SteveX Compiled

There are a number of Internet businesses that have been based on copyright infringement. YouTube, LimeWire, Napster, BitTorrent, even Google and their cache of web pages was initially deemed infringement (and still is by some people).

The thing that lets these businesses survive is the DMCA, strangely enough. Thanks to the DMCA, I can let a user upload videos to my site and basically close my eyes to what gets uploaded. If someone uploads something that they don't have rights to, it's not my problem - it's up to the copyright owner to notice that it's there and send me a takedown notice. Until that happens, I can let users view that video.

Here's the text from the DMCA itself:

Under the knowledge standard, a service provider is eligible for the limitation
on liability only if it does not have actual knowledge of the infringement, is not aware
of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent, or upon gaining
such knowledge or awareness, responds expeditiously to take the material down or
block access to it.

This gives entrepreneurs the freedom to build companies based on copyright infringement, doesn't it? Nice thing about the Internet is that there are enough users out there willing to pirate material that if one of them uploads something and it gets taken down, there are 20 more people waiting to re-upload the same content.

This is what Mygazines seems to be depending on. Mygazines is a YouTube for Magazines. But unlike YouTube, there isn't even the pretense that the site exists for sharing legal material. It's a place to upload magazines for other users to view them for free, until they get pulled.

What will be the next ludicrous, obviously-illegal business to start using this same loophole? I'm guessing a commercial software sharing site that lets you upload ISO images of commercial software for other users to download. Or has someone done that yet?

As I mentioned a few days back, my current GPS is now a Garmin Nuvi 760. Here are a few bullet points on my experiences with it.

• It's bright. No problem reading the screen in full daylight - this was my complaint with the TomTom.
• The mount is solid. More solid than the Mio mount. It doesn't move at all when I'm typing on it, and getting it on and off the mount is easy.
• Finding points of interest is slow. If there are a lot matches, it's not so bad, but if you're looking for something that's not close to you and there aren't a lot of matches, it can take 30 seconds or more.
• When you miss a turn, it takes too long to recalculate. This can lead to a really frustrating situation where you miss a turn, it recalculates and then says "turn left" just as it's too late for you to make that turn. Recalculate, rinse, repeat.
• Screen updates are slow, too. It can drop to close to 1 frame per second in some areas. When you're glancing at the GPS to see if you should take this exit or the next one, this is a noticeable delay.
• I'm using the 2009 maps, but my street, where I've been living for 3 years now, isn't included.
• Just in the last few weeks I've already had 3 instances where the GPS tried to send me the wrong way down a 1 way street or down a street that was blocked (and had been blocked for years).
• I'm using a 3 month trial of the TMC FM traffic data, and in Ottawa, it sucks. It seems like all they cover is some stretches of the Queensway (our main East-West highway), and I'm guessing they just have someone somewhere updating that data based on the traffic webcams the province has set up. But roads closed due to construction, the most useful use of traffic data in my opinion, aren't marked. At least none of the ones I've encountered. Subscribing to TMC in Ottawa would be a waste of money.
• The POI database has huge, unexpected holes. For example, it thinks the closest Costco to my house is over 162km away (when in fact there are at least 3 or 4 in the Ottawa area). It knows about tons of little businesses, but a few big ones I've searched for are missing. Another example: I'm in Mont Tremblant right now, and searching for the nearest Tim Hortons shows the closest one is 42km away, but I've seen 2 of them just in the local area.

The low quality maps and POI database is a real disappointment, as this is something I depend on. So far it seems the Mio's TeleAtlas maps had better POI data and roughly equal map data to the Nuvi.

The TomTom had a great framerate and POI database, and had a unique "tiny updates" mechanism that let users input data (right into the GPS) to say things like "this street is blocked", so they could aggregate and publish that data on the fly. This mechanism showed a lot of promise, but the real future is what Dash is doing. Dash GPS units communicate with each other (through a server), so traffic problems can be detected and routed around automatically. Not yet available in Canada. :(

I'm linking to Steve Yegge's rant on requirements because it's a great read. I absolutely agree that writing software for yourself makes for better software. If you're not using it, you're going to not notice the little details that make the thing awkward to use on a day-to-day basis. It's easy to get caught up in satisfying requirements and ignore the fact that, say, a core tool requires 2 more clicks than it really needs to.

Sure there are ways for that to feed back into the product (like, a key customer makes a particular usability nit into a requirement) but building a product that you actually use means you'll find awkwardness sooner. Building a product you want to use, and using it as you build it, is doing for usability what test driven development does for code quality.

The comments are interesting too.

My bad day yesterday is continuing into today. The good news is that it seems like the power supply was the problem. I picked up an Antec Earthmate 500 watt power supply and installed it, and my memory errors went away. The hard part has been getting Windows Home Server back on its feet.

The problem was that the registry was corrupted, probably by the contents of the failing RAM being written out to disk. There's an MS knowledgebase article on troubleshooting this sort of problem (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/325375), so I followed those steps up to the point where you're supposed to go into the System Volume Information folder and find a recent registry backup to use. Nothing there. It looks like Windows Home Server doesn't use System Restore.

So I have a Windows Home Server that's back to it's just-installed state (knowing nothing about the data on the extra drives) but at least the drives are mounted and I can see all my data. The primary drive has a \folders folder that looks like it has all the data in it (more data than fits on the drive, with many files being represented as hard links) but the system doesn't know how to follow the hard links so I can't actually use that folder to get the data off. There's also \DE\shares on each drive, which contains subsets of the data. Because of replication some of the data in \DE\shares is replicated on more than one drive, but if I copy all that data off (overwriting where there are duplicates) I should end up with an intact copy of all my data.

BUT I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO DO THIS. This is a huge waste of time. I have Windows Home Server to keep my data safe; I shouldn't have to muck around like this to get it back. I should have been able to repair or re-install WHS on the primary drive and have it do this work for me.

It sounds from the documentation and posts I've found online like this should have been possible - like I should have seen a "Re-install" option in Setup, but when I re-ran the WHS setup, the only option listed for me was a "New" installation, with the clear warning that it would re-format all my drives and I'd lose all my data. This may be because I have 2 IDE and 2 SATA drives, and while WHS is booted up it sees the SATA drives but Setup wasn't seeing them. I don't know. If that's the case, then maybe I'm only having to go through this because I built my own WHS instead of buying one with a supported hardware configuration. But it sucks anyway.

Okay, it's probably not WHS's fault, but an hour or so ago WHS told me that it needed to repair the system drive. No problem, I told it to go ahead. That's the last I heard from WHS.

I went downstairs to check, and found a black screen telling me that c:\windows\system32\config\system is corrupt. Sigh. Look for the WHS installation CD, can't find it. While I'm looking for that, I find a bootable memory test CD, so I boot that. Hmm, lots of memory errors.

Check the BIOS, and the 12V power number looks like it's a bit low (11.18 volts). Maybe that's the problem.

Unfortunately the PC repair shops that I deal with are closed on Sundays, so I guess this is a job for tomorrow. Hopefully the power supply is causing the memory errors and caused something bad to happen with the drives, and I can just swap the power supply, boot WHS from CD so it can fix itself so it can boot again, and everything will be back to normal.

But somehow I just know it's not going to be that easy...

Last month I blogged about a problem I'd been having where my Vista machine kept waking up for no apparent reason. I think I've found out what was happening.

The computer in question was my old Windows Media Center box, now decomissioned. I deleted the user accounts and created new ones, but I didn't wipe the box. Turns out that the Media Center had a number of daily shows scheduled to be recorded and whenever it was time to record a show, the computer would wake up.

I couldn't find any way to "reset" Media Center, but after removing all the entries from the list of scheduled recordings, my computer stopped waking up.

So if you see Vista waking up unexpectedly, and "powercfg -lastwake" (as described here) reports what the Real-Time Clock (RTC) is responsible for waking up the computer, then check your Media Center scheduled recordings list.

Geocaching gone horribly wrong. Check this out.

Given the nature of geocaching - hiding interesting looking things in unexpected places - I wonder how often this has happened. I'm sure it's not the first time.

(I'm still waiting for a good geocaching app for the iPhone - the only one so far is Geopher and it makes you read the coordinates out of the browser and type them into it's UI - yuck).

One of the big differences between the Nuvi 760 and 780 is MSN Direct traffic information. The 780 is expensive, but Costco had the 680 on sale for $349, and that includes MSN Direct, so I picked one up to try it out.

For me it was the 680 or the 760, so the decision really hinged on the quality of the MSN Direct data. And so far, at least in Ottawa, that quality is not good.

The weather data works fine, but really that's not something I use the GPS for. It was cool to have it show the weather at my destination, but if I'm taking a long trip chances are the weather will change before I get there anyway. Movie times work too, but I have the iPhone for that. What matters most is traffic data, and in 2 days of playing with it, when I've had traffic information at all, it hasn't been useful.

For example, here in Ottawa a large chunk of a particular busy street (Preston) street is currently under construction. It has been for weeks, and will continue to be for weeks more. This is the kind of data that should be easy to migrate into the GPS through MSN Direct, but the 680 routed me right down Preston, and when I checked for traffic data, it said there was none available. FAIL.

So I'll be trading in the 680 for a 760.

Why get a new GPS at all? After all, I only picked up the Mio C520 back in August last year. Here's my list of reasons:

• The Bluetooth handsfree support in the C520 doesn't work with the iPhone. At least I can't get it to work.
• A newer GPS will have newer maps. There are newer maps available for the C520 but I'd have to pay to get those.
• Ability to find waypoints along the current route. This is a huge feature for me. Finding the next gas station along the route is much more useful than finding the closest gas station, because I might not mind if it's 20km ahead, but if it's 20km behind me, I'm not interested.
• I'm upgrading while C520 is still worth something. It'll end up costing about $200 out of pocket, which seems reasonable for the stuff listed above.

My original complaint with the Garmin Nuvi 350, slow boot time, doesn't seem to apply to their newer GPS's.

I'm expecting the 760 in a few days; I'll post a brief review when I can.

I bought a Toyota RAV4 in December, and after living with the RAV4 for the last 7 months, we decided we wanted to go back to a minivan. So I started looking around.

I found a particular used Chrysler Town & Country I wanted. It's about the equivalent of the 2001 Grand Caravan ES but without All-Wheel drive, and the one I was looking at has some nice features like a nav system and sunroof.

The asking price for the Town & Country was $6500 less than I paid for the RAV4, and since I've only had the RAV4 for a few months, I figured I'd get some money back on the deal, or at least break even. But what I didn't take into account was what happened to demand for SUVs over the last 7 months.

Two things happened since I bought the RAV4. Gasoline increased in price by about 40%, and the impact of the change in value of the Canadian dollar versus the US dollar started to show up in the price of new vehicles in Canada.

When the price of a new vehicle drops, the price of used vehicles drops more. That's just the way it goes. Add to that the general plummet in demand for SUVs - even though the RAV4 is a particularly fuel-efficient one - and, well, things don't look good.

Basically the dealer offered me 60% of the what I paid for the vehicle that I bought only 7 months ago. Ouch.

So we'll be sticking with the RAV4 for a while.

I wear size 13 shoes, and I can't find ones that fit. For my life up till now, buying shoes was relatively easy. Walk into a store, see what they had in size 13, and then pick which of those I dislike least. But now that technique no longer works.

I've been to at least 10 stores in the last two months and probably tried on 100 pairs of shoes, and they're all small.

"Your feet got bigger" you're thinking, and I was starting to wonder about that too, but yesterday I compared my sandals, which are actually a little big on me, and the ones in the stores, and the ones in the stores are smaller. Somehow, size 13 shrank.

It's not like shoe sizes are some arbitrary number. The formula, in North America and Canada, according to Wikipedia, is:

male shoe size = 3 * last length in inches − 24

I measured my foot. 11.5 inches. According to this chart I should be size 12.5, and yet here I am wondering where to find Size 14 shoes.