecessarily making themselves a potentially viable target. Of course, even if that plugin works in the latest version of WordPress, it doesn’t preclude that the unmaintained plugin itself isn’t wide open to abuse, just another potential security hole in an otherwise fairly sound system.
• Support. There are literally thousands of plugins out there, the vast majority written by individuals who developed their plugins for their own special needs, and out of a bit of thought for the community, decided to share their creations with other users. They probably aren’t looking for any form of reimbursement, neither gold nor glory, other than a bit of gratitude. And whilst there may be some of that, they are far more likely to drown in a hail of support issues, bug fixing and feature requests, something they are neither capable or inclined to cope with. Some people post on the WordPress Extend site itself, many ask questions on the release post on the author’s blog, other plugin authors run their own forums, but even these may require that users sign up just to find how little information there is or how infrequently the author actually answers posts. Where exactly can users go then for help?
• Quality. The WordPress Extend repository proudly states that there are over 9,000 plugins with a cumulative 80 million downloads: and the vast majority of those are utter cruft. I don’t think anyone should have any illusions about that. A plugin is obviously more than just what it purports to do on the box, and a good plugin in particular is one that ticks more than just the boxes for functionality. It needs to have accurate and up-to-date documentation, how to install, use and (ideally) uninstall the plugin. There should be an accurate and preferably human-readable changelog detailing the key alterations, bug fixes and feature additions between each version. That’s a lot of work for one man, and I very rarely find a plugin that gets it all right: I’ve seen plugins which link to other pages for an up-to-date changelog that doesn’t include the last two versions, or others which link to a trac page without even the slightest attempt to translate that list in something regular users would likely understand. One popular plugin has documentation that is sadly so incomplete, that users point to posts on other blogs for fuller idea of how to use it.

The Cons

• Labels. Core, Canonical, Official, Godly, call it what you will, all those plugins which make it into the selected few and get the rubber stamp will destroy the efforts of many other plugin developers who weren’t so lucky. Regular users will of course browse through the official lists before turning to true third-party solutions to their problems. In what developers like to call the plugin free market, it really is a case of all plugins are equal, but some are more equal than others.
• Hierarchy. One of the other big concerns from developers is that the move presents an encroachment in an otherwise egalitarian ecosystem. Plugin developers invariably create their plugins to fulfill a particular need, their own or someone else’s. They are the ones with the final say when it comes to fixing bugs, adding features and writing the code. With an official plugin, however, who’s the one who gets the final say when it comes to adding new features? Who’s to decide which code gets included, which issues get priority, and so on?
• Monopoly. A developer sets up a WordPress site and finds he needs something that isn’t covered in the core software, and for whatever reason hasn’t been implemented or implemented well by another plugin, so writes his own and publishes it for others to use. Of course, in all likelihood there are other plugins already available, which may approach the issue from different angles, or with different feature sets. These plugins, however, essentially overlap in terms of their usage, and the ensuing competition should result in more well-rounded plugins that are up-to-date, flexible, reliable and secure. Only the fittest survive. At least, in theory. With these official plugins, all of this competition goes out of the window, technically more proficient plugins with better features and tight code, will be overlooked by users in favour of the canonicals.

A personal take

In case it wasn’t already clear, I would have to say that despite the objections, everytime I’ve gone through the arguments in my head I’ve come out in favour of the core plugins idea. One of WordPress’ greatest strengths has definitely been its flexibility and easy extensibility. As one critic of this decision wrote, the bar for entry is low, it doesn’t take a coding genious to install WordPress, decide he needs something extra, and write a plugin to cover it. Recent updates have also made the WordPress repository so much more accessible; users can now search for and install plugins right from the WordPress installation.

Yet the quality and reliability of those plugins remains a major issue. I’m not even referring to those coding one-offs with barely a hundred downloads that presumably make up the vast majority of the plugin repository.¹ Many of the more well-known solutions out there still fall at one or another hurdle as already mentioned, whether it concern support, timely updates or documentation. To say nothing of the millions of potential issues of interoperability.

One of the more interesting complaints that a number of developers had was that of having a top-down hierarchy dictating what goes into which plugin, something that I found entirely fallacious. As it stands, the vast majority of plugins I’ve come across are developed by a single person, with occasional patches sent in by more able users. They are the ones who decide what happens, what gets fixed, what gets included, when things are released. And if they decide to give up on the project, for us mere mortal users we can only hope that someone equally competent will pick up the reigns and provide support and future updates. Sadly, that isn’t necessarily going to be the case. The idea of the core plugins brings at least some stability to proceedings, a guarantee that updating WordPress won’t bring everything to a crashing halt, and the knowledge that the entire project doesn’t revolve around the mind of a single man. It’s the very principle that has ensured WordPress itself has grown from strength to strength, why should it bring nightmares to the plugin world?

The great alternative that many people seem to be lauding is that of making improvements to the tools available to plugin developers. As already mentioned, recent WordPress updates brought the regular users and the plugin repository much closer together, by making the latter navigable from within the regular WordPress installation. This change, as well as other updates on the repository itself, have ensured that users can see when a new version of their favourite plugin is available, as well as read a changelog (assuming there’s one available), and check to see if the current version will work on the latest version of WordPress.

But these changes need to continue to support good plugin development work, and help users separate out the chaff. One of the most popular plugins on the repository, with well over a million downloads, has has only 800 ratings from users: the compatibility of the latest version with the latest version of WordPress at the time of writing has been reported on by less than 10 users, and there’s no elucidation as to what’s going wrong for the few who’ve reported it to be broken. With that in mind, how are regular users expected to know which plugin to install, when they search for an open or popular term and are presented with a dozen or more plugins? And since these are all likely one-man projects, what will they do when the time invariably comes and the developer gives up on updating the plugin and moves on to new horizons? Actually mentioned facetiously, since one of the contentious issues of the core plugins is that they will be presented on their own page on the WordPress backend, but the idea of having an editor’s choice list of plugins that fulfill a selection of standards for inclusion actually wouldn’t go amiss as an alternative to the current turmoil.

All in all I can only say I welcome the move, and look forward to its repercussions. Attempting to ensure high standards, compatibility, support and open source development are all laudable goals, that neither preclude the disappearance of competition and variety, nor the ability to provide plugins that are commercially supported (just that the open source alternatives might be all the better!). And here’s to a core plugin for creating multilingual blogs, I’ve had enough trouble switching over from one system, to another, to another!

For anyone really interested in the debate, the posts on Weblog Tools Collection and One Fine Jay in particular are definitely the places to look.

1. Some actual statistics on plugin downloads and updates etc. from the repository would actually make interesting reading.

The Internet Trail

An email arrives from a company you’ve never heard of telling you about a change to their user policy. It could very well have been spam, except that the details are actually correct for a change, and you’re not being offered a credit card, mortgage, or a million dollars from a Nigerian general. The email details alterations to a privacy policy you probably never read, particularly since the company name itself doesn’t register. You’ve just stumbled upon your Internet trail, crumbs you’ve scattered around the place registering here and there over the years.

But just how big is your Internet footprint? If you’re a conscientious user who goes out of their way to protect their information and avoid pointless trivia on the Web, it could be that you’ve only left a few grains behind you. But for the rest of us, those little titbits could very well be quite liberally scattered throughout the Internet, potentially accessible to just about anyone with the time and inclination. Whilst the content we’ve created ourselves might be relatively humble, today’s social web has ensured that all but the most camera shy can end up having their pictures online for virtually anyone to see, and references to us can be found with just a few simple searches. But our Internet footprint isn’t just limited to those relevant bits which appear when we’re Googled—which after all is as much dependent on the uniqueness of our names or the fields in which we work—but simply, how many little instances there are of us out there.

Control of information

Just how much information about us is available out there on the Internet can sometimes come as an unpleasant surprise. French magazine Le Tigre set themselves the challenge of publishing the life story of a young French architect based solely on the information it could glean from Internet sites such as Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. The article appeared in the magazine in December, 2008, and a more tempered version that appeared at the gentleman’s behest can still be found here (in French). Certainly, the man in question was clearly au fait with the new world of social networking sites and the like, but none too concerned about his privacy. Information on his holidays, his former girlfriends, his work and friends, even such information as his mobile phone number and whereabouts were all gleaned from these sites with a scanty amount of detective work. In this case, the man was responsible for publishing a large amount of information about himself on the Internet, but how can any of us stop third parties doing the same? How many of the 350 million Facebook users has a real clue about its privacy settings? And how many of those are friends with people who are conscious about controlling the information available about them?

A captcha of logins

Signing up to a social networking site, you might be forgiven for thinking that at least then you can have some form of control over the information available about us. But there is more information available on the Internet for those with a desire to look for it. Just think about how many sites out there you have an account for. Just how many little instances of ourselves are there out in the wild? Email accounts, social networking sites, online banking, multimedia sites, shops, forums, services, blogs. Even just counting the ones we use with any amount of regularity, that could easily amount to a few dozen user accounts, and that’s to say nothing of the various gizmos we use that aren’t accessed via the Web, such as instant messenging platforms, backup or VoIP services, online games etc. More importantly, how many other extra accounts are there out there from services we’ve only merely sampled and don’t use with any frequency? How many accounts out there belong to users who have signed up to give a website a trial and perhaps never came back? Or worse, have been forced to sign up in order to access essentially free material, or to leave a one-off comment, and left their account ever after disused?

Personally, I would not be surprised if my own number of instances scattered around the Internet included over a hundred accounts. People more active on the web no doubt have many more. Those accounts may not all contain the same information—different usernames, passwords, email addresses, heck, sometimes even different names—but they are all linked to me, and the differences are not usually so bold. Most of us probably have a particular username and password combination that we like to use; it makes our lives easier if we only have to remember a single combination for all of our online activity. Occasionally those plans go awry when we find our username has already been taken, forcing us to adopt an arbitrary modification, like adding a number to the end, or an underscore in the middle. Other times our passwords have to change to accommodate some rules for a particular service, meaning our regular password has to suddenly grow or lose a number or special character, or grow or shrink accordingly. But in general, our online presences are cloned copies of our logins sprinkled across the Internet like a particular allele in the gene pool.

Well, so what? It’s not like these details are generally put on public display. Except that they can be. Try typing your own unique username into a site like User Name Check. And all it would take is for one of those sites to have a flaw in their security for someone to potentially have access to any number of services you’ve become a member of over the years. Only recently, a popular social website with over 30 million members proved to be a ripe source for the usernames and passwords of all its members. As detailed here, this represented a pretty basic flaw in security, yet despite its popularity, the site nevertheless failed to protect the information of its members. Would you really trust every little site and service you’ve signed up to to do the same?

The circle of trust

The web has to a large extent now grown to become an extension of the societies in which we live. Web presences have been something of a standard for most reasonable-sized businesses for a long time, and many small outfits have long since followed suit. Yet the last few years have seen that requirement spread to the general populace. It seems like every man and his dog has a Facebook account.¹ Information about us that would once require some serious detective work can now be gleaned from the comforts of your own home, with a bit of patience and a supply of coffee. The potential is still there to control how some of that information is shared, but only to a certain extent. And how many people are actually aware or savvy enough to look after that information is an entirely different matter.

Nevertheless, we are usually willing to place a lot of faith in the many online services we subscribe to, often without so much as reading the privacy policy or terms and conditions. In order to save ourselves the heartache of memorising different usernames or passwords for those services, we tend to limit ourselves to a small handful, all too often to some of those found on lists such as this one. With the potential for any one of those services to become victim of an attack and reveal to unknown third parties information including, but not limited to, usernames, email addresses, passwords, personal and payment details, it seems borderline lunacy that we leave so many unnecessary little copies of our details scattered around the Internet. This latter point is particularly true if you use the same username and password combination for the majority of sites. On the Internet we are willing to accept many into our circle of trust, but it still only takes one site to be broken for us to have a potentially large headache on our hands.

So what can we do to minimise our risks? Simply follow the same rules of common sense you would adhere to in the real world: keep your passwords secure and make yourself a smaller target; actually read the privacy policies and terms and conditions before agreeing to anything; acquaint yourself with the privacy settings on social networking sites, and keep control of the information about yourself; if you run a site of your own, don’t force users to sign up for an account unless absolutely necessary; and as a general Internet user, try to limit the number of instances you create, and delete the ones you no longer use.

1. Or else Bebo, MySpace, Orkut, Friendster, LinkedIn etc.

Whilst that already caused some consternation when documents would be sent to the wrong machine, it was compounded by the fact that if the printer was offline at the time, Windows XP would spend 100% CPU time trying to find the damn thing, leaving the PC highly unresponsive until the print queue was manually cleared. Meaning the options were between remembering to change the printer on every print job, or forgetting and rebooting the machine in between.

Fortunately, we found the handy little script below on some forum or other (praise be to the original author). It stops Windows’ printer service, deletes any waiting print jobs, and then restarts the service. Copy the lines below into a batch file (or into a simple text file and change its extension to .bat) or alternatively download the same script as a file.

@echo off
echo.
echo Purging the print queue . . .
net stop Spooler
echo Deleting all print jobs . . .
ping localhost -n 4 > nul
del /q %SystemRoot%\system32\spool\printers\*.*
net start Spooler
echo Done!
ping localhost -n 4 > nul

Steam

I’ve been using Steam for a fair while now, in fact pretty much since the beginning, and have seen the program grow on from its fairly humble origins. There are now hundreds of titles available, including games from big-name publishers and independent game houses alike, and the usual crashes and quirks that afflicted the early releases are pretty much gone. Nevertheless, there are still a number of key areas in which Steam continues to live up to standards, at times making using the system a bit of a nightmare. This is a list of some of those issues which in my eyes prevent Steam from becoming a really top class product, delivering everything the platform really promises. Some of these issues admittedly have their origins outside of Valve’s headquarters, but the way in which they are dealt with only compounds the problems further, for both customers and clients.

Steam Friends

It’s an instant messenger on a budget. Think of your favourite system, but without any of the frills. There are no file transfers, no webcams, none of the various add on junk you find with most of the big name instant messaging clients. And let’s face it, Steam Friends is all the better for it. It’s a simple service that does what it needs to. At least most of the time. Which is exactly where this little service fails to live up. Steam Friends suffers so much downtime, it makes you wonder what the system is actually running on; it crashes about as often as Windows 95.

For the most part, that downtime isn’t much of a problem, since few people use it for anything important, and even if the service is up and down like a yo-yo, the periods of downtime generally aren’t particularly long. But the outages are sufficiently frequent to leave you wishing that Steam really did have some of those standard added extras common to other instant messaging services. The lack of being able to send offline messages means you end up having to hold staccato conversations trying to keep in time to the downtime conductor’s baton. And with no chat logs there’s no recourse to checking what was last said if you happen to close the window. Which can be doubly troublesome if you happen to have the Steam overlay open at the same time, since the messages people send might appear on the window on your desktop, but not on the game overlay, meaning you’ll still have to ALT+TAB out of the game you’re in to read the messages, one of the supposedly key advantages of using Steam Friends in the first place!

Why hasn’t this API been opened up to third party clients? Why can users navigate the Steam Communities pages, leaving messages and reading profiles, but have to run Steam as soon as they want to send a live message? The downtime, exclusivity, and lack of ‘regular’ frills leave Steam Friends to be a last resort mechanism, when it has the potential to be a very promising communication tool.

Steam Group Chat

Similar to the Friends service above, Steam’s Group Chat provides every group on the Steam Communities page with their own little chat room. Very generous, very appealing, but does anyone actually use it? I’m sure there are some groups out there in the dark corners of the gaming world who actually pop into those chat rooms and spout some drivel, but for the rest of us, I really can’t see the point. Most other groups have already come up with their own solution to such problems, using IRC or other such technologies, and those who haven’t will have difficulty finding the Group Chat options anyway. If group administrators had the ability to tie in their chat rooms to other pieces of software, particularly IRC for example, these rooms actually might find some use, but as it is they stand pretty exclusively neglected among Steam’s various other appendages.

Steam Prices

One of the key supposed advantages of buying games via an online content distribution service such as Steam is that the savings made by the ‘publisher’ are passed on to the customer. And not to do Steam any discredit, the customer has certainly had the opportunity to benefit from some great prices and bargains, in many cases undercutting in-store prices considerably. But that isn’t always the case. Particularly since the introduction of prices in Euros and Pounds in December, 2008, customers have been able to see the discrepancies between the various zones. Especially in the Eurozone this could leave games for sale that were actually more expensive than their box-and-disc in-store equivalents, and significantly more expensive than the prices listed in pounds or US dollars.

Whilst Valve cannot be held to blame for the price differences of many of the titles chosen by other publishers and distributors, the discrepancies can often also be seen with Valve’s own titles, most especially when games are put on limited-term offers. Of course, some users can work around the restrictions, by having others buy them games as a gift (see below) or else logging in themselves in another country, and making their purchases in the relevant currency.

Steam Payment

Of course, giving your money to Valve for Steam purchases should be one of the easiest things in the world, but unfortunately, this just isn’t the case. Probably related to the differences in pricing mentioned above, Steam has some pretty pernickety requirements when making purchases above the payment method used and the location you’re buying from. I’ve had my Steam account locked from purchases on two or three separate occasions, without notification, for using a payment option on another account (these were the days before Steam Gifts). Clearly that’s one step away from money laundering. And only recently, my payment was refused because the address of my payment option wasn’t in the country I was buying from. This despite there being a clear option to check a box whether or not I was currently in the stated country; quite what this option is for if it is irrelevant to them, I can’t say. Is there something particularly insolent about making purchases from another country that I wasn’t aware of?

Steam Geography

As a system capable of delivering content to pretty much anywhere with an Internet connection, it’s perfectly reasonable that Steam acknowledges local laws and adjusts its own system to abide by them. This applies to a large extent to the pricing issues mentioned above, where various distributors only have the right to publish games within certain geographic locales. In which case, it’s up to the people of those nations to find workarounds, or to complain to their governments if they feel they are being unfairly treated. But it does lead to some rather irritating and odd situations when using Steam’s services. Take one of Valve’s own recently released titles like Left 4 Dead 2. The game generated a little controversy with its content, and ended up requiring Valve to publish milder versions for customers in Australia and Germany, according to the laws in those countries. Naturally the government of Germany feels that its citizens are a little more puerile and paramnesic in character than the rest of the world, and didn’t want to risk having a few people see a bit of gore. They might have been incited to invade Poland again, who knows. Anyway, buying a copy of the game in one of those countries will result in the customer having a permanently crippled version of the game,¹ which as far as I’m aware, cannot be fixed easily. On the other hand, loading up an account with a copy of the game purchased in another country will present the full flavour version that was supposed to be banned.

Steam Gifts

As mentioned earlier, I had my Steam account blocked from purchases in earlier days because I had the audacity to use my payment methods to log in to other people’s accounts and buy them games. Fortunately, with the introduction of Steam Gifts, this no longer became necessary. When buying a game, just tick the box that makes this available as a gift, and the copy will go to the person of your choosing; similarly, should you buy a game that you already own in a bundle, you can simply give the extra copy away.

The idea is all well and good, except for the limitations listed above about payment options, added to the problems of products only being available in certain versions in certain countries. But this is compounded by the fact that buying a gift means delivering that gift on the same instant; if you actually do want to buy someone a present for a specific occasion and want to keep it as a surprise, you’ll either have to concoct your own time-delay private email address, buy the game on the special day, or just apologise your gift is coming early!

Steam Accounts

Buy a game, a book, a car, a house, or a tube of toilet paper, and you generally find you have the right to sell it on to someone else. Alright, second-hand toilet paper is still a growth market, but you get the picture. With Steam, buy something and Valve reserve all rights for you to resell your items, including the account you bought the games on, refusing you even the right to “sell, charge others for the right to use or otherwise transfer [an] account.” Some might consider this to be a reasonable condition, for the lower prices and level of service Steam offers, but for those of us used to selling off old copies of games, the physical versions of that software does maintain some of its appeal. Perhaps more disconcerting is the fact that tying the serial keys of games bought in the shops to a Steam account can render them similarly unsaleable.

Steam Files

Just how does Steam organise the files it puts on your system? Is there actually meant to be some method to the madness? Whilst I can see that for the most part, Valve have little say over how its clients utilise the Steam system, Valve’s own titles are about as confusing as the lot of them. Most of Valve’s titles appear in the Steam\steamapps directory as compressed .gcf files, whilst third-party titles appear under the Steam\steamapps\common directory. Valve’s Left 4 Dead title, however, does the latter. Some of the titles store their user files in sensible places under in the user directory, others store them in their own folders in the common directory, whilst most of Valve’s titles go one step further, creating extra files per Steam account under the steamapps directory. That’s difficult enough when trying to backup your savegames, locate your screenshots, or edit a config file. But the latter variety causes even more problems if you have even just a few Steam accounts being used on a single PC; since each account creates its own personalised files, items such as cached models, sounds, third-party maps and extensions are all replicated, swelling the size of the installations entirely unnecessarily. I sometimes wonder how LAN centres which have several users signing in per day deal with the associated cruft (ignoring for the moment Valve’s Cyber Café Program).

Steam Backup

One of the obvious (dis)advantages of Steam, depending on which side of the fence you’re sitting, is the ability to download your games from wherever you are logged in. If your Internet connection is fast enough, you can get your games downloaded ready for play the moment they are ‘released’; faster than it can be delivered in most cases, certainly faster than having to get your copy from the shops. But for those of us with slow connections, downloading items from Steam can be a slow and painful experience, and one that you don’t like to have repeated every time you decide to switch hardware. Which is why the implementation of a backup system to Steam was pretty much a no-brainer. Select Backup games from the main Steam menu and you can have your downloads all neatly arranged in CD or DVD sized chunks, ready to be reinstalled at the touch of a button.

Not a bad idea, except it functions about as well as combing your hair with barbed wire. The backup process is fairly slow, slower than simply copying the files manually, but that’s reasonably forgiveable since it does at least chop up the files in reasonable sized chunks. The real problems come when trying to reinstall games using the backed up files. Installing more than one game at a time left my Steam program actually trying to download the games from the Internet, exactly what the backups were supposed to avoid, and actually left the program so unresponsive I had to kill it. Trying to install the programs one at a time often threw up the error that the servers were too busy to handle my request; when I looked again, the games were being updated from the Internet. Not too busy to suck up my bandwidth I see! Third time lucky and the game actually did start installing from the backups, albeit as slowly as it was backed up in the first place, and for each game I had to go through the same rigmarole, which would have been even more painful had I actually had the backups spread across half a dozen DVDs.

Valve

However, the number one thing holding Steam back is Valve. You can normally draw a line in the sand separating companies into those with decent moral standards, and Microsoft, and Valve would almost certainly fit into the former category. They listen to their customer base, they generally keep their products up-to-date, fixing bugs and releasing new content for free, and they opened up the Steam platform to what are essentially their competitors. Each title released is like a mini-celebration in the industry, and is generally met with decent reviews and rewardingly good sales figures.

Yet the power they wield with Steam is not to be underestimated. Since no sales figures are actually published, one can only speculate, though it is bound to be a considerable proportion of the online distribution market. This monopoly type situation is particularly problematic when you consider Steam to be a marketplace run by one of the main competitors. Even if there is no deliberate attempt on Valve’s part to give themselves pride of place, with such power comes great responsibility that should not rest in uneven hands. I’ve seen days in which one of Valve’s titles will take pride of place in their store front, ahead of game of the year winners and new releases. And I forget now where I read it, but the number of people Valve actually has working on Steam is incredibly small, something like half a dozen staff. If it were properly managed, all of the above issues with the platform could no doubt in some way be addressed, for the benefit of customers and clients alike.

Summary

Fair play to Valve, they had the idea and they ran with it, dealing with the early teething problems and creating a popular and successful piece of software, and they deserve the financial reward for it. Ideally, however, Steam should now be hived off from Valve as a separate, independent company, to focus on the equal online distribution of titles from all software houses. It’s surprising in fact that many of the larger publishing houses haven’t already pushed for such a move, or made overtures to the courts. Who knows, with that bit of extra development, they could even get round to porting the Steam platform over to other operating systems and opening up the market further. As things stand, however, that little development push on Valve’s part is lacking, and this potentially well functioning, open marketplace is slightly stifled by the monopolistic nature of Valve’s position. Steam is not a bad product. Far from it, the complaints in this list are mostly areas lacking polish, oversights that a little more focused development would soon fix, or issues that arise from Steam’s interaction with national laws and distributors rights. But the basis is certainly there, for a free, open marketplace that gaming enthusiasts and developers alike can benefit from.

1. As an aside, I’ve tried the crippled version of the game’s demo, and have to say the changes are pretty drastic. Instead of reacting bloodily when challenged, dead enemies instead disappear unrealistically into the ether, an effect which is rather surprising and at times quite confusing. Do German soldiers in Afghanistan get a shock when Taleban soldiers actually start bleeding when shot?

define('TEMPLATEPATH', '/path/to/theme/directory');
define('STYLESHEETPATH', '/path/to/theme/style.css');

Fairly innocuous, until you actually change your WordPress theme, in which case those long forgotten about resource savers will leave you with little more than a blank page to diagnose your problem. If this is the case though, just updating the lines or commenting them out will leave you with a workable system once again.

Fortunately, I managed to find an easy solution. Fire up the 7-zip File Manager, and rename the file from there. Bingo – don’t ask me how Vista couldn’t manage it, or indeed why 7-zip could, but at least now you can delete the blasted thing! Kudos to the guys on this forum for the answer.

The Fold

Many of us are probably familiar with the idea advanced in the early days of the Internet, that most users don’t know how to scroll through a website. Today that seems pretty unbelievable. The vast majority of websites, and indeed many of the most regularly visited, not only favour scrolling but to a large extent rely on it for navigation. So have the rules of the so-called ‘fold’ changed since the Internet’s inception? And what role should it play in decisions made regarding a website’s design today?

Viewing the web can be a very personal experience. Depending on your very own choice of browser, monitor or resolution, the web can look a very different place. If you’ve ever for some reason been forced to view one of your regularly visited websites on a much lower resolution monitor, for example, you’ll know what I mean. What once appeared spacious and easy to read suddenly seems squashed and cluttered. The cute little thumbnail images now take up good chunks of room and force you to scroll around them to get at the text. And should that site employ a fixed-width design that is wider than the current resolution, even more space goes to waste with the appearance of a side scrollbar.

Of course, well designed websites take their average readership into account, using accrued data to work out profiles that fit the viewing set up of their users. But finding out where that ‘fold’ lies can nevertheless be a tricky business, even armed with knowledge regarding the average resolutions used, given the various toolbars and other gimmicks most browsers can come equipped with, to say nothing of the size of the browser window, the workspace of the operating system, or whether the site will be viewed ‘zoomed’.

So does the fold even really matter? Jeff Atwood over on his blog at Coding Horror posits that scrolling fast became something of a litmus test for web users. Scrolling soon proved to be a prerequisite skill for web surfing, and thanks to the principle of survival of the fittest, every web user today should be a scroller. Yet old ideas die hard. Trying to cram as much content as possible into the top section of a web page is pretty common practice even today, and more graphically inventive or intensive preamble to content hidden beyond the fold are more of a rarity than they perhaps otherwise would be. The fear that content not immediately displayed on a page will go unread then, is perhaps given users’ willingness to scroll unfounded.  But just because everyone is in the position to do something, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to do it.

As the research over at cxpartners points out, scrolling is par for the course, and in fact having content that is obviously cut-off or clearly points to content further down a page increases the amount of time users will spend scrolling through it. That isn’t to say there aren’t any pitfalls to avoid, and one thing that can seriously distract users and disguise potential content hidden offscreen is the use of strong, horizontal lines. Particularly if these should ever happen to coincide with the bottom of a browser window, such lines can act as a mental barrier, as users expect the content to end. A second pitfall can be the use of scrollable content embedded in the page, which remains hidden from the main scrollbar, an tool often used to gauge further content according to the results.

But the most important conclusion drawn from the test is that sites should avoid trying to cram too much content above the fold. Assuming that users will be drawn in by their first impressions of a site is one thing; concluding that they will only care for what they first see is entirely another. There are things that certainly belong in that noble place above the fold, depending on the type of site. A site logo/link to the home page, the main site navigation, the search form, a link to the checkout, the login form/registration link. We’ve come to expect that such staples of the web find themselves in an easy to find location above the fold. Sites which break these conventions, however, are not unheard of.

The original reason I started this little post was seeing Chris Coyier’s personal blog redesign detailed over at CSS-Tricks. I was particularly impressed by the use of custom designs for various pages, such as this one and this one. What does this have to do with the fold? Because with this miniature resolution I’m using, there’s little content to see on first impressions, and only the content of the entries themselves to draw the reader further in. What made the pages particularly inviting, however, was certainly this attempt at customisation, a move towards giving each of his entries a more personal look suited to the content it is delivering. This step towards a magazine-style approach to displaying content is, in my eyes, a very welcome one. Of course, Coyier’s site is a personal blog and can perhaps be forgiven for breaking the other ‘rules’,¹ but I hope his reckless approach to the fold, along with throwing more colourful and individual content out into his posts will prove to be a success and an inspiration to others.

1. In my opinion the site suffers from a poor navigation and a lack of search functions.

[Via African Politics Portal]

Bridge solutions

Many of us have found ourselves in this position. Your business or group make use of an online system, such as a forum, wiki, blog etc., which you then wish to augment or combine with some other system. How you go about doing that, of course, depends entirely on your goals and the systems you’re trying to use together. Design and styling are usually the least of those worries.

The problem which consistently presents itself when attempting such a combination is what to do with the userbase. Whilst this issue can sometimes be simply ignored, in the hope that only a small number of the users of one system will need access to the second, this isn’t always the case. When it comes to one userbase requiring access to two or more systems, the first question that needs to be answered is whether the user information should be shared, enabling a unified login procedure amongst other benefits. Requiring users to sign up to various different pieces of the puzzle is a time-consuming process, and one that many will find confusing and unnecessary. And since different online systems often have conflicting requirements when it comes to usernames and passwords, for example, this can also lead to more lost password checks and work for the system administrator. However, programming such functionality oneself certainly isn’t within the realms of the abilities of all of us, and keeping such modifications functioning across various systems and versions can be a painful procedure.

Fortunately, in certain instances such functionality may well be freely available, usually in the form of third-party hacks or bridges, as they are often known.¹ Installing such addons is, in comparison to a home grown solution, much easier, safer and reliable. But reliance on a third piece of software does not guarantee that all of the features required will be available, and it also presents its own set of security issues. Aside from the software hiding its own potential security pitfalls, it can also lead to services being inoperable after an upgrade, if it isn’t kept regularly up-to-date with the latest versions of the systems it is meant to bridge, and in so doing advocates running outdated software.

This post provides no answers or alternatives. In fact, I’m not even sure if what I’m proposing is already available, or otherwise feasible or not. The news on the OpenTTD project website was the first to jog my mind about this, wondering exactly how they had solved their problems, and whether or there might be a simpler, more user-friendly option. Essentially, my idea would be for a new open source project, to offer a simple solution to the issue of shared user details across a variety of different online systems, be they forums, wikis, blogs, bugtrackers, etc. Beyond handling simple login information, the system could be used by administrators for handling various user-related issues, such as assigning general rights and permissions, handling groups, cookies, password requirements, user info and so on, but the basic benefit would be a central one-key-fits-all solution for unifying user accounts across a variety of different systems.

Does such a system already exist somewhere, one that is user-friendly, free-to-use, and supporting a wide variety of platforms? If not, would such a system even be feasible, given the different requirements and standards of the different systems, and the various issues of security and privacy involved?

1. Take this list of WordPress/forum bridges as an example.

Classics of their medium, but which will have a harder time in the future?

In comparison to a medium like cinema, computer games suffer from a particularly poor level of longevity. The vast majority of films can still happily be viewed today, often in an updated format, though keeping to the original production. That isn’t to suggest that films do not become dated, nor that more than just distribution formats are updated in later productions. Only recently I had the privilege of watching a once lost silent Polish film, A Strong Man (Mocny Człowiek), rediscovered in 1997. As there were no hints as to what musical accompaniment was meant to be played with the film, the DVD was released with a modern ambient style, that took a short while to get used to, but actually fit the film’s plot and style rather beautifully. On the whole, however, a film produced fifty years ago can be viewed with much the same clarity today as on the day it was released.

With computer games this issue is all too obviously unsolved. Not only do games age, as with any form of media entertainment, but they do so astonishingly quickly. The systems in place to support many of them gradually fade away, the communities surrounding them normally dissipate before too long (if there even is one), and in many cases the hardware and software required to run them simply move on.

To compare games to cinema is perhaps unwise, but many of the principle facets remain the same. Older games may not have the same visual complexities of today’s successors, nor the scope of their worlds or the detail of their mechanics, but their storylines and gameplay can remain as fresh as ever. A game such as Tetris will never die, on the basis of its blinding simplicity and addictive gameplay – but most importantly thanks to the myriad of rewrites, updates and clones that have kept the game alive to this day. Even the signature theme tune will live on as a classic example of gaming heritage.

Yet for every classic such as Tetris that has survived or been adapted for the modern era, there are simply thousands that have been essentially lost under the rolling wheels of technological advancement. Worst of all is that whilst many games become unplayable as operating systems and hardware develop, and as publishers stop producing them, copyright holders generally maintain their grasp on the games and consign efforts to keep them alive to pirates. This is quite frankly one of the more maddening aspects of computer game development, that golden classics should be consigned to history or piracy, since they cannot legally be made available for free, and cannot be purchased in any store that isn’t still anticipating the Millennium bug, is in my eyes simply a crime. All power to the outfits that make their games available after a certain period, or like id software have a policy of releasing their source code for free after a certain period.

Nevertheless, all is not Doom or Gloom. This post was originally inspired when I came across the remake of a classic of the 1980s game Ghostbusters, entirely rewritten for today’s machines. No doubt the original is out there somewhere, and playable via one of the many decent emulator programmes available, but trying to acquire and run these things can be a challenging experience. The more popular platforms have well developed, stable emulators with a lot of support, and finding ROMs for these isn’t particularly challenging, but for the more obscure platforms and titles, this can still be a frustruting and fruitless search.

Fortunately, some really great work has been done on a number of projects to keep certain niches alive. The ScummVM project has done some excellent work to make a number of classic adventure games playable on today’s operating systems. Quite how they’ve run into battles with the LucasArts legal team when trying to rescue their back catalogue from the dustbin is beyond me. A number of projects have also arisen around the selection of older id software games, such as Doomsday, which providing an updated game engine for Doom, Heretic and Hexen, helped in large part to id software’s laudable policy of releasing the source code (not to mention having the temerity to port many of their games in the first place). With a more general aim, the DOSBox project empowers a great many classics with a new lease of life, although this can be a tricky process, made much easier by the D-Fend Reloaded frontend. As per the recent entanglements with Worms, however, even this can cause some headscratching.

My favourite project of this ilk, however, has to be the astoundingly good OpenTTD. The ultimate goal being to create an entirely free re-working of Chris Sawyer’s classic Transport Tycoon Deluxe, the project certainly sits on shaky legal ground for attempting to present a copy of the game, but that aside the software is able to utilise the original game’s graphics and sounds, and not only recreate the original experience, but also improve upon it. Amongst other merits are the plethora of options, the feature additions which are well within the tone of the game, and of course the brilliantly updated multiplayer options which has given this game a decidedly extended lease of life. I could happily go on raving about this project, but that’s probably best left for another post altogether.

One might like to believe that the future looks brighter as far as gaming longevity is concerned. Distribution platforms such as Valve’s Steam allow games to be ‘published’ long after the traditional cycle, and has even been in large part responsible for resurrecting some old classics (e.g. Commander Keen). It may also spur developers to keep their catalogues ‘current’, at least as far as running on the latest Microsoft operating system. Nevertheless, the modern computer game has certainly moved far from its humble origins. The classic games of yesteryear that have remained with us on account of their unique simplicity, are mimicked today in the largely plotless gameplay oriented multiplayer games of the Counter-Strike or Unreal Tournament ilk. There are of course more recent and highly successful moves in the direction of more immersive and detailed worlds, and although World of Warcraft alone probably accounts for well more than half of all players of MMORPGs, clearly in terms of gaming attributes the multiplayer aspect has grown to highly significant proportions.

Ultimately then, whilst there are numerous well-intentioned projects out there to attempt to rescue many classic games from the grave, will the future of gaming make that job actually harder rather than easier to achieve? Certainly any multiplayer gaming experience relies to some extent on the quality of the players involved, but setting up a multiplayer game of Doom is probably easier today than it was when it was released, the only thing needed are the players. But for games that rely on servers and a myriad other players cannot really hope to be recreated in the future, in the same way that an old DOS or Amiga game can be rewritten or emulated. In the future, will we be forced to look back upon a game like World of Warcraft as a phenomenon?

Basic tools

For simplicity we used D-Fend Reloaded, a handy graphical frontend for DOSBox. This emulates the DOS environment that allows Worms to run exactly as it did when it was released. The installation should be pretty straightforward, simply download and run the latest installer package.

Installing the game

Depending on your source, the game itself will need to be installed. It may be possible to find this game on abandonware sites, or lurking elsewhere in the tubes, but I’ll assume you have the game on CD.

1. Launch D-Fend Reloaded.
2. In the window which pops up, double-click the entry “DOSBox DOS”. You should be presented with a classic C:\> DOS prompt.
3. Enter the following commands, replacing “d:” with the drive letter your CD is loaded in:

   mkdir WORMS
   mount d d:\
   d:\
   install

4. This should run the Worms install programme. Install the game, ensuring to choose C:\WORMS as the installation target.

Install the game via DOSBox

Setting up

Assuming the previous stage completed successfully, you now only need to set up Worms in D-Fend Reloaded.

1. Press F3, or select Add –> Add with wizard…
2. In the ensuing guide, select DOSBox if it isn’t already highlighted, and click Next.
3. Select the programme to be run (normally .\VirtualHD\WORMS\WORMS.BAT) and optionally the setup programme (this will depend on your version of the game) and click Next.
4. The programme should automatically choose a template that matches your game (either Worms or Worms Plus). If this isn’t the case, you can choose one of these templates from under the Use user-defined auto setup template list. Click Next.
5. The next screen simply contains details of the game and how it will be displayed in the D-Fend menu. Alter these if you wish, otherwise click Next.
6. The final screen should list the drives mounted by DOSBox when the game is run. Currently this should only include .\VirtualHD as the C drive, but we also need to mount the CD. Click Add… and in the following window change the Type to CD-drive and select the root of your optical drive as the Folder for mounting. The Drive letter should be D and the Label can be WORMS or anything else for that matter. Click Ok.
7. Before closing this wizard, tick the box labelled Open profile editor when wizard closes, and then click Ok.
8. For some reason, the sound is disabled by default, so in this final menu, we need to select Sound and then tick the box Activate sound. Click Ok.

Worms listed in D-Fend Reloaded

Play

There should now be a second entry in the D-Fend menu in addition to DOSBox, which should run the game in virtually all its former glory! We still ran into a few problems with our version, namely that the intro FMV sequence had to be skipped (by pressing S when prompted) and the few little FMV sequences in the game itself ran extremely jerkily, and were better off being by-passed altogether (pressing Escape). More disappointingly, the CD music refused to play, an ingredient sorely missed! Otherwise, the game failed to disappoint any of those expectations heaped upon us by nostalgia.

Worms menu screen

Fortunately, an excellent guide was available on Alex King’s blog. For more information and follow-up comments, you should definitely read the full post, but here’s a summary of the method that worked for me.

Note that you should always backup your database before attempting any such conversions. WP-DBManager comes highly recommended.

If you have access to phpMyAdmin:

1. Use phpMyAdmin to dump the database (this should be in UTF-8 by default).
2. Open the dumped file in Notepad or similar, and save it to ANSI format. In Notepad++ you can find this under “Format” and “Convert to ANSI”.
3. Open the saved file in your web browser, and then change the character encoding to UTF-8.
4. Copy the contents of the current display, and paste this into a new document in Notepad. Check that any and all references to CREATE TABLE within this file use the character set ‘utf8′. If this is not the case, find and replace all references of the previous character set (e.g. from ‘latin1′ to ‘utf8′).
5. Save this new file to yourfilename.sql using UTF-8.
6. If you are moving the database, import the newly changed file into the new database, modify your wp-config.php file and then check your site.
7. If you are changing your database in situ, drop the affected tables (you already backed up, right?), then import the new file and check your site.

If you have shell access, you could also try using the script detailed here or here.

Reproduced entirely without permission.

Free hotspots in your area?

In the last year, I heard how Dublin City Council had given up on plans to run a free, city-wide wireless Internet programme on the grounds that it was against EU regulations, anti-competitive and bad for the consumer. As Ireland currently has some of the slowest and most expensive broadband options available in Europe, it seems obvious how the consumer will benefit from having to continue paying for their poor services. But there could be a nicer alternative to centralised WiFi. In a post much earlier this year, Bruce Schneier generated a lot of debate when he claimed he leaves his wireless network open and unprotected for just about anyone to use. This he considers a common courtesy, and whilst acknowledging the risks, considers them to be largely inflated. As many of the people commenting on his article or reporting about it elsewhere point out, there are risks involved, and as far as many of the people in authority are concerned, his common courtesy leaves him much more culpable. Many ISPs stipulate that sharing a connection in this manner would be a breach of contract, and from a legal perspective infringements undertaken by someone piggybacking the network could result in a rather unwelcome investigation for the owner. Needless to say, much of what Schneier writes makes sense. Wireless protection, like most forms of security, can only really be seen as a form of prevention. If someone were to hack his protected network and then carry out their nefarious activities, from a legal standpoint would his defense be any the stronger? ISPs may demand their customers run protected wireless networks, but at what level should we consider a network secure? I’ve been in places where the wireless was only secured by WEP, and even making the owner aware of its deficiencies only resulted in a shrug or a blank look. As is the case with many technologies, wireless was developed and put to market as soon as possible, and security concerns are only dealt with as and when they appear. It should be given a higher priority, and as Schneier points out, if a user intends to use his laptop on other open networks, such as those often provided to customers in airports, hotels, universities or cafés, a far more dangerous prospect as far as network security is concerned, it makes sense for that security to start at home. There are however several downsides to Schneier’s argument. From a security perspective, one of the first rules is always to present as small and undesirable a target as possible. Leaving a wireless connection open certainly allows would-be hackers an easier point of access, and raises its profile. Also, should the network be in a densely populated area, the amount of network piggybacking could quickly become an issue, to the extent that there could be extra charges or a reduction of service quality from the ISP. Furthermore, it is entirely plausible that users stealing bandwidth could find themselves charged, with the sensible argument running that even if someone leaves their door unlocked, walking in and stealing the TV would still be considered theft (even if the insurance company would term it negligence). Ultimately, whilst Schneier opens his network up to people in good faith, this could cause problems for people who aren’t security minded, or even for those thinking of using such open networks. Whilst a number of people have come up with their own solutions to the issue (such as putting a telephone number as the network’s SSID and giving people access if they should call), FON have turned it into something of a business model. Essentially, the system relies on users signing up to allow their connections to be shared with other FON members. An entirely distinct wireless network is enabled which any FON member can access using their details to gain Internet access. In return, members can earn some money if people pay to access the Internet through their access point, and of course have the benefit of being able to use other FON members’ connections when they are on the move. The FON map shows just where those hotspots are, and there’s already quite a surprising amount of coverage in some areas. In the UK it seems that FON has made a partnership with the leading broadband supplier BT, who would sell access to the Internet via the FON network. The interesting corollary of this of course is that BT will thus derive some revenue from the reselling of its rivals’ bandwidth (which may already have been purchased from BT). Personally I would consider running an open network in principle, but for a few minor problems. The first is that this building is so adequately wired that the wireless option on the router serves little purpose except when the occasional guest prefers to use it, otherwise the wireless is disabled. More troublesome is the fact that since our broadband provider limits our monthly usage, it could easily be considered an expense to run an open wireless network should anyone feel obliged to download vast amounts of data over it. Furthermore if anyone were to be leeching bandwidth it would make things like VoIP calls or online gaming a painful experience. These two problems could easily be stymied by keeping an eye out for potential abuse, or more logically by simply locking down the ‘public’ wireless access to ensure that bandwidth is both limited and given the lowest QoS priority. After all, I see the greatest benefit for users of public WiFi in being able to check emails and do some idle surfing on the go, not downloading the latest linux ISO images or streaming movies from their favourite website. But the most important deterrent for me personally has to be the fact that even our nearest neighbours probably live outside of WiFi range, so unless a horde of people turned up on our road to use our wireless from their cars, they might as well come in and get plugged in properly and have a cup of tea to go with it! Schneier’s comments are very reminiscent of the claims Jeremy Clarkson made earlier in the year about the lack of danger presented by bank details being readily available, after another monumental data loss by a government department. To prove his lack of concern, Clarkson had published his own bank details and made it clear how easy it would be to find his address. Unfortunately for him, someone did indeed take up the gauntlet and set up a Direct Debit payment to charity Diabetes UK using precisely those details. At least to date I’m unaware of the same type of thing happening to Schneier, but the wager has been made.

The war against file-sharing that currently rages primarily over the Internet will ultimately be lost. That’s my prediction. I can’t support this argument with any authority, being no expert in the fields of law, politics or technology, but instead make my statement on the basis of many years’ observation from the wilderness. But the trends all point to this being the case. File-sharing has become a mainstay of this new generation, a fact which has forced most corporations and organisations to rethink their strategies and come up with ways to stem the tide. We have already seen many changes in this direction, such as the explosion of digital content that is now available online from legitimate sources. But in addition to this carrot, the war is also being waged with a stick, as organisations set out to have legislation passed to clamp down on file-sharing activities, and new technologies are created to lock down digital content and prevent its spread. So what will the future bring?

File-sharing is usually portrayed as a new nefarious activity, something alien brought about by changes in technology and society that benefits no one and is an obvious criminal activity. Whilst there are some elements of truth to that charge, it’s not entirely accurate. Man is a social animal and has been sharing since the stone age. The only thing that’s new is that it now involves digitally stored media rather than pieces of sharpened flint, and problematically, it is now easier, faster, more accessible, more reliable and perhaps more inconspicuous than ever before. But this is merely the extrapolation of a phenomenon that is essentially part of man’s nature. Irrespective of the legality of the issue, people generally consider it fair use to lend books, albums, movies or software that they have purchased to their friends and relatives. It is generally considered reasonable use for people to record items broadcast on television or radio for later viewing, an act normally referred to as ‘time-shifting’, though these recordings may well be played back repeatedly, and of course lent and exchanged as with purchased items. And if anyone were to take a peek in many university libraries throughout the country, they would see the level to which the letter of the copyright law is upheld in the ‘fair use’ rules of photocopying published articles. In each case, the law has either been adapted, or it has fallen into disuse. The latest developments must no doubt ultimately result in a similar reaction.

The similarity between online file-sharing and the typical state-funded public library system is perhaps more than a little unfair, but in theory shares similar features. That one is treated as a villanous scourge and the other as an equitable and fundamental public service is born not out of principle, but out of execution. Libraries are often restricted, under-staffed, under-funded, and under-provisioned, but most vitally, they are controlled. Online systems of file-sharing are none of these things, and the sheer scale of the problem provokes the reactions we see around the world. Quite what effect the rise of file-sharing has had on the many industries is difficult to tell, with arguments and statistics flying back and forth almost unceasingly. There is sadly no control experiment to substantiate the many arguments, whether they claim file-sharing has a negligible or positive effect, or that milliards have been written off the world’s economies. People who assert blindly that file-sharing boosts album sales are ignorant of the facts, whilst studio execs who believe that every downloaded track is a lost sale are plain wrong. Nevertheless, whatever the effects, this is a changing world, and every generation’s attempts to lay claim to that impalpable, fleeting sense of the status quo have failed. Whilst the majority of society morphs and adapts, there are always those who attempt to put the brakes on.

Virtually every attempt, particularly in the mainstream, to prevent copyright infringement has met with resistance from the end-users, or has been circumvented to leave it essentially useless. The recent case of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection placed on a number of recent games released by publishing giant Electronic Arts has met with particular resistance from customers. Recent games like Spore, Red Alert 3 or Crysis Warhead all come equipped with SecuROM, a form of DRM which installs itself surreptitiously onto a user’s computer, and includes limits on how often the game me be installed amongst other features. After a certain number of activations the user has to call EA to have the limit lifted, otherwise the disc is unusable. Aside from the obvious problems for the customer, particularly in the longer term given that the servers which deal with the activations could easily be switched off at some point in the future, is the manner in which the relationship between the corporation and the customer becomes strained. This kind of copyright protection instantly treats customers with suspicion, even to the extent of criminality. Worse still for the company is that this kind of intrusive mechanism is stripped away in the illegal versions of the software which are produced almost as quickly as the mechanisms can be implemented. And this is well known to many customers, evidential in that Spore became probably¹ the most downloaded game of the year, no doubt to a large extent based on the DRM issue.²

As has happened so many times in the past, the current furore over file-sharers is an example of a conservative heritage being challenged by the next generation with new technologies and ideas. Copyright laws are no longer able to cope with the situation, and whilst file-sharing undoubtedly infringes upon copyright law, the ability and the will to enforce the letter of the law is lacking, and to a large extent, essentially inappropriate. As I understand it, New Zealand has become the first country in the world to pass legislation to allow for a “three strikes” attitude to individual file-sharers, meaning that they should be cut off from the Internet if they are found to be responsible for file-sharing. All very well in theory, but in principle dealing with such scenarios is extremely tricky business: it is difficult to achieve from a technical point of view, it is difficult to enforce and prove from a legal standpoint, and in most instances it certainly infringes on personal freedoms and liberties. In this respect copyright laws are put on a pedestal above individual liberties.³ The attempts to equate file-sharing with theft in media propaganda⁴ have met with very little sympathy from the general public, in part because the comparison illustrates how the law is no longer able to reflect reality. Stealing a car is not commensurate with making a copy of it, a blindingly obvious fact that is recognised by the general public, but not by the organisations and legal bodies, though there are signs that wheels are in motion in certain parts of the world.

It is difficult to predict what the precise outcome of the current war on file-sharing will be. Whilst repeated attempts will no doubt be made to plug the analogue hole, and increased powers are sought to enable authorities to control the public’s actions on the Internet, a few braver men are trying to find answers in fundamental alterations to copyright law and society’s view on file-sharing, and the new technologies and freedoms that have developed in leaps and bounds in the last few decades. Perhaps it is no surprise to see that Sweden is leading the charge. The potential pressure of the Piratpartiet caused a number of parties to rethink their stance on the file-sharing issue, particularly with regard to the statistics which highlight around 10% of the Scandinavian country’s population as potential targets for litigation. The Swedish Left Party, for example, has come around to the idea that copyright laws need amendment, and that file-sharing on a domestic basis is as legitimate an activity as lending libraries. Similar changes in policy may also affect the Moderate Party and the Green Party.

It may yet be many years before this issue sees a satisfactory resolution, and the market will adapt accordingly. With all likelihood a change in copyright legislation will be required that prevents leaving vast numbers of so many nations liable to prosecution, or it will it lay dormant like so many other vestigial and antiquated legal modes. The attempts to incriminate almost an entire generation cannot be in the best interests of either society as a whole, nor even its constituent parts, whilst the efforts to hunt down the technological cat and put it back into the bag are as futile as trying to turn back the clock. Whether a miraculous, ingenious solution will be found that satisfies everyone, or the weight of numbers fighting for change will affect a political reaction, or simply a piecemeal combination of political change, technological development and market mutation, the days of file-sharing as a nefarious phenomenon are numbered. The future is not set. But neither is the present.

For a future post in relation to this topic, I intend to conduct an interview with one of the founders of a leading Bittorrent tracking site. If anyone has any questions they would like to have posed, please feel free to leave a comment below.

1. Statistics in this area are notoriously difficult to confirm.
2. See many of the reviews at Amazon as an example of customer reaction.
3. Typical in the democratic societies in which finance is so deeply entrenched in the political process.
4. As ridiculed here in the recent Futurama film.

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "gui.py", line 4, in ?
File "iPodderGui.pyc", line 3573, in main
File "ipodder\configuration.pyc", line 468, in __init__
File "os.pyc", line 154, in makedirs
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'C:\\Users\\xxx\\My Documents\\My Received Podcasts'

Fortunately the fix seems to be quite simple and pain free (though a bit of a hastle to implement manually), found courtesy of Randall’s Life.

1. Change the compatability mode of the application to Windows XP SP2 mode. To do this, right-click the application file, or a shortcut to the program, select properties, click the ‘Compatability’ tab and then tick the box to ‘Run this program in compatability mode for:’ and select the appropriate option from the download menu.
2. Locate the file Ipodder.cfg (normally found under C:\Users\xxx\AppData\Roaming\iPodder) and edit it such that the line reading “download_dir = ‘C:\\Users\\xxx\\My Documents\\My Received Podcasts’” instead reads “download_dir = ‘C:\\Users\\xxx\\Documents\\My Received Podcasts’”.

After that, the program should run normally.

Whilst I wouldn’t normally comment on a post of this ilk (given my feelings about bloggers who blog about blogging) it seems pretty clear that unless Boutin is giving us a tongue-in-cheek excuse for a debate on web trends, he’s essentially wrong in his assessment. After all, it comes as no surprise that Boutin proclaims the fall of the blogosphere from the comfort of a blog entry, nor indeed that he rails against his own ilk in decrying the “tsunami of paid bilge” that ranks highest on the Technorati charts. The idea that blogs should be abandoned on account of the fact that personal blogs rarely garner any extended readership or popularity calls into question why authors set up their blogs in the first place, and why indeed they should switch to other means if popularity is their main objective. Boutin upbraids blogs for being text-only affairs, a charge which I daresay isn’t especially accurate, particularly since it is easily possible these days to integrate precisely those services that are supposed to supercede blogs, such as Flickr or Youtube.

Of course, no one can deny that the nature of the Internet is constantly changing, so much the better, and whilst the blogosphere may start to shrink once the new wave of Web2.0 forms of communication become fully fledged, they will merely overlap and supplement the current crop of technologies available. The continued prominence of email, IRC, Usenet and web forums all point to this fact. So whilst I daresay the number of new blogs appearing on the web will start to slow as new users find outlet to their thoughts on other media, there may always be a place for the humble (and not so humble) blogs that litter the webscape today.

[Via huffenglish.com]

If there’s one jargon term that every user new to the Internet soon becomes acquainted with, spam must near the top of the list. Its prevalence and virtual ubiquity through many forms of online communication have generated miniature industries devoted to dealing with it, and the science of spam detection, prevention and treatment almost resembles the tactical skirmishes of biological immune systems.

Spam exists in many forms, from bogus guestbook entries to elaborate instant messaging robots, but the variety which prompted this post was that classic form – unsolicited email. The level of penetration of spam illustrates itself in the number of systems put in place to combat it as standard on the vast majority of websites, including of course authentication emails and the ever evolving captcha. I use a small combination of plugins on this blog to block out most of the spam, and given the extreme sparcity of genuine comments, the potential for inconvenient ‘false positives’ is rather slim. Nevertheless, even the cursory inspection I tend to make over Akismet’s latest haul becomes tiresome for all the size of this blog – spam comments to date outnumber genuine ones by a factor of almost 500 (and that only counts those caught and tallied by Akismet). Quite how larger, more popular blogs deal with searching for false positives, I don’t know, but the task must be fairly time-consuming.

Yet even that abysmal ratio sometimes seems quite congenial next to the level of email spam I receive in its current state. Whilst the common techniques for filtering out spam emails have fairly high success ratios, the constantly evolving battle with the Bayesian filter can never ultimately separate emails, black and white, and sifting through the gray matter can be a painful experience, particularly when searching for unexpected false positives. Indeed with some of my emails going through multiple filters (before finally ending up in a Thunderbird client and getting filtered once more), I begin to wonder many emails have simply drifted away in that black sea of jetsam.

The problems of course don’t stop there. In recent days I have been reminded of another serious gripe, when my inbox was flooded with bounced messages, evidence that my address was being used by spammers (and many of those were filtered as spam on account of their message contents, despite technically being genuine messages). Since very few strings at the associated domain are actually received by anybody, it stands that the deluge represents merely the tip of the melting iceberg. There are many tips out there to stop spammers from harvesting your email address, but very few to prevent them using it to spoof messages elsewhere (and even to yourself). The most common piece of advise is simply to wait it out – eventually the spammers move on and utilise a new address, and indeed the bounced messages seem to come in waves.

One of the methods used to reduce spam that was highlighted through these bounced messages is Sender Address Verification. As covered by this post, the method requires people sending email to an address for the first time to verify their authenticity by fulfilling a certain task explained in an automated email reply, before the message (and future messages) may be delivered to the recipient. This bears some resemblence to the automated email verification sent out by many only accounts. However, it is not without its weaknesses. After all, spam sent via spoofed, verified emails will still be delivered as genuine messages, and the potential for spammers to find methods to fulfil the authentication tasks is all too clear from the variety of methods already deployed to crack online captchas.

Ultimately I’m reduced to dealing with spam in the usual manner, relying on filters to do the heavy work and leaving me to occasionally label those messages not picked up, whilst occasionally doing my own filtering for false positives (and burying my head in the sand every time my addresses come up for spoofing duties).

How do others combat the spam plague? Are there other methods commonly available that I’m overlooking? And do people consider the possibility of false positives a necessary evil in the war against spam?

NET USE U: \\NETHOME\LOCID /PERSISTENT:YES /SAVECRED

The necessary username/password details can then be entered and should be stored, allowing the drive to be mapped automatically when the user logs on.

Yet some downtime during a WordPress update is not the only worry when it comes to plugins. Whilst major updates often accentuate the problems, there is no guarantee that plugin authors will continue their work to cope with bugs and software changes. The small WPPA plugin currently used on this blog was recently broken by the WordPress update, but the author considered that the features introduced in the recent version might make his plugin obsolete, and only touched up the plugin to work with 2.5 (so far). Since I hardly post any photographs, such a change makes little difference to this site, but for many others migrating to another plugin could prove a major job if automated tools aren’t available. Others may have experienced such changes when moving between multilingual plugins as the features and support changed, from Language Picker, through Polyglot, to Language Switcher or WP_Multilingual. Such a migration might involve moving media around, altering themes, or having to change tags or syntax within WordPress posts.

How do you approach using plugins on WordPress? Do you consider WordPress should avoid leave extra features to the plugin authors rather than implementing features already well covered (e.g. tags, photos)? Should plugin authors attempt to implement migration tools or leave it to end-users to do the necessary conversions?

And, indeed, the coda of the first movement, with its slippery, chromatic bass and the awesome moans above it, remains a paralyzing experience. That is the way the world ends. It is absolute music, but it clearly represents struggle, and it is hard to hear so monumentally anguished a cry without reading something into it. The trouble is that face with such music, all of us tend to become sentimentalists, reading into it the wrong message.

So he sums up the Ninth Symphony of that “Revolutionary from Bonn” as the chapter title has it. A pretty decent book on the whole. And yes I realise that was four sentences.

Now the bigger question of who to pass this on to. Let’s see if and how Steffi, Heliologue and Rob respond.

The user profile service service failed the login. User profile cannot be loaded.

Or in German versions:

Die Anmeldung des Dienstes “Benutzerprofildienst” ist fehlgeschlagen. Das Benutzerprofil kann nicht gestartet werden.

From what I can gather, it appears that this problem occurs during Vista’s attempt to create a restore point. The user profile is backed up but no replacement is made. Thus these errors are most often seen after the installation of some new software or drivers, or after a Windows update, which may occur in the background with many users unaware of its activity.

Fortunately, some solutions are available, although not all appear to work in certain circumstances. Nigels blog offers a solution to restore the backup profile by editing the Windows registry. To do this, users need to:

1. Start the machine, and press F8 before Vista begins to load, choosing Safe Mode.
2. Search for the programme ‘regedit’ from the Start menu.
3. On opening this programme, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionProfileList
4. Affected profiles can be located by the extension ‘.bak’. This extension should be deleted, the RefCount value should be 0, and the State value should be 0. Change accordingly and reboot the system.

German readers may also refer to this forum post.

Unfortunately this solution appears not to work in all cases. Since this problem generally appears to occur following a Windows Update or other software installation, however, it is equally possible to restore the system to a prior state and restore the working profile(s) to how they were before the incident. This might result in some strange behaviour or odd errors in some programmes, but these problems should only be minor ones. To do this

1. Start the machine in Safe Mode (hitting F8 before Vista loads, as above)
2. Search for the programme ‘rstrui’ in the Start menu.
3. On running the programme, the user should be presented with the option of restoring the system to the most recent restore point (recommended). Restore and restart.
4. Should the recommended option fail to solve the problem, follow the same procedure but use an older restore point. Hopefully one or other should do the trick.

Hopefully with the gradual rollout of Vista Service Pack 1, this type of problem will become less frequent.