If you have a Rubik’s Cube that you haven’t been able to solve and want to “clean it up,” you should check out the free online application at Wrongway.org. Wrongway is a blog run by Eric Dietz out of Minneapolis and includes some very helpful links, including those to solve the standard 3x3 Rubik’s Cube, the more advanced 4x4 Cube, and some general advice on solving the cube on your own. With the simple interface, you color the cube to match your exact configuration, click solve, and a page will be displayed with the step-by-step instructions to solve your cube. It’s quick, simple, free, and effective; all the hallmarks of good software.

Wrongway.org

It’s great to be an American.  It can never be denied that our government provides well for us.  Each election we debate which areas need improvement, which areas should be left alone, and hopefully elect candidates who will achieve that agenda.  And if not, well, we’ll get ‘em next election.  There’ll always be critics and cynics, but even they would have to admit to more good things about our government than I could ever hope to list here, from the mundane (garbage, sewage, waste treatment) to the critical (food, clean water, health, safety, financial assistance) to the spectacular (snow removal, public television, air traffic control).

I’ve always loved how towns and cities build and maintain parks for no gain other than to give the citizenry space to relax or play a game.  I’ll always support the construction of skate parks.  I would never argue against the creation of more parks even if the last time I set foot on a skateboard, it was narrow and made of hard plastic with rubber wheels that would catch on every pebble or patch of sand.  You shouldn’t have to be a boarder to get behind the idea of a park for kids to entertain themselves with physical activity.  I also love that if you don’t like the particular parks in your town, you can just go over to a neighboring city and hang out in one of their parks instead.

In most areas of the country there’s even plenty of subsidized transportation to get you there.  I just read somewhere that Boston was ranked #2 in the top list of cities that are accessible by foot.  The Massachusetts Bay Transit system, the T, is a great example of what a government project should achieve.  There are 5 different subway and streetcar lines (red, orange, green, blue, and silver), plus the commuter rail, buses (diesel, electric, or LNG), wheelchair vans, cars for the handicapped or elderly, and even boats.

Or if you prefer, there’s a massive, regulated hansom industry in Boston.  That’s one thing I miss about living out here in the sticks: taxi availability.  We can get on the commuter rail and be in Boston in about 30 minutes, but we can’t get a taxi cab to take us down the road to a St. Patrick’s Day party.  But, I digress.

The government has been providing for us in many areas for a very long time.  Unfortunately, it feels like all the big ideas, all the revolutionary government projects, all the greatest things about this country, were undertaken far too long ago.  In simpler terms, what have you done for me lately?

I don’t mean to be glib, because it’s not something I take lightly, but where’s our space race?  Where’s our Hoover Dam, Statue of Liberty, or Mount Rushmore?  Where’s our Chicago’s World Fair?  Where are the bold projects that lead the way?  Particularly lacking is the government’s involvement in technology.

In the past thirty years, computers have gone from obscure thinking machines for mathematical functions to penetrating most aspect of our daily lives.  A computer was probably involved somewhere along the way in the construction or delivery of everything we buy, wear, eat, use, or consume.  My alarm clock has a computer in it.

With all this heavy reliance on computers for banking, commerce, communication, management, construction, or entertainment, I find it a little disturbing at how hands off the government has been.  Instead of action and leadership, we get regulations and bureaucracy.  Of course, the concept and implementation of the internet itself was the results of a government project through DARPA, but since that was over forty years ago, it can’t be considered recent.  Where are the great new projects that show that the government recognizes it’s a digital world and some things need fixing?

A clear example of this lack of leadership is the continued presence of spam.  Why isn’t anything being done about spam?  The government has tried to deal with spam by passing nearly meaningless laws. Even when ledislators “get tough” on spam enforcement, it means that they’ve enacted measures to allow their constituents to do all the heavy lifting and sue some spammers for deceptive advertising or for not providing an opt-out.  These laws are based on the ability of the citizens to track down the spammers, serve them with papers, get them to appear in civil court, and prove the case.  Have these laws had any effect?  Has your inbox noticed the difference?  Mine sure hasn’t.  I still get spam at work and home and that’s after the emails have passed through about 4 different spam and anti-virus filters.

Spam is nearly impossible to fight from the receiving end.  And even if you do stop it from eventually getting to your inbox, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t sent.  There could have been hundreds or thousands of routers, switches, and computers which had to carry the message all the way there only to be refused and then bounce the message back, most likely involving a different path than the way it came, involving even more equipment.  Rejecting spam can take up twice as much bandwidth as having received it.

The worst part about spam is it never, ever stops.  When I first setup the email server at work in about 1995, I got in the habit of reading the email logs.  I remember right from the get-go, we regularly got email addressed to two usernames that didn’t exist at our company.  Our company name is similar to those of many other companies that operate around the country, and clearly two people from one of these other companies with a different, but similar, URL got onto some kind of mailing list.  Every year, these same two names appeared as the target of thousands of emails, even though a single message has never, ever been read - every single one was bounced or rejected.  A few years ago we outsourced our email server and I don’t bother reading the logs, but I’m sure that if I did, I’d see the same two email addresses today.

Spammers don’t care if they ever hit their target.  They’re just throwing crap at the wall and hoping something sticks.  They’re just playing the percentages and since it doesn’t cost them anything to send the emails, those percentages can be pretty low and still equate to a fortune.  Why isn’t the government making any real effort to stop it other than enacting regulatory laws that put the burden on the citizen?  Can you imagine the outcry if every night there was a knock at every American’s front door with someone pitching a bottle of snake oil or a peek at some dirty pictures?  Yet that’s exactly what happens to us regularly through email and its left up to every individual, company, or ISP to police the situation ourselves.

The U. S. Postal Service seems to me to be a prime governmental body to be involved in advancing the cause of email.  With the competition that has sprung up in the way of package handling and the reduced volume due to online invoicing and bill paying, an excellent stream of revenue for the U. S. Postal Service would be to charge money to deliver an email in the same way that it charges to deliver a letter.  In exchange for this fee, they could provide services like confidentiality, security, authentication, a confirmed receipt, and tracking information.

Another advantage with using the USPS is that tampering with the mail is a federal crime.  So is using the mail for the commission of a crime.  The same could be made true of USPS email.  If some shyster spammer passed an email through the USPS, the weight of the federal government should come down on him.  In the movie, Tom Cruise was only able to take down The Firm after he had gathered evidence of billing fraud and brought down the mighty hammer of the government due to the realization that the fraudulent invoices were sent through the US mail.

Chances are most spam would drop anyway even without the threat of felony prosecution.  If a spammer had to pay money for every email sent, it could change the percentage game enough that spamming wouldn’t be such a lucrative business after all.  At the very minimum, it would get spammers to care more about whether their emails were reaching an audience at all, let alone an interested one, and thus stop knocking at doors that weren’t being opened.

The USPS would also resolve another problem with email: the difficulty in changing email addresses or managing multiple addresses.  You can now keep the same phone number when you change cell phone carriers, but if you change ISP’s, you’re SOL.  I wouldn’t know where to begin if I ever left my job or cancelled my Verizon DSL.  I’d have to plan for at least a month to hope to get half of my subscriptions, correspondence, newsletters, and registrations switched over to a new address, if it’s even possible at all.

There could be other advantages of having a central clearing house for email.  Virus disinfection could be handled on a higher level than it is currently being handled through the “go-out-and-buy-whatever-package-you-think-will-work-update-it-regularly-never-open-any-attachments-and-pray-for-the-best” approach that stands now.  It would also help if the virus could be traced back to the first registered citizen that released it to the internet so it could be stopped at the source.

Email is only one of the problems that I see as affecting us on the technological front.  There are also serious problems with the patent office, the copyright system, open document standards, internet commerce, and allowing some very powerful corporations to have the power to dictate terms for the regular use of the systems on which our country’s computers are based.  These are only the things I can pick off the top of my head, but each is ripe with problems, misguided intentions, and example of a laissez-faire attitude toward technological innovation. I don’t expect these or any of the other problems facing the industry to be corrected with the wave of a wand, but shouldn’t we expect that at least something be seriously attempted?  Let’s build today’s equivalent of the NASA space program and stop pushing the burden onto the citizen.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
George Bernard Shaw

Even though I’ve been ripping and burning MP3’s for years, it’s only been since I got my iPhone that I’ve been using my MP3’s for regular playback. Up until now, my MP3’s were simply an easier way to organize and store my music collection. I’ve mostly only used MP3’s as a platform to more easily burn songs to CD or minidisc for enjoyment in the truck, home, or at work. Of course for backyard barbecues and holidays like Halloween, I’d setup a playlist on the computer, and I once burned an MP3 DVD just to test out the feature on a new DVD player. But still, for regular listening I listened to music recorded on hard medium until the iPhone, so I’ve been playing a little catch up on the technology.

Excepting only a few recent album purchases, I’ve kept up with ripping all my CD’s and have every song encoded as an MP3 with artist, album, track, title information. Now recently, since using iTunes, I’ve been adding album art to all my MP3s. The album art displays on the iPhone when a song is played and appears in the album view display on both the phone and the desktop version of iTunes.  I think sliding through the album covers and selecting one to play is the most impressive example of the advantage of the touch navigation and the iPhone’s beautifully rendered graphics.  The Mac makes it easy to add the art because you can simply use a search engine’s, like AllTheWeb, image search function and drag the source image right to the album. It’s also great that if the source image has since been removed and is no longer available, you can just drag the thumnail representation right off the search engine’s results page.  Oddly enough, sometimes these thumbnails even look better than the source image for rare songs where few alternatives available.

I’ve always manually defined the artist’s name on compilation albums because I want the songs to appear when I sort by artist and not just when I search for an artist’s name. For example, I would want Sweet Jane to appear if I were browsing through the Cowboy Junkies, and not have it be sorted with the V’s under “Various Artists” just because it happens to be from the Natural Born Killers soundtrack. Storing the albums this way never seems to occur to programmers who write MP3 software and result in somewhat of a mess. For example, in any album view or sort, iTunes treats each song like its own album and separates it from the rest of the tracks. For these, I click select each of the songs on the album, use the Mac’s command-I function, and assign the album art to all the songs at once through the properties window that pops up.  You can also assign multiple art files to your songs, but I haven’t seen a need for that yet and have only assigned one per.

I found a nice widget that automatically looks up whatever song is playing if it doesn’t already have art and finds an image from one of several defined sites (e.g. Amazon).  It’s a good tool because it’s very simple and does exactly what it sets out to do, but I found that I could usually find much better, clearer images on my own.  I also found that it doesn’t like the way I name tracks from compilation albums any better than iTunes, and results in locating the art for the album on which the artist originally released the song and assigns it to the whole album, which is a nuisance.  Another album art tool I’m using is a screen saver that wallpapers the screen with rows and rows of artwork, then randomly flips each one and replaces it with a different album.  I don’t know if it’s new with OS X Leopard or had existed in Tiger too, but I’ve only just noticed it recently.

I also experimented with the iTunes’ store’s custom ringtones, but wasn’t satisfied with the results. To create a ringtone, you need to have purchased the song through the store, so I had to buy a single I already owned, then buy the ringtone made from the track.  I got to pick and adjust the sample of the song that I wanted to rip to a ringtone, but that was more of a curse than a blessing. What I thought sounded great on the Mac is a muted, delayed mess on the iPhone.  I left so much of a pause at the beginning that I might as well have selected dead air.  Now, whenever Maggie calls, the iPhone stops playing music and I hear absolutely nothing and realize it’s her before a note has played, which is not what I was looking for in a ringtone, at least not for $5. I’m going to start checking out some make-your-own ringtone tools and some of the free sites out there and report back what I find. Once I get some that I like, I’ll write how to load them on the iPhone.

"Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.”
Frank Zappa