Ramblings of Narc

Here’s a neat question for you: what do you think the most traded media on the Internet is?

Is it:

1. Feature-length movies?
2. Music?
3. TV Series?
4. Video Games?
5. None of the above?

As it turns out, the answer is (e) None of the above. “The Internet is for porn” is not just a catchy show-tune. Note that I’m not referring to the most bandwidth consumed, the honor of which goes to spam — I’m referring to actual, user-shared, P2P trafficked media.

So if that’s true, then we can start to look at the RIAA/MPAA’s claims that “The Internet/downloads are destroying the [music/movie] industry”. By this statement, it should be impossible to make any money selling porn on the Internet, right?

…Yeah, and if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell ya. I don’t believe I’ve mentioned this before here on the blog, but I work with porn every day as part of my regular job, and let me tell you: the only time the signups stop is when someone does something stupid to break them. Otherwise, they just keep coming.

So if free porn didn’t kill the pornography industry, what makes the *AA think that free music/movies are going to kill their respective industries? Perhaps they’re hiding some feelings of inadequacy?

Okay, so, if you’re a subscriber to this blog’s RSS feed, I apologize from the bottom of my heart. Having taken the time to subscribe and read that feed, I have come to the conclusion that it is absolute, unfettered crap. It’s severely incomplete, obviously generated automatically, and ends up cutting a HUGE amount of the original post off, in spite of the fact that I specifically asked WordPress to include the complete article in its generated feeds!

Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be any solution (other than, probably, getting a plugin to do the right thing instead). Until I looked closer…

Compare this:

Fig. 1: Ramblings of Narc RSS feed sample

To this:

Fig. 2: Ramblings of Narc Atom feed sample

That’s right, the atom feed is much, much better. Like, infinitely better. So much better, in fact, that it’s now the only feed I’m advertising for this blog. If there is demand, I will probably throw the Atom feed through FeedBurner and point people to that, but until then, the Atom feed, which rocks immensely, is king.

Here’s one that should be entertaining — a listing of all the acronyms I come across on a daily basis, along with my opinion (or other tidbits) on them:

• PHP — originally “Personal Home Page”, now the recursive acronym: “PHP: Hypertext Pre-processor”. Not too painful to use, given the alternatives.
• PERL — “Practical Extraction and Report Language”. AcronymFinder also lists “Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister”, which is reasonably accurate, from my experience with it.
• SQL — “Structured Query Language”. Not “Standard”. Unfortunately.
• SSH — “Secure SHell”. Uses SSL (see below). Very solid and reliable, in my experience.
• SSL — “Secure Sockets Layer”. A technology for implementing mostly-transparent secure data transfer.
• HTTP — “HyperText Transfer Protocol”. Stateless, Simple, and Stupid. Also, very useful.
• HTTPS — either “HTTP, Secure”, or “HTTP over SSL” (which, IMO, should be HTTP/SSL), depending on who you believe. See also HTTP, SSL (above).
• SFTP — “Secure File Transfer Protocol” (not to be confused with FTPS, which is actually FTP/SSL, and doesn’t have much traction in the real world), a service provided by (Open)SSH servers in addition to the shell service.
• AIM — “AOL Instant Messenger”. Crappy software, but with a third-party client like Pidgin is actually reasonable. See also AOL (below).
• AOL — “America OnLine”. Shitty company, well known for being asshole-ish towards its customers (known internally as “members”).
• Y!M — “Yahoo! Messenger”. Semi-crappy messenger service. Reasonably functional, though, and quite stable.
• GTalk — “Google Talk”. Another messenger service, this one built on Jabber/XMPP (see below) and made by Google, the “Don’t be evil” company. Not too evil.
• XMPP — “eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol”. An open standard for exchanging (instant) messages over an XML-like protocol. Speaking of which:
• XML — “eXtensible Markup Language”. I just love these X-acronyms, they always make me feel like I’m living in the future.
• IRC — “Internet Relay Chat”. Yes, people still use it. Some pretty awesome people, in some cases, as it turns out.
• APT — “Advanced Packaging Tool”. So far, the best package management tool I’ve seen. However, my experience is limited, so a grain of salt is recommended.
• PTS — “Pseudo-Terminal Slave”. What your SSH session spawns into: a terminal with no associated hardware (virtual or otherwise).

There are probably more I’ve missed, but these will do for the time being. How about you? What are the interesting/important acronyms that you work with every day?

First off, apologies for the graphics-intensive post, but the subject matter demands it.

I’ve seen various pictures of desktops on the Internet, and they usually tend to be cluttered with a bunch of icons, sometimes clustered in such a way as to suggest organization, sometimes not so much.

What I haven’t really seen (well, I haven’t looked very much, either) is what I have:

Presenting… the icon-less desktop!

I assume that makes you think I use the start menu a lot? Far from it, my friend. I happen to consider the Start Menu “no man’s land”, for “those few brave souls who’ve dared to enter it… have never come back”. Instead, what I have is…

The auto-hiding Quick Launch (and more) toolbar. The icons up there are the tools I tend to use the most, though not in that order (or any order, really). The very important ones (for work) are Cygwin (for starting vpnc), PuTTY, and WinSCP. There’s also a Komodo Edit icon, but I don’t really use it — it’s my default editor, anyway, so who needs the extra link?

Because it’s the Quick Launch bar, most installers ask if I want an icon there, so it gets mostly the same type of mileage as the Desktop would. But wait, what’s that over to the right? Could it be…?

That’s right, it’s the Desktop. Now cleanly organized in menu/drawer-like fashion, it still has all those other links I might need once in a while (like, a My Computer to right-click), and can also be used to drag the icons from those applications whose installers don’t ask if you want an icon on the QuickLaunch bar.

There’s one minor problem, though — with this setup, the Recycle Bin tends to try to open automatically if you hover your mouse over it. And if it’s full of a whole lot of stuff, that’ll take a while. Plus, you don’t really see it, do you? Thus, that “Special” folder, er, “on” the Desktop.

It’s the source of a toolbar that sits right next to the Start button (didn’t notice it, did ya?) that contains only a shortcut to the Recycle Bin. So you can see it when it’s full, and can right-click, Empty away.

There’s also a pretty direct mapping between the Games folder and the Games toolbar/menu, but I suspect that’s obvious.

What I love about this is the fact that there are no desktop icons. I rarely see the desktop, anyway (outside of the times when I’m taking screenshots of it, of course), so it’s useless to keep anything there. And the background picture doesn’t get all cluttered up, either. What do you think?