KaiSchaller.com

Coming in to work this morning I passed a billboard encouraging me to vote Yes on Proposition A. They had a website listed that took the typical form of “VoteXonY.com”. That got me thinking: surely they would have run out of domains of this type long ago, given the amount of elections that happen at the local, state, and national levels. The next logical thought was that the domains are allowed to expire every year (since the campaigns no longer need them), thus freeing them up for others to use.

I then realized that there was potential for capitalism if someone were to buy up the domains and offer to sell or lease them whenever a campaign was in need of one. I checked this out once I got to work and it turns out there is at least one business that does exactly this. They have hundreds of domains dedicated to “VoteXonY.com” that are available for lease (about $40/month if you were wondering). Clever idea, and it ensures that no one government can hog a particular domain.

I was all geared up to write a post about how it is a poor idea to have Firefox save your passwords since there is plenty of password field “unmasking” software floating around out there. In theory all a malicious user would need to do is go to the login page of one of your saved password sites, load up the unmasking software, unmask the password field (which has been auto-populated by the browser) and be on their way.

I figured it would be wise to make sure this actually worked before ranting about security flaws; imagine my surprise to discover Firefox (v3) seems to have taken this tactic into account. The unmasking software I was trying had no effect on stored password fields. I was curious to see what the mechanism for this was, so I downloaded the FF3 source code. I didn’t dig in too deeply, but was nevertheless amused to see the XML namespace they were using was “there.is.only.xul”. Clever.

Also, I went to the Obama rally on Saturday. It was amazing to see 100,000 people come together like that. Go-bama!

My hosting provider, Dreamhost, is in the midst of becoming a “greener” company. One part of this is moving to more efficient servers. Since this kind of massive undertaking inherently comes with its fair share of problems, they are offering free upgrades to “unlimited” bandwidth and storage for users that volunteer to be moved first. Since this site isn’t vitally important I decided to be one of the guinea pigs.

Fair warning in case the site goes down for a time!

For the first time in my years of Apple coveting I find myself being displeased with how one of their products is functioning. I recently upgraded to the 2.0 software for my iPod touch and the number of problems I’ve had with the device since then has increased from none to many.

Last night I was suddenly unable to transfer podcasts to the iPod. Music would go over just fine, so this was baffling. I couldn’t get it to work on the PC either. After not being able to find anyone with a similar story on the ‘net I bit the bullet and initiated a restore, confident that I could restore my settings, etc. from the handy backup iTunes offered to make for me.

After the restore was finished, I was told the backup was either corrupt or not compatible with the iPod I was trying to restore. I would also be unable to restore my applications (some of which I’ve purchased). Luckily the App Store recognized that I had already purchased certain applications and let me re-download for free.

These kinds of usability issues are unacceptable in any product, even more so an Apple product because they’ve set such a high standard for themselves. Compounding the problem is that there never seems to be a real solution to any particular issue except “Backup and restore the iPod.” Hey, I’d love to , but that doesn’t seem to work reliably either.

One other small thing that’s been bugging me lately. I know that some of the problems that people experience with iPods are due to copyright-protection technologies that limit what users are able to do with their devices and media. Just another reason to scrap the whole mess and get on with it — DRM and similar technologies do nothing but hurt the end-user.

I just did a double-take while reading a job listing on Craigslist for a “Junior Web Developer”. From the listing:

Would you like to be part of a development team working on the newest web 2.0/web 3.0 concepts?

Web 3.0?! People sure love their buzzwords these days… Wikipedia was slightly helpful in lessening my confusion with this article.