So the problem I mentioned in the previous post was not exclusive to LiquidWeb or Mail.app. All the issues seem to be related to an upgrade to CPanel which addressed a critical security vulnerability.

A few days after the LiquidWeb problems I ran into similar issues with sites hosted on SwiftCo.

Both hosting companies handled this poorly. Customers should have been notified that there would be an upgrade. Both tech support departments appeared to be caught off guard by the mail problems. While it is impossible to anticipate every potential interaction from a system upgrade, some advance warning would allow for these issues to be dealt with more effectively. Letting us know something was coming would also invite feedback which would help identify problems more quickly and help the companies better prepare responses and solutions whatever comes up.

I came very close to firing hosts and moving sites over this, not knowing the cause of our problems had me assuming incompetence.

I’m not loving the new desktop. It’s hard to believe that after all these years of publicly mocking Microsoft and Vista, Apple appears to be aping one of the ugliest and most useless features of Vista: Aero.

The transparent menu bar is a disaster. Michael Tsai agrees, calling it “insane.” Looking around the conference it’s easy to tell which machines are running Leopard, they’re the ones with the horrid acid-pastel menubars. The first corrective solution, Non-Transparent Menu Bar, was posted a few hours after the keynote. Personally, I would have called it a de-uglifier.

The interaction of windows butted up against the menubar is also sub-optimal. In all previous OS X iterations, there has been a faint grey line at the base of the bar. That prevented windows from visually grouping with the menubar. Now that the bar relies on whatever incidental color is leaching through, window title bars appear to clump up with the menubar.

About the Dock’s new glowing blue LED blob: Didn’t we learn our lesson after putting the original iMac’s into Aqua’s menus? Or Brushed Metal? Mimicking physical elements do not necessarily make for good computer interface design. This is looking dated already and it’s only been a day.

The faux-perspective Dock floor implies the bottom edge of a portal into a 3d space. The problem here is that the windows go behind the furthest edge of the Dock’s floor. That means we’re sort of looking into a box and our windows, the most important content, are psychologically far away from us, all the way down at the bottom. Nevermind that the menubar doesn’t exist in that space in any logical way. Having seen Beryl’s true 3D windows, the Finder feels flat and dated. And that oversized drop shadow is so big it’s nearly comical, except that we might have to live with it for a year or two.

Stacks. Like so much else, they demo well. Beyond that they’re really strange, especially regarding usability. I guess it will be nice to see the icon of the last-downloaded item (or newest item in a folder), even if that means I’ll always have a DMG, ZIP or unremarkable text file down there. Most of the time we’ll be hitting the Downloads stack to get to the most recent download, but here Stacks defies logic and moves that icon to the farthest position from the mouse. (this seems to be a Leopard design pattern) It seems to me that the most recent thing should be closest to the mouse. Also, and I don’t know the exact number, but beyond a certain amount of files, stacks revert to a limited grid view which shows a few dozen items. My Downloads folder is a junk collector, currently there are 225 items crufting away in there. Stacks are mostly useless for me.

So one of my credit card numbers got jacked and was being used for an incredibly useless shopping spree; all sorts of crap I didn’t order is showing up in my mailbox but well at least I’m getting card travel rewards. Good job morons.

Whoever did this either guessed my email or googled me. Records of fraudulent purchases came to both my normal email and my gmail account, which I don’t give out and rarely use. It almost seems like someone was deliberately trying to sabotage me, however the GMail account is such an outlier that I doubt it.

Credit card theft most often happens when someone takes a receipt from a store or restaurant. I rarely use this card physically, so I’m pretty sure I know precisely where and when the number was taken.

In a way, this episode might be an argument for lack of privacy, aka open secrets. I have a listed phone number, I still google well and, much as it sometimes makes me nervous, especially as a parent, it’s just not that difficult to find out information about me. That same information might be the reason I was able to find out about this fraud quickly instead of waiting several weeks until my credit card statement showed up.

I first noticed this because a slew of subscriptions to Jagex/RuneScape showed up in my email. Initially I thought these were just more spam, so I waited a day to call my card’s issuing bank. I wrote Jagex and they were very helpful, refunded all charges and blocked the card from future purchases.

Columbia House and BMG Music Club present an incredibly sleazy face to the world. Trying to get a phone number on their websites is just about pointless.

BMG had several numbers listed though most were “no longer in service”, thankfully one referred me to another number where I was finally able to get a person after pressing zero repeatedly. The phone number for BMG was 317-692-9200.

Columbia House was worse, there were no numbers I could find on the site. I ended up getting their corporate phone number via whois (then I found it in several other places relating to the corporation). The number for Columbia House is 212-596-2000, tell them you’re calling to pursue a fraud case and they get you to a person very quickly.

With both BMG and Columbia House, once I got a person on the phone they were very helpful.

Citibank’s fraud division has been amazing and I’m really not worried about having to pay for any of this stuff. Mostly I am worried that my email address, which I’ve been using for over 10 years, might be polluted to the point that I can no longer use it for purchases.

The only thing I definitely won’t be able to get back are the hours spent dealing with this.

At Bell Labs in 1962, John L. Kelly recreated the song “Bicycle Built for Two,” also know as Daisy Bell, using an IBM 704 computer. This might have been the first demonstration of digitally synthesized speech. (MP3)

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.
I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.
It won’t be a stylish marriage.
I can’t afford a carriage.
But you’ll look sweet,
upon the seat,
of a bicycle built for two.

Listening to an MP3 of the event, the wonder of that accomplishment still comes through.

Arthur C. Clarke happened to witness that event and would go on to use the song for HAL9000’s death scene in 2001.

IBM is said to have sold only 123 model 704 computers between 1955 and 1960, though the machines were extremely expensive and often rented. A single computer might have cost as much as $24 million — in 1957 dollars.

FORTRAN and LISP, the foundations of most all modern computing languages, were first developed on these machines (FORTRAN was started on the IBM 701 but first compiled on the 704). The 704 was the first commercially available computer to feature floating point arithmetic, and magnetic core memory (initially containing 4k of 36-bit words, which I think works out to about 18 bytes of memory. An installed machine was said to have come with its own human field engineer. Here’s a scanned copy of the IBM 704 Manual of Operation.

First glimmer via Wikipedia by way of Defective Yeti.

At a weekend playdate for the girls, Jonathan showed me this movie:

It’s a ferrofluid sculpture by Sachiko Kodama, Yasushi Miyajima, Morpho Towers — Two Standing Spirals, higher quality clip at the link.

Another video, possibly showing a prototype and scale of the above fountain:

A ferrofluid is:

Ferrofluids are composed of nanoscale ferromagnetic particles suspended in a carrier fluid, usually an organic solvent or water. The ferromagnetic nano-particles are coated with a surfactant to prevent their agglomeration (due to van der Waals and magnetic forces).

In English, I think that means very small metal particles are coated with oil, then those oil-coated particles are suspended in another liquid. Sort of like a thin version of artists oil paint. A ferrofluid isn’t a liquid metal, it’s a liquid with lots of very tiny pieces of metal suspended in it. Sort of like a stable mixture of iron filings and oil. Ferrofluids do not retain any magnetism.

Ferrofluids can be made at home using water based or oil based recipes. It can also be purchased online (prices seem to run $12 to $25 per ounce).

Here’s someone playing around with ferrofluid at home using a bolt (instead of precision crafted metal spirals). The first 30 seconds are still images then it switches to video. Please jump around, the results are beautiful and fascinating, but it’s ultimately just 10 minutes of someone dripping liquid onto a bolt:

As beautiful as the spikey ferrofluid demonstrations are, this video shows patterns I would never have expected to see coming from magnetic fields:

The changing patterns looking like typographic ornaments or petroglyphs or cartoon drawings of bacteria. As pointed out in the YouTube comments, the pattern-transformation at 2:04 is especially crazy.

Most of the recipes online involve some scary chemicals.* However this video deserves linking not because it makes a ferrofluid from laser toner and motor oil, but because the guy has a spoon in his drill:

Yeah the music’s horrible. I’m surprised the magnets in the drill’s motor didn’t cause the stuff to shoot off the plate.

Someone needs to find a way to turn this into a sub-$40 desk toy. Way better than a lava lamp. If anyone’s interested in organizing production of something like that, I have sketches and ideas ready to go.

* Almost all chemicals scare me. I never had much chemistry in high school, don’t have anyone to ask and the margin of error seems to involve the range of explode->not-explode or horrible-disfiguring-chemical-burns->no-reaction. As someone who tends to learn by trial and error, chemistry is an area I actively steer my curiosity away from.

When did Flickr change from being a place to share photos of cats into a place to find really technically exceptional photography? Rarely is there anything particularly revolutionary; lots of beautiful sunsets, dappled afternoon light, long-exposures smoothing the movement of water, fast-exposures freezing the movement of water, macro shots of flowers and urban settings evocative of lonliness. Nice pictures. But these are often quite wonderful take collectively, sometimes stunning images reflecting remarkable skill and incredible moments of luck.

Reload this page a few times to see what I mean:
Flickr: Explore interesting photos

I’ve used a My.Yahoo! page as my default home page for about a decade. There’s nothing particularly special about it, just a few news feeds, weather and stocks. Yahoo! recently started a beta redesign of the My.Yahoo system, and in the process they broke the old one. None of the content on the old page is updating now.

The new design feels clunky, but then Google’s portal thingie feels slapdash. Take your pick. Getting used to this is going to take a while, if I don’t just go roll my own with MooTools…

Poking around the new pages with FireBug (hands down the greatest browser add-on and web development tool ever, really) I found some strange stuff in the My.Yahoo page. Can someone explain why this seemingly random 1.2mb image is being sent? Feivel? Huh? As far as I could tell, it’s not random, but the query string prevents caching. The only thing I can think of is some sort of  bandwidth test.

Whatever it was, before I could publish this the image stopped being sent. Good thing I saved a copy. I guess.

This thing should totally be on a geek shirt.