Coyote Blog

From the PC Magazine Blog:

The venerable BlackBerry manufacturer launches a native Facebook client
that makes staying in touch with your Facebook friends a cinch.

Venerable?  BlackBerry?  ROFLMAO, as they say.

After several years and jillions of emails telling me I have a problem, I finally have https://coyoteblog.com  (without the www) pointing to this site rather than an under construction page. 

In the middle of a block of Nigerian email scams and spam for cheap viagra, I got this:

Brazilian Sugar in
Containers
C&F Price
Worldwide
Icumsa 45 - US $ 435.00 per
ton
Icumsa 100 US $ 425.00
per ton
Icumsa 150 US $ 420.00 per
Ton
Minimum order quantity: 10 container of
20" with 27 tons per container and 270 tons in total

I must say that offering me $115,000 of sugar is not the usual come-on

I am working on a submission (outline and several chapters) for a book prize that is due December 31, so I may not be posting much over the next week.  The contest is for a novel that promotes the principals of freedom, capitalism, and individual responsibility in the context of a novel (hopefully without 120-page John Galt radio speeches). 

My project is one I have been tinkering with for a while, an update of the Marshall Jevons economist mysteries from the 1980's.  If you are not familiar with this series, Marshall Jevons was a pseudonym for a couple of economists who wrote several murder mysteries that included a number of expositions on how economics apply to everyday life.  Kind of Agatha Christie meets Freakonomics.  I found the first book, Murder at the Margin, to be disappointing, but the second book called the Fatal Equilibrium was pretty good.  I think the latter was a better book because the setting was university life, and the murder revolved around a tenure committee decision, topics the authors could write about closer to their experience.  The books take a pro-free-market point of view (which already makes them unique) and it is certainly unusual to have the solution to a murder turn on how search costs affect pricing variability.

Anyway, for some time, I have been toying with a concept for a young adult book in roughly the same tradition.  I think the Jevons novels are a good indicator of how a novel can teach some simple economics concepts, but certainly the protagonist as fusty stamp-collecting Harvard professor would need to be modified to engage young adults. 

My new novel (or series of novels, if things go well) revolves around a character named Adam Smith.  Adam is the son of a self-made immigrant and heir to a nearly billion dollar fortune.  At the age of twenty, he rejects his family and inheritance in a wave of sixties rebellion, joins a commune, and changes his name to the unfortunate "Moonbeam."  After several years, he sours on commune life, put himself through graduate school in economics, and eventually reclaims his family fortune.  Today, he leads two lives:  Adam Smith, eccentric billionaire, owner of penthouses and fast cars, and leader of a foundation [modeled after the IJ]; and Professor Moonbeam, aging hippie high school economics teacher who drives a VW beetle and appears to live in a trailer park.  There is a murder, of course, and the fun begins when three of his high school students start to suspect that their economics teacher may have a second life.  As you might expect, the kids help him solve the murder while he teaches them lessons about life and economics.  The trick is to keep the book light and fun rather than pedantic, but since one business model in my last novel revolved around harvesting coins in fountains, I think I can do it.

Anyway, wish me luck and I will be back in force come the new year. 

Frequent readers will know that I have reversed all the new Vista machines in our household back to XP and I have banned Vista from any computers purchased in the company (Dell is quite happy to sell XP rather than Vista).  Here is a how-to on how to downgrade to XP.

Now, PC World has voted Vista as the technology failure of the year  (I would also vote the box as the packaging failure of the decade, and the new user interface in MS Office as the hose-your-installed-base gaffe of the year).

I thought this was an interesting fact, from PC World several months ago:

Certainly sales of Vista aren't blowing away XP in stores. Chris
Swenson, director of software industry analysis for the NPD Group, says
that, from January through July of this year, XP sales accounted for a
healthy 42.3 percent of online and brick-and-mortar retail OS sales. By
contrast, from January through July of 2002, after XP's launch in
October the year prior, Windows 98 accounted for just 23.1 percent of
retail sales.

I made a similar observation using Amazon sales rankings of XP vs. Vista here. Finally, just for the heck of it, I checked the OS's of users coming to Coyote Blog.  In the past, our users have demonstrated themselves to be ahead of the technology curve (Firefox eclipsed Explorer as the #1 Coyote Blog brower long ago).  As you can see, Vista barely has 4% share, in a near tie with Windows 2000 and Windows NT and barely edging Linux:

HT:  What's Up With That

I have to agree with Roger at Maggie's Farm:  I really love all the silly weirdness on the Internet as well.  I already Rick-rolled my readers once (belated apologies) a while back so I won't do it again.  Instead, I will link with full discloser to this mash-up of Hitler doing Rick Astley.

I get a number of search engine hits from people coming to this blog looking for information on, you know, coyotes.  I actually get a lot of questions about coyote behavior, which I struggle to answer since by knowledge of the animals generally is limited to:

1. Watching them play outside my house as they likely fantasize about making a meal of my family's Maltese.
2. Taking humor from their hapless interactions with the ACME corporation.

Via a reader, this is the woman you need to be visiting for real coyotes.  She also seems to be a marvelous photographer.  This, for example, is beautiful.

Many free websites (like newspapers and forums) require an email address to sign up.  To make sure you give them a real one, they send you a password or activation code, usually within 60 seconds, by email.

Guerrilla Mail will issue you an email address that is good for 15 minutes.  You don't even have to leave the web site, just hit refresh and any emails you receive show up there on the screen and can even be replied to.  The only problem is that this will leave you with an impossible list of user ID's, but it is great for, say, forums where I only need to post one time (say with a customer support question).

Via this list, via Tom Kirkendall

A web site on which I was registering said "Your password must be alpha-numeric and a minimum of 6 characters."  I had an argument about this language with the customer service agent, but I may be wrong.  I would interpret this as meaning that all the characters in the password must be from the alpha-numeric set, as opposed to, say, symbol characters.  Therefore "asdfasdf", "12345678", and "asdf1234" would all meet the stated test.  The customer service agent said that I was totally wrong, and went so far as to inform me their web designer has a PhD in English.  Her contention was that alpha-numeric clearly means "must contain both a minimum of one alphabetical character and at least one numeric character."   In my example above, only "asdf1234" would therefore qualify.   Anyone have an opinion on this, or a definitive source?

If, from this and previous posts, folks out there are drawing the conclusion that I am losing patience with customer call centers, they would be correct.

We are rapidly coming up on the first anniversary of Vista, and it has been a very rocky year for Microsoft.  New releases of an OS are always difficult, but many users have really turned up their nose on Vista.  My experience has been much the same as everyone else's:  Applications run slower in Vista (I know because I had a system set up to dual boot and A/B tested a number of applications).  Networking, particularly wireless networking, is much less stable than in XP.  Good drivers STILL don't exist for many legacy hardware devices, including may graphics cards.  I ran into any number of quirks.  The most irritating for me was that a laptop communicating with a printer via wireless network would lose connection with the printer every time the laptop was shut down in a way that could only be rectified (as confirmed by MS customer support) by reinstalling the print driver every time I wanted to use it.

Most computer NOOBs probably never noticed, not having anything to compare Vista with and only using their computers for a narrow range of functionality (ie email and internet browsing).  However, many of us who are more comfortable with computers and who rely on our computers as an important tool have either avoided buying Vista computers (Dell, for example, still sells a lot of XP computers) and/or have taken the time to roll back their Vista to a dual boot system or even XP only  (which I explain here).  Which may explain why standalone XP packages are better sellers on Amazon than Vista.

For gamers, most of whom tend to be power users, Vista has been nothing but a negative, slowing games down and requiring use of buggy graphics card drivers (Microsoft crows that they get fewer customer service calls on Vista than XP, which may be, but I can gaurantee, from browsing gaming boards, that gaming companies get swamped with Vista calls from gamers who can't get the game to run on Vista). 

Looming over all of this, though, has been one word:  Crysis.  Gamers have been lusting after this game for over a year, with its promise of knock-out graphics and game-play.  To this end, Microsoft did something clever.  It updated its DirectX graphics engine in Vista to revision 10, and included in it all kinds of new capabilities that would really make a game look fantastic.  MS decided, either for technical or marketing issues, not to ever release these features on XP.  If you wanted DirectX 10 games, you had to upgrade to Vista.  Over the last year, graphics card makers have been releasing hardware to support DirectX 10.  Crysis was set to be the first game that would really take advantage of DirectX 10, and many hardcore gamers upraded to Vista solely on the promise of running Crysis maxed out with the new DirectX 10 features.

Well, Crysis was released a few weeks ago.  You may think I am building up to say it sucked, but just the opposite is true.  It is absolutely fantastic.  Easily the most visually stunning thing I have ever seen running on my PC.  First-person shooter games are not really my favorite, but I have thoroughly enjoyed the game.  (here is a trailer, but unlike most trailers, the game really looks like this in gameplay, maybe better due to limited resolution on YouTube.)  Click below for larger screenshots:

But here is the interesting part.  I keep my system state of the art.  I have close to the fastest Intel multi-core processor currently made running with two of the newest Nvidia graphics cards (8800GT's) running ganged together in SLI mode (don't worry if you don't know what all that means, just take my word for it that it is about as fast as you can get with stock components and air cooling). Crysis, like most graphics games, can have its settings changed from "low", meaning there is less graphics detail but the game runs faster, through "med" to "high" and "very high".   Only in the latter modes do the new features of DirectX10 really come into play.  So I ran the calibration procedure the game provides and it told me that I needed to set the game to "medium!"  That's not an error - apparently everyone else in my position who have a large monitor with high resolutions had about this experience.  I can set the game to higher modes, but things really slow down.  By the way, it still looks unbelievably awesome on Medium.

The designers of Crysis actually did something kind of cool.   They designed with Moore's law in mind, and designed the highest game modes for computers that don't exist today, but likely will in a few years.  So the game (and more importantly the engine, since they will likely sell the engine as a platform for other game makers to build their games atop) has some built-in obsolescence-proofing.

But lets return to Vista and Crysis being billed as a killer app.  As it turns out, none of the directX10 features are really usable, because no one can turn the graphics engine up high enough with their current hardware.  Worse, in a game where users are trying to eek out any tweek they can to improve frame rates and graphics speed, Crysis runs demonstrably slower on Vista than XP.  Finally, those who have run the game in its higher modes withe DirectX 10 features (presumably at the cost of low frame rates) have found the actual visual differences in the DirectX 10 graphics to be subtle.  The game boards are a total hoot, as folks who upgraded to Vista solely for Crysis are wailing that their experience on Vista is actually worse than on XP.

I have not idea how much blogging I will do this week.  I am headed for Manhattan to watch my daughter, who is in the opening act of the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade.

1. I really like my new iPod touch as a movie player for trips.  With an add-on double-A battery for extra life, it beats the hell out of portable DVD players.  It is a decent Internet surfer over WiFi though I am still looking for something a bit larger.
2. Anyone who fetishizes Apple's design capability has never tried to sync two iPods from one computer.  It can be done, with a klugey shift-click open to iTunes that brings up a "pick library" menu, but it really blows.  Also, they obviously have not had to endure QuickTime popups 415 times a day that say "Some of your Quick Time software is out of date.  You can fix this problem by updating the the latest version."  When one clicks "Do it now," one invariably gets the error message that the servers are busy (if the system does not crash entirely.
3. The new iPod classics still suck.  I tried them again at Best Buy.  The menu is laggy as hell and very hard to make selections or browse.  It is no accident that new-in-box generation 5.5 iPods are selling for more on eBay than new generation 6 iPods with the same or more memory.

I am a bit blog-awarded out, but having been nominated again, it would be embarrassing to get no votes at all.  Coyote Blog is in that Oh-so-prestigious category, "top 501-1000 blogs,"  the winning of which has always struck me as roughly equivalent to winning the NIT Men's Basketball Tournament ("We're number 66! Yeah!").

Anyway, drop me a vote so we don't get entirely embarrassed.

We have a strict no-console-game policy in the household.  Generally, when I see how other people's kids spend their time, I am pretty happy that we have stuck to this.  However, it has meant no Guitar Hero in the house. 

Well, finally, Guitar Hero III is out and is available in a PC version, though of course Amazon is back-ordered right now.

Not sure what is up with comment viewing.  Have sent service ticket to Typepad.

The visit counter rolled over 1,000,000 this morning.   I'm not sure that this number is very meaningful any more, as Coyote Blog gets about a thousand feed readers a day who don't register on Site Meter, but its a fun milestone anyway.  Thanks to all you readers for your interest.

I won't go into my bad experiences with Vista, nor into the story of my purge of Vista from all personal and corporate computers, but you can read here and here.

Here are some interesting Amazon sales rank numbers as of 10/16/07 for Vista vs. XP, which Vista supposedly replaced 12 months ago.  All the following are sales ranks in the Amazon software category, with a lower number implying higher sales:

XP Home Full Edition:  #19
XP Home Upgrade: #105
Vista Home Basic Full Edition:  #277
Vista Home Basic Upgrade:  #174

Obviously this is unscientific, because it is just one channel.  Also, Vista has more different segmented SKU's, so the product comparison is not exactly apples to apples.  But it is interesting, no?

The OEM market is going to skew towards Vista because that is what OEM's tend to load by default.  But even so, Dell, for example, is still offering Windows XP as an OEM option, a pretty unprecedented move this long after a new Windows launch.  But the Amazon traffic is probably 99% OS changes, since almost everyone with a PC gets an OEM version loaded.  Most of the Vista purchases are going to be upgrades from XP, and most of the XP purchases are going to be downgrades from Vista.  Does this mean Vista downgrading is outstripping Vista Upgrading?

Postscript: It has now been two months since I downgraded to XP on my kid's laptop, and we are still amazed at how much better everything runs now.  I was afraid I could not get all the drivers for XP but in the end I was succesful and everything, including the sound, is working great.  There are a LOT of websites nowadays to help you downgrade.  Or you can try dual booting.

Update:  The real indicator that this is Vista downgrade sales of XP is that the Full Edition is out-selling the upgrade edition, which is a reverse of history when XP was the lead product.  When I downgraded, I found I could not use the upgrade version of XP and had to use the full edition.  My guess is that others have the same problem, and that the very high sales rank of the XP full edition is very likely due to high downgrade demand.

In a blinding glimpse of the obvious for those of you who just reached CoyoteBlog.com, the blog is a going concern again. Problem explained here.  Sorry.

Years ago, I, without really knowing what I was doing, established a bunch of my URLs through Network Solutions.  I didn't understand at the time that Network Solutions was both irritating and the high-cost provider. 

Now that I know more, I have doing my registrations via a much lower cost supplier (GoDaddy).  A few weeks ago, I did a mass transfer from Network Solutions.  Apparently, Network Solutions locks the domains down, ostensibly for security (which is probably true) but also to make it harder to leave them, which makes sense as given their prices there must be a serious net drain of business out of the company.  Most of my domains cleared this Berlin Wall to freedom, but I screwed up on a couple, one of which was CoyoteBlog.com.  As a result, the domain ended up expired, and email dead.

Thanks for all of you who have tried to notify me of the problems.  Nearly two days ago I went ahead and renewed at Network Solutions for another year, just to get things back up ASAP.  Unfortunately, the URL still seems to be marked expired.  I don't know if that is their poor service or because I am in Hawaii and at the absolute end of the earth for name server updates.  Hopefully all will be right tomorrow.  For those who visited CoyoteBlog this weekend, I am sorry about the flurry of tacky popups Network Solutions was dealing out at the URL (as many as three at a time, the losers).  For those of you who access via https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/ you should have been able to read the blog but without formatting.  I believe that RSS access was unaffected.

Network Solutions and I seem to have a disagreement as to whether I have already renewed my domain name.  Hopefully we will be back up soon.

Here they go again.  Another company is attempting to commit public relations suicide by blowing up the negative commentary of a small, low-traffic blogger into a national story.

An unlikely Internet frontier is Paris, Texas, population 26,490,
where a defamation lawsuit filed by the local hospital against a
critical anonymous blogger is testing the bounds of Internet privacy,
First Amendment freedom of speech and whistle-blower rights.

A state district judge has told lawyers for the hospital and the
blogger that he plans within a week to order a Dallas Internet service
provider to release the blogger's name. The blogger's lawyer, James
Rodgers of Paris, said Tuesday he will appeal to preserve the man's
anonymity and right to speak without fear of retaliation.

Rodgers said the core question in the legal battle is whether a
plaintiff in a lawsuit can "strip" a blogger of anonymity merely by
filing a lawsuit. Without some higher standard to prove a lawsuit has
merit, he said, defamation lawsuits could have a chilling effect on
Internet free speech.

"Anybody could file a lawsuit and say, 'I feel like I've been defamed. Give me the name,' " Rodgers said.

The blog about problems at Essent Healthcare is here, called The-Paris-Site.

Interestingly, the hospital, owned by a company called Essent Healthcare, appears to be using the medical privacy act HIPPA as a bludgeon to try to stifle criticism.  To make a case against the hospital, general criticisms about poor care and medical mistakes are best backed up with real stories.  But the hospital is in effect saying that real stories can't be used, since doing so violates HIPPA.  I don't know if this is or is not a correct application of HIPPA, but it is a danger of HIPPA that I and others warned about years ago.  The hospital goes on hilariously about how they are not really worried about the damage to their reputation, but for the poor patients whose medical details ended up in the blogger's hands.  Memo to health care workers in the future:  If you think the hospital screwed up my care, you have my blanket permission to release the details of said screw-up.

Before starting my own company, I have worked in a number of senior jobs at publicly traded companies and a few soon-to-be-f*cked Internet ventures.  In several of these cases, I and my fellow managers came in for pretty rough and profane criticism.  In many cases the posts were hilarious, positing well-oiled multi-year conspiracies from a management team that was just trying to survive the day.  Most of us were pretty rational about these sites - the more you try to respond to them, the more attention you give them.  The best response is to ignore them except maybe on Friday night when you can drink some beers and laugh out loud reading the commentary.  But there were always a few folks whose ego just got inflamed by the comments, even though they were seen by maybe 12 people worldwide.  They wanted to put a stop to the commenters.

I am sure that this is what is happening here.  Because any good PR person who has been in the business for more than 5 minutes would tell you that the worst thing you could do for a critic with a small audience is to a) turn them into a martyr and b) increase their audience about a million-fold.  These guys at Essent are just nuts, and in the heat of ego preservation are in the process of making a massive mistake.

I am reminded of TJIC's response when a lawyer threatened to file a BS copyright suit against him:

With regards to your statement that you've been "looking forward for a
class action lawsuit on a case like this", I, too, would enjoy such a
lawsuit. The publicity that we would derive from defeating your firm in
court over a baseless allegation of copyright infringement, brought
about by a law firm and a lawyer that does not understand the First
Sale doctrine, and which are entirely ignorant of the Supreme Court
case law on the topic, would be of incalculable value to us, and would
be a very cost efficient way to further publicize our service.

Hat Tip to Overlawyered for the link.

Update: The blogger appears to have been around since 2005.  The article said that as of June, or after about 2 years of operation, he had 170,000-ish page views.  He now appears to be at about 230,000 just three months later and only a few weeks after the story went public.  Q.E.D.

Update #2:  I forgot to include my opinion on the case.  There has got to be some higher legal bar to be cleared to strip the anonymity of a blogger than just asking for it to happen during discovery on a lawsuit.  If the legislature is not going to establish this bar, then a higher court is going to have to do so. 

A little while ago I wrote a post to say I was excited by the new generation of IPods.  I was ready to replace my 30GB v5.5 iPod classic with an 80GB that has the same form factor.  I am still hoping the iPod Touch (think iPhone without the phone) will turn out to be great, but there is a LOT of bitching out there about the new IPod classics.  Apparently, in a bid to make the interface prettier, it has become a lot slower (kindof like Vista).  Also, apparently some of the video functionality has been nerfed.  Research before you buy!  For example, check out the Amazon reviews.

The laptop I bought my kids 6 months ago is rapidly becoming the worst purchase I have ever made.  Not because the laptop is bad, but because of a momentary lack of diligence I bought one with Vista installed.  It has been a never-ending disaster trying to get this computer to work.  A while back, I put XP on a partition and my kids spend most of their time on XP since, well, it works.  Vista does not.  It is the Paris Hilton of OS's -- looks pretty but does not work.

In particular, the networking is an enormous step backwards from XP.  The wireless networking was a real pain to get set up in the first place, in contrast to XP and my wife's Mac which both worked and connected from the moment the power switch turned on. 

Now, we are getting two new errors.  First, at random times, the computer will stop being able to connect to the internet.  It will have a good wireless signal, and see other computers on the network fine, and the other computers on the network will see the internet, but Vista does not.  Just rebooted the computer into the XP partition, and XP sees the Internet fine -- its just Vista that is broken.

Second, and perhaps even more inexcusable, I have to reinstall the printer driver in Vista at nearly every log on.  There is a bug in Vista such that laptops that move off the network and come back will find that the network printers are now marked "offline" and there is nothing one can do to bring them online short of reinstalling the drivers.  Really.  I thought I was doing something wrong, but searching the web this is a known problem.  None of the suggested workarounds are working for me.

Vista is rapidly becoming the New Coke of operating systems.  I have had every version of windows on my computer at one time or another, including Windows 1.0 and the egregious Windows ME, and I can say with confidence Vista is the worst of them all by far.  More: corporate demand for upgrading to XP from Vista;  DRM hell in Vista;  how I set up dual-booting on a Vista machine; and what happened to the File menu?

Looks like the XP partition is soon going to be the only partition.  But recognize how serious this step is:  Laptops, unlike desktops, have more model-specific device drivers.  For example, instead of one Nvidia graphics driver for all cards, you tend to need the driver for your specific card in your specific computer model.   The computer I have has never and will never publish XP drivers.  I have found drivers that work for XP for most things, but not for sound.  So I will be giving up a substantial piece of functionality -- sound-- in exchange for never having to swear at Vista again.

Back in 2003 when I set up this blog, I knew less than nothing about how to do it.  I mostly did things in a way I am still happy with, but I made one mistake.  In setting up the domain mapping from CoyoteBlog.com to Typepad, I mapped CoyoteBlog.com to my entire Typepad account, not just this blog.  As a result, my permalinks take the form of www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/blahblah.html rather than www.coyoteblog.com/blahblah. 

I now know how to fix it, but when the site republishes, I am pretty sure that anyone who has ever linked to a permalink on the site will get an error, because they will be remapped to the shorter address in the www rather than the /coyote_blog domain.  My question is this, if I access to all the A and MX and CNAME etc. records for CoyoteBlog, is there some way to calls the the www.CoyoteBlog.com/Coyote_blog/ domain to www.CoyoteBlog.com/ ?  If I can do this, I *think* my old permalinks will work.  Maybe. 

I probably will be too scared to try this, unless I can get a good solution for this problem

I had a call today from a reporter at the Christian Science Monitor who wanted to discuss climate skepticism.  What a disaster of an interview I am!  He would ask an open-ended question, and off I would go into feedback theory and then to acoustics and then into helicopter dynamics and back to the ice age and then to temperature measurement in Tucson.  I try to follow 6 trains of thought simultaneously and the result is a mess. 

The poor reporter was quite friendly and ended with "I am not sure where we are going with this story" which is the universal reporter speak for "your interview was such a mess I am not sure how we would ever use it."  LOL.  Only by writing, with the implicit governor applied by the keyboard, am I able to organize my thoughts well.  Which is why I have never invested in a computer dictation product - I shudder to think what I would find on the page after a session.  Which reminds me of the early Doonesbury cartoons with Duke when he was a reporter at the Rolling Stone, when he would come into the his editor's office and claim to have dictated some really powerful stuff, only to find a garbled drug-induced mess, which was obviously a reference to Hunter S. Thompson, who... oh crap, I'm doing it again.