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| Tuesday, June 12, 2001 |
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You are what you hack 
Click here and for the next 30 days I won't kill you
| | The ever-vigilant JY points to Ev's directions for blocking "the X10 pop-under ad." Now I'm more curious than ever. By whose (and what's) agency was this annoyance introduced to my browser in the first place? |
| | Dan also writes, pointing out that the ads "still pop up but then go away." Does that suck or what? Why is putting this e-noyance on your site even debatable? Well, it pays. And some of us really need the money. |
| | My advice: think of X10 as a credibility reduction field you can add to your site ‹ one that subtracts far more value than it yields in money. I actually stopped going to Weather.com after these ads started showing up. |
| | Given X10's modus operandi, I'm not even sure if Weather.com was to blame. Let's see... I just went there and it offered two cookies, both of which I accepted. Was either from X10? Nope. Why is that? Here's the poop, right from the horse's FAQ: |
| | Being an innovative company, X10 is utilizing a new form of advertising technology called "pop-under" ads. What this means is that when you visit a site that X10.com is advertising on, a new window is launched with our ad and it sends itself underneath what you are looking at. This allows you to navigate the site you're looking at without being interrupted. When you're done with the site, and close the browser, you will then notice our advertisement. At this point, you can click on the ad to learn more about the product and special offer or close the window by clicking on the "X" in the top right corner. |
| | Translation: it hides until you close the window. So if you've been to a bunch of sites you don't know where the hell it came from. But you're inclined to blame the last site you visited. Which is what I did with Weather.com. Joyce did too. The other night she pointed at one of the X10 ads and said "What is this? And how can I get rid of it?" I didn't know then. Worse, I guessed at the wrong answer. No wonder the next question in the X10 FAQ is "Is this a virus?" |
| | It's a virus of manners, and it's time to get vigilant about it. So do this: go into your browser, open the Cookies setting under Receiving Files, sort by Server, click on the letter X and then delete every cookie from x10.com (I had about eight). Then set your browser to "ask for each cookie." Even from friends. |
| | Then close and restart the browser. It's the only way to make sure the cookies get deleted. (This is on IE for the Mac, versions 5 and 5.1. I can't figure out yet how to do the same on Netscape or IE on the Mac or the other two platforms I'm running here. Not enough time, frankly.) |
Got it
| | Paul Snively (who writes a mean email and needs a blog or something so I can link to him), offers this on the PDF matter I asked about yesterday. Here's what he says: |
| | MacOS X's graphic architecture: OS X uses a graphics subsystem called "Quartz," which is indeed based on Adobe Postscript technology, including the "Portable Document Format," or PDF. What Jakob seems to take issue with is the notion of reading a PDF file within a browser, and here I agree with him: I use Google extensively, and while I appreciate the fact that it now indexes PDF's (and it so happens that I found a wonderful thesis on a highly valuable data structure for a project I'm working on, in PDF format), I really don't want my browser displaying the PDF when I click on the link, because the PDF plugin takes over--and completely alters--the navigation paradigm of the browser. For example, I can no longer just Command-F to "find" a particular word or phrase in the document. Selection and copying work differently. Even scrolling works differently. It's extraordinarily intrusive and confusing and I hate it. |
| | This has nothing to do with how MacOS X does graphics or text, however, and using MacOS X makes that perfectly clear. In addition to being plenty fast and gorgeous, MacOS X gives developers the built-in ability to print to PDF files. If, like me, you're constantly generating or receiving stuff that you want to have multiple hardcopies of, it's a godsend: I can just print to PDF and send the PDF file to the Kinko's down the street. |
| | The point is that PDF is a spec, and Acrobat Reader (and its browser plugin) is merely one tool that implements the spec. It's important to remember that Jakob is complaining about the latter, whereas MacOS X implements the former. |
Go bligure
Speaking of rude
| | Does anybody know why this ad for a wireless video camera keeps comping up in random places? It used to just to come up at Weather.com. Now it comes up on lots of other sites, such as this one here. |
| | If you run across the ad or the product, be sure not to buy it. I'll spare translating that to Fuck, the language of my own native land, New Jersey (and perhaps especially for one of my native municipalities, Brick Township). |
Who says the French are rude?
| | JY also wrote to notify me that he got Amazon's French connection to fix my name. I'm Doc now. Not Doey. Bon homme. |
Eventually she obeyed the command
| | Many years ago my mother used to leave her sweet old collielike dog, Christie, at our house for weeks or even months at a time. Christie was low maintenance. Mostly you had to pet her when she put her head gently on your lap and looked up with wide, trusting eyes. But in her later years she mostly kind of moped around, looking sad. |
| | One day my business partner walked in the house and was met Christie, with her wide-eyed look of enduring pathos. "Go die," he said, and moved on to whatever else he was doing there. |
| | It was a cruel remark, but we all got a laugh out of it. Christie didn't mind. As a good dog, our happiness was hers as well. And the name stuck. From that piont on, at least around our house, her name was Go-die. |
| | This story comes to mind as I struggle with no less than three computers, none of which function nearly as well as Christie did in her waning years. |
| | JY tells us it's Murphy's Law at work. Maybe. I finally did get the files all moved. But I'm still not sure all of them moved. How would I know which of the 14,000 files didn't get copied over? I know the way. I just don't have time for it. |
| | Not that it matters, but I found the problem copying files was on the server side. It just cut off both other computers (in a rare moment all three were up) simultaneously. Apparently it does this after about ten minutes. FWIW, the OS is X. |
Unreel
| | I love what Rob Schneider said about news that Sony invented a fake movie critic so they could write their own blurbs: "That's okay. They'll just invent a fake marketing guy to take the fall." |
Bulletin: Publishers Discover Two-Way Web
| | Thanks to The Head Lemur for this link here. And this one, which sources Zeldman's wisdom. And here's some nice positioning: J.D. makes the Lemur's inner circle of daily news links. That was fast. |
| | Not speaking of which, here's J.D. on Automatic Media, which is dying for lack of continuous VC donations. Automatic Media is the parent of Feed, Suck, Plastic and Altculture. I notice that Plastic has a tip jar, testing how much of a real market there may be for its goods, now that the market for its stock has proven nil. |
Can you spell aaefgimnnortt?
| | I've got to wipe my laptop clean and start over. It's a bummer, but it has to be done. Right now I'm copying everything but the system folder onto a little 30 GB firewire external drive. I got it for the laptop, but it barely works there. Fortunately, it works perfectly on the G4/500 dual processor desktop machine, so I'm backing up over the local net. Wow: I have 14,000 files in the copy queue. In just 6 gigs of space. |
| | ARG! The server has "unexpectedly disconnected," leaving 5,000 files uncopied. I hate this shit. |
Profiles in fear
| | Last night one of the TV networks introduced one of its McVeigh execution features with this phrase: "a triumph of good over evil." It might as well have been an infomercial for capital punishment. It creeped me out so totally I had to turn the tube off. |
| | Earlier on the radio I heard an interview with one of the editors to whom McVeigh granted access. The editor said McVeigh was inspired, even driven, by a work of literature called The Turner Diaries, by Andrew Macdonald. When I started looking around for more about the subject I got a case of the shudders. |
| | It says here and here that The Turner Diaries also inspired both the killing of Alan Berg and James Byrd. Berg was a popular radio talk show host out of KOA in Denver. His misfortune was to have been Jewish and Liberal. James Byrd was an ordinary citizen of Texas whose misfortune was to have been black. |
| | Most of Timothy McVeigh's victims were ordinary Americans whose misfortune was to have been present in a federal building when McVeigh took revenge against The Government. |
| | It's easy to forget that the default suspicion after the bombing was to blame terrorists from the Middle East. The truth, it turned out, was literally a different story. |
| | Most stories today have something they didn't have when Andrew Macdonald wrote The Turner Diaries. They have links. So do I get a twinge of fear when I write about this kind of stuff? |
| | Alan Berg wasn't just another talk show host. He was the inspiration for Eric Bogosian's play and movie, Talk Radio. More to the point, he was a direct ancestor for what I'm doing right now — and for what a lot of us do every day. He was a blogger. A good one. Maybe too good. |
Did I think it wouldn't be just another intensely impactful technology management inference structure solution provider breakthrough?
| | I finally got dialed into the news conference. It sounded like this: |
| | zzzzz the zzz is zzzz made th zzz decision zzzz oo zzzz articipate zzz in zzzz process zzz signifi zzz nce zzz ontinue zzz articipation zzz supportive zzzz rocess zzzz assert zzzzzzz th es ion es oo nd noo t t sn n fr ln ss t t ss n b zzzzzz ... and so on, like BuzzPhraser calling in on a bad cell connection. |
| | Worse, it was a news conference at a trade show. Why didn't I realize that before I said yes to being at my office and dialed in at 6:30am? I detest going to news conferences even when I'm at trade shows. They're just press kits for the hard-of-reading. |
| | Worse, I wrote about how bad and dumb they were almost ten years ago. |
| | Arg. I think I'll go home and pour some coffee in my eyes. |
Wake up, it's noon
| | It's clearly better to blog from the East Coast. Or Europe. You're up earlier. There's a better chance that when more people go to your blog, there's something new there. |
| | Maybe I should change the date flipping time to 10pm yesterday and pretend I'm back working for a morning newspaper. |
| | Does it look like I'm killing time, by the way? I am. I'm supposed to be at an on-line news conference, but the number to call is in my laptop, which just crashed. I'm doing this while it goes through its resurrection/restart routine. |
| | Maybe we should call this "by the way" journalism. Hey, I've got a couple minutes. Let's write something! |
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