O’Reilly Radar has an article written by Dale Dougherty, a roundtable set of opinions on whether the war on spam can be won. Rafe Colburn also has his own response.

Rafe’s solution is to use GMail. In the Dougherty’s article, Paul Vixie mentions that the internet is going to become a “walled garden;” relying on proprietary technology provided from a single company is the same thing in my eyes. There’s no way I’m going to advocate a proprietary solution for something as important as my e-mail.

Eric Allman mentions DKIM, which I think is an excellent weapon in the war on spam. I’m not using it however, as it doesn’t fit in with the way I use e-mail, and MUA (e-mail client) and MTA (e-mail SMTP server, essentially) is extremely sparse.

My unfortunately ineffective and impractical solution to this problem is use of PGP. Besides identity verification via digital signatures, it is also a generic platform for encrypted digital communication, and provides a distributed, robust trust model. Unfortunately, its learning curve is high, and that is why it’s basically been a failure for the past 10 yrs.

Though, lack of user education is why the spam problem keeps getting worse too. It’s users who click links in spam e-mail; it’s users who allow spammers to take over their machines through their negligence in applying security updates; it’s users (sometimes) who allow their identities to be stolen.

In the process of writing a term paper for a class, I’ve been paging through many research papers.

Unfortunately, many of these research papers are only available for reading via PDF. Even for those papers that have full text on a normal webpage, complex login and authentication systems (i.e. I can only access said page through my university library) force me to save PDFs to facilitate later reading.

PDFs are really miserable for reading on the computer. My gripes:

Fixed font styles

Many PDFs use serif fonts, which are generally difficult to read on screen (though fine on print media). Some irate designers even create PDFs that use “Times New Roman,” which despite it being default on many web browsers is ugly and difficult to read. In a web browser, you can change it; in a PDF, you are forced to suffer with it.

Fixed font sizes

Font sizes are fixed in PDFs, you cannot change them. Often when reading on screen, fonts are just too large, or are too small. This is compounded with…

No wrapping

Text is statically laid out, so you are completely reliant and sizing your window and adjusting your zoom to be able to read a block a text, or stuck with moving your scrollback back and forth.

Columns

Computers have scrollbars. Columns make absolutely no sense when you can scroll. The worst case comes up when you combine columns AND scrolling: you have to scroll down to finish reading a column, and then scroll back up to begin reading the top of the next column.

Usability expert Jakob Nielson thinks so too: in 2003 he had a column PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption.

It seems that some of these problems stem from a mismatch in orientation. Computer monitors are generally landscape; PDFs and printed media are portrait.

And computer monitors just keep getting wider. While widescreen is nothing short of awesome for movies and television, its not that useful for computing. The classic use case is the accountant with a wide spreadsheet: but how many people have wide spreadsheets? Because most people use computers to create content in a portrait orientation, and that most content we read expands downward rather than to the side, it seems as if it would make sense if monitors were a portrait orientation rather than landscape.

Fortunately, this is easy to try out now. Most LCD monitors swivel into portrait orientation with a flick of the wrist. Microsoft Windows and Linux (through the XRandR extensions) have provided orientation switching support for a few years as well.

But it’s not yet usable by the mainstream. For example, on Linux with nVidia’s binary drivers, running in portrait means losing out on accelerated 3D as well as multimonitor support, things many people (including myself) are not ready to lose.

I have bought my 16th domain name today, randomized.info, for a project that I am going to do some day soon.

The way I see it, domain names are like Internet real estate. And indeed, some people market them like this (though I wouldn’t). The domain name system and the top-level domains everyone knows and loves (.com, etc) are not going away anytime soon, nor is there any kind of suitable replacement to solve its inherent problems.

I can never remember how to install Java on Debian, so here’s my version on how to do it the Debian Way (TM).

Download the Sun Java 2 Runtime environment or Development Kit from Sun’s Java site. The file you download should have a “.bin” extension. Then install:

java-package is a set of Debian scripts for creating your own Debian-ized Java package. fakeroot lets you run certain programs as root, such as the Debian package creation process. After these are installed, run:

The first creates a Debian package from the Sun binary installer, while the second installs the created Debian package.

This will fulfill all Java dependencies in Debian, something you would not get if you installed Java via some other method. It’s also the “official” Java, as opposed to using something like Blackdown, and makes you less reliant on having to rely on other people for packaging. For example, I used this to create my own AMD64 64-bit Java package.