The Andrew Turnbull Web Journal Archives: June 2007-August 2007

8-23-2007: I miss TechTV...

Remember this?

I first discovered TechTV in 2001, when my cable company added a few new channels to its lineup and, conveniently enough, a move resulted in me getting a cable access jack in my own bedroom. I soon discovered it to be the best thing to hit the tube since Square One: An insightful, intelligent channel devoted to all manners and aspects of computers and technology in general, with an assortment of live and specially-themed shows. Even though the content covered wasn't always in my direct interest (Hey, I was still using Windows 3.1 at the time), it was captivating. Where else could you see viewers' questions be diagnosed on the air on Call for Help, or see the producers tour Third Eye Blind's recording studio on Audiofile?

Unfortunately, the powers that be wouldn't leave well enough alone. Ultra-mega-cable-conglomerate Comcast bought out TechTV in 2004...and immediately proceeded in dismantling and destroying it. In due course they fired nearly all the staff, cancelled nearly all the programs, and promptly "merged" it with its barely-fledgling G4 "game" channel, which was something almost no one watched (or wanted to watch) before then. Fans were angry, but no concessions were made, and by early 2005 even the "TechTV" name had been dropped from vestiges of the network.

Who on earth would want to watch a channel with amateurish, incompetent hosts and programming, devoted to the extra-narrow topic of computer games and nothing else? Yet, that was exactly what the post-"merger" G4 was. And as if the channel wasn't rendered unwatchable enough already, they've since abandoned even this premise, airing things as un-technical as reruns of "Cops" to pad the schedule. My how the mighty have fallen in three short years...

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8-21-2007: News Break

About a week ago (mere days before the fall semester started), WVU finally got around to removing my name from their online directory and deactivating my old personal website at the community.wvu.edu URL. Yet, I can still access my WVU e-mail...at least by POP3. I haven't bothered with their web interface in years.

WVU's "Personal WWW Space" FAQ states that students' web space is deactivated "about 10 days" after their last semester ends. For the record my space lingered on the server in excess of three months from graduation, so I'd presume that their IT folks aren't exactly in a hurry.

This year marks the first late-summer in nineteen years where I don't anticipate (with excitement or with dread) the coming of a new academic year. Yes!!!

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8-7-2007: The Block Strikes Back

Unfortunately, it seems that I've been struck by a case of writer's block once again. Any suggestions?

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7-26-2007: Thunderbird, Wither and Die?

Mozilla Thunderbird 2

This type of news makes me shake my head in disgust. The Mozilla Foundation/Corporation...the quasi-nonprofit entity that took over where Netscape left off...is going to spin off the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client as a project outside its direct oversight.

This sounds somewhat similar to how they "discontinued" and spun off the old Mozilla suite a couple years ago. To a degree I was willing to tolerate that, as Firefox and Thunderbird had been touted as the successor to the suite from the beginning, more or less duplicated it in functionality, and it only made sense to concentrate on one comparable product at a time. But Thunderbird presents a different set of implications.

Thunderbird is the companion POP3/IMAP e-mail client to Firefox, and e-mail is just as fundamental an element to online communications as browsing the web. Netscape began to complement its web browser with an e-mail client back in 1996, and Thunderbird is a successor to that. While e-mail clients haven't seen as many exciting innovations in the last decade as web browsers have, Mozilla Thunderbird is a decent product for what it is, and is much more secure, functional, and system-compatible than Outlook Express, its main competition.

Evidently, because "the resources allocated to Firefox dwarf those allocated to Thunderbird," they want to wash their hands of Thunderbird entirely. That is the silliest position imaginable: The resources in question come out of Mozilla's own hands, and it's their own responsibility to allocate them so that their software is developed and promoted in the way it should be! And if the Mozilla Foundation cannot provide the resources needed, why does it think that a separate entity without the benefit of search revenues and the like from Firefox will?

Even if development of Thunderbird goes on in some way or form (like the old suite has as SeaMonkey), you can count on potential implications of this news...such as the software no longer being promoted alongside Firefox, or god forbid, a name change...to all but extinguish any potential Thunderbird had to catch on in the popular consciousness to begin with.

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7-20-2007: Flashing a Sign

[Flash 8/9 Required messages]

What the heck gives with all the websites that have sprouted up in the last year requiring Flash 8 or newer versions to view content?

The Flash plugin is often overused and misused in and of itself. Unless a site is a multimedia presentation like YouTube, the addition of Flash is seldom not bettered by its removal, but version incompatibilities make its use all the more frustrating.

Macromedia is a company that made some fairly decent products over the years. It seems suitable that Flash 8 was released in the wake of Macromedia being swallowed up by Adobe...a company well-known for sluggish, poorly-designed applications like Adobe Reader 6.

I use Windows 95 OSR2...the last version released before the interface designers swigged the IE 4 Kool-Aid and went insane...and cannot use Flash 8. Yet Adobe (née Macromedia) have no qualms about "supporting" Flash 8 on Windows 98, which is nearly identical in terms of APIs and capabilities.

When Flash 7 and earlier versions were current, I don't recall any site ever demanding more than the previous version or the version before that for compatibility. Yet just a brief time after Flash 8 was released, a bunch of sites popped up claiming to require version 8 and 8 only. Evidently, Macromedia changed how the scripts inside Flash files were processed with this version, producing backwards-incompatibility. It seems grimly coincidental, though, that they didn't decide to break compatibility until after leaving Windows 95 and NT 4 users in the dust.

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7-14-2007: Sony, Copy This!

Remember the Sony "copy protection" fiasco a year or two back? The music division of Sony (or actually "Sony BMG," in this post-apocalyptic merger-mania era) got into hot water when it released a number of unmarked CDs containing copy-prevention schemes that automatically installed on computers without consent. Well, get this: Now Sony BMG are suing one of the makers of the software for "defective technology" and "cost[ing] the record company millions of dollars to settle consumer complaints and government investigations."

Oh, the irony. Maybe if Sony hadn't insisted on "copy-protecting" their hardware to begin with, this wouldn't have happened!

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7-10-2007: Square One TV music videos on YouTube

Rats...why isn't stuff like this on the air any more?

(And why do I keep running into people who remember dull shows like Bill Nye the Science Guy more fondly than this?)

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7-4-2007: Upgrades in sight, left and right

I'm back again, after spending a week at a hobbyists' convention. You can look forward to seeing some "upgrades" to my arcane "License Plate Gallery" soon.

Eight months after Mozilla Firefox 2 came out, Firefox 1.5 finally prompted me with a notice to upgrade to it. Unfortunately I won't be upgrading any time soon, though: Thanks to a teeny little Unicode API change during development, Firefox 2 broke compatibility with Windows 95 and for that matter NT 3.51. (And yes, I still use Windows 95 today, although by this point it's more out of silent protest against web integration, product activation, DRM, and inefficiency than anything else.) Although Firefox 2 can be hacked to run with a little effort, why bother? Firefox 1.5 still works like a charm.

See you again soon!

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6-21-2007: Safari...on Windows?

I have to say that this software release took me by surprise. I never expected Apple's self-made Safari web browser (or KHTML, for that matter) to be ported to Windows, or indeed any platform other than their own. But ported it was, and a beta version of Safari for Windows is available for download.

Like seemingly everything else nowadays, WinSafari "supports" Windows XP and Vista only, although some people have been successful running it on Windows 2000 as well. I haven't tried out the release myself for that reason.

The reason this was released seems a bit unclear: Its primary purpose may have been to serve as a web app development program for the iPhone, or perhaps to make it easier for site developers to test their pages in Safari. I'm not a fan of Safari myself--during my brief stint as a Mac user, I found the interface far too uncustomizable and convoluted to use--and it looks like the Windows version offers no improvements on that note. The stupidly hard-coded user interface violates every Windows UI convention imaginable. One of my online acquaintances tried it out, and he reported that it crashed more often than the unofficial Netscape 5 pre-alpha from 1998.

Although Safari for Windows is hardly ready for prime time, I'm inclined to believe that in terms of encouraging innovations in performance and features, increased browser competition (unless it comes from Microsoft) is a good thing. There could be unforseen complications, however: If statistics for a website turned from, say, 78% IE, 15% Firefox, 2% Safari, 5% Others to 78% IE, 9% Firefox, 8% Safari, 5% Others, what incentive would there be for a lazy, read-the-numbers webmaster to target any browser other than Internet Explorer?

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6-18-2007: Music: The Scoop on Genesis Reissues

[Genesis 1976-1982]

For a couple years now, news has circulated in music circles about the Genesis catalog being reissued in the high-resolution SACD format. About a month ago, their output of the 1976-1982 timeframe was re-released in a boxed set with video content on bonus DVDs, with the respective albums from Trick of the Tail up through Abacab being reissued individually as well. So, it's time for Genesis fans such as yours truly to run out to the stores and snap them up, right?

Not quite: The newest reissues have been botched in a number of ways.

To begin, the Genesis catalog is split between two label conglomerates worldwide: Warner Music Group (in North America) and EMI (in the rest of the world). While hybrid SACDs are being released in Europe, Japan, and anywhere else EMI has distribution, Warner's releases in this part of the world are plain CDs with no high-resolution audio content. The reason why? Warner was the chief backer of DVD-Audio--an arch-rival, competing format--and hell would freeze over before their suits approved an SACD. If that wasn't bad enough, the bonus video content is encoded in NTSC on some releases around the world and PAL on others. For North American fans scouting out expensive imports in the hope of finding both SACD and compatible DVD content, it's enough to drive one mad!

Most people (myself included) don't have the means to play SACDs, so that could well be a moot point if the reissues sounded good. Unfortunately, even that is not to be: In preparation for multi-channel SACD releases (and in a bit of revisionist history), all the music was remixed...into shrill-toned, over-compressed sonic poop. The instrument and vocal balances have been changed, the original dynamics have been squashed, and everything sounds bright and brittle to the point of ear fatigue. Check out this sound-clip comparison if you're morbidly curious yourself. A lot of the remixes aren't severely different from the original incarnations, but all sound weird in their own ways.

Probably one of the few good points about the reissues is the packaging: The box looks handsomely done, with a rendition of the early '90s band logo on each side. They did a faithful job of reproducing the LP graphics and typesetting on each disc's inserts, without the generic white spines and disc faces that marked the last round of CD reissues. Of course, the faithfully reproduced LP graphics are adorned by an ugly "FBI Anti-Piracy Warning" logo on the back cover. Funny how those that buy the music on CD get huge warnings, while those who download it illegitimately get none of it.

The new 2007 incarnations are destined to replace the earlier releases on the market, and more remixing madness is likely on its way. All I can recommend at this point is snapping up the original album mixes on CD while you can. It's great music...a pity it couldn't be celebrated in a better way.

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6-11-2007: End of the Ladder

I feel like I've reached a very weird time in my life.

For the last eighteen or so years, the progression of events in my life has been more or less a ladder laid out in front of me: I seamlessly stepped up from preschool to kindergarten and elementary school; middle school, and high school. College certainly presented me with a few more options and original considerations on my part, but even then it was fairly obvious what I was going to do.

Graduating from WVU was an anticlimactic experience. Even with four years of college life under my belt, I'm back to feeling pretty much the same now as I did four years ago: Stewing at home with no sure idea of what I want to do or where my life will pan out from here.

I've never had a clear plan or aspiration as to what I want to do for a living. Do I want to be an actor? Museum worker? Computer programmer? Engineer? Artist? Historian? Probably all of these and then some have crossed my mind in the last decade, but none have really stuck. I enjoyed studying art history somewhat my latter three semesters in college, but I'm not enthusiastic enough about the matter to want to commit to it in graduate school, nor do I see a career continuation out of that.

So, what should I do right now? Get a random low-wage job and see where it takes me? (That seems obvious enough.) Go on a trip? Find some way for inspiration to arrive?

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6-4-2007: Whither Arial?

In my font rant a number of months ago, I inquired if there was any evidence of the Arial font being used anywhere in practice prior to its inclusion in Windows 3.1.

Well, I haven't gotten any answers, but I did come across an intriguing lead when going through some old videotapes. This bit of fine print flashed at the bottom of the screen in an HBO "Comic Relief III" promo from 1989:

HBO Comic Relief III promo
Arial/Helvetica font sample

Judge for yourself: The "R" and "G" sure look more like Arial than Helvetica. It's all too blurry to know for sure, however, so this may well be a false lead. Still, it's interesting nevertheless.

Got any pre-1992 evidence of Arial at hand? Tell me about it!

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