Broofa Blog

“Inline Linking” or “Deep Linking” is the practice of linking to content hosted on a website you don’t own.  There are various reasons why you might do this, but the practice is often frowned upon by site owners because it generates traffic that doesn’t come from actual site visitors.  Not only does this drive up hosting fees (since it causes more work for the servers), it tends to pollute web server statistics, making it harder to understand what legitimate site users are doing.   And, in the worst case scenario,  if the content that is doing the linking gets slashdotted, it may bring down any servers it links to.

Thus, when someone named, “iPranc”, started using an image from my site in their signature on VBForums.com, which gets 100x more traffic than little ‘ol broofa.com does, it didn’t go unnoticed.

A common remedy for such problems is to simply change the URL for the image (i.e. break it) and wait for the linker to notice and update their content.  In this case, however, that didn’t work - it just resulted in tons of 404 errors showing up in my logs for several months. So, I’m trying something a little more drastic.  We’ll see if it has any effect.

[iPranc, if you happen to read this, feel free to leave a comment with your contact info]

July 4th weekend saw a pretty horrific encounter between a driver and two bicyclists in Los Angeles.  The residents of the community involved are upset about how cyclists have come to make driving difficult, cyclists are in an uproar about the outrageous behavior of the driver, the police are involved, and it’s starting to garner attention not just outside the area, but outside the state.  It’s just an ugly situation all around.

I’ll let you do your own homework on the incident and commentary surrounding it, though.  I don’t feel like rehashing my opinions on the matter here.  But there are a couple things that merit discussion.

First, I suspect the tension between these drivers and bicyclists is inevitable and, to a large degree, may be irreconcilable. These two groups exist in completely different realities.  A bicycle is 20-30 pounds of wafer-thin, steel tubing powered by an engine (the rider) that has a peak power of about 1/3rd horsepower.  Safety consists of strapping 9 ounces of foam to your head.  Drivers, on the other hand, are encased in 3,000 pounds of steel, surrounded by airbags, and have 100-150 horsepower at their disposal with a simple touch of the accelerator.

Two completely different modes of transportation in terms of handling, safety, and environmental impact.  These physical differences in machines translate to ideological differences in their respective riders.  It’s pretty clear we will always struggle to understand one another.  The most I think can be hoped for is for is to start moving away from this pattern of distrust and resentement that has evolved.  Doing this will require treating one another with courtesy and decency, even at such times it may not seem warranted and, hopefully, we can begin to develop a bit of mutual respect.  It’s worth a shot at least.

The other thing I wanted to touch on is a bit more ominous.  One of the forums discussing the above incident had to close down commentary because people kept posting the personal information of the driver involved.  It is clear that there are a lot of very angry bicyclists out there, and a story about an incident as blatant as this one provides them with a tempting target. Out of curiousity, I found myself doing a little research to see how hard it would be to track down some information on the driver.  In a span of about 5 minutes, I was able to find his home address, email address, home phone number, Google Maps imagery of his house, and the tax records and property value for his home.  It’s pretty spooky how easily available such information is.

The specter of online vigilantiasm is very intimidating.  In the Old West, vigilante justice required rounding up a willing posse from your local community, tracking down the villian in question in person, and applying a very personal, hands-on form of justice.  All of which required real energy and risk to the vigilante. The internet changes all that.  Instead of a posse of half a dozen neighbors, the “villian” faces a veritable army of outraged users around the globe.  Users who, instead of having to confront him in person, need only sit in the comfort and anonymity of their homes, hundreds or thousands of miles away, and tappity-tap at their keyboards to wreak a staggering amount of digital mayhem.

If you happen to own an HP 5MP Laserjet printer, than you’ll probably be interested in HP5MPServiceManual.pdf - the service manual for it.   If you don’t, than let me explain …

In the center of the desk that my wife and I share sits one of these printers.  It is easily the oldest piece of computer equipment I have, a dinosaur from a previous era of hardware manufacturing ethos.  Unlike printers today - made simply as a vehicle for selling overpriced ink cartridges - this one is a tank, a frickin’ TANK,  of a printer.  It was made in the early 90’s and was built to last.  It only prints in black and white at a measly 6 pages per minute, and at a paltry 600 dpi resolution, and it shows it’s age. The once cream color finish is yellowing with age and speckled with dust permanently embedded in it’s surface, and it’s covered with various notes  I’ve scribbled on it with a Sharpie pen over the years to remind me what the various buttons and lights are for.  But in the 15 years since I bought it, I’ve spent less than $80 on it, and printed well over 10,000 pages.  And the print quality is as good today as was when I first bought it.

With broken down printers littering the curbs of our streets, waiting for the garbage truck to cart them away, this thing has come to hold an irrational place in my heart as it chugs along, outlasting one device after another in our household.  In fact, the worst part of owning it has been the paucity of information available.  Because of that, the service manual, above, is an incredibly useful document. But HP no longer makes it available, and I noticed that it’s no longer available anywhere else on the web either (according to Google at least).  Which is why I’m publishing it here.  A small act of digital charity for those fortunate to have one of these beauties sitting around.

“Hi, this is Mark from Experian. We’re calling to update your contact information…”

That’s how I was greeted when I answered the phone just now. This was nominally someone from one of the big 3 credit reporting agencies calling to make sure they had current contact information for their database. Harmless enough, right?

Well… probably. But I tend to be pretty guarded about giving out my personal information. It’s remarkable to me that these companies expect people to simply pick up the phone and start answering questions about names, phone numbers, addresses, and whatnot, without ever questioning whether or not the caller is who they say they are. 99% of the time I’m sure it really is someone from Experian, or Wells Fargo’s Loan department, or the Census Bureau. But the cost of misplaced trust the other 1% of the time can be pretty high. Thus I typically answer with a curt, “I’m sorry, but I don’t give out personal information to callers. Can you please give me the contact information for the person I should talk to about this?”

This invariably illicits a brief pause of confusion as they process this unexpected resistence. They’re not used to having people question their veracity. After taking a deep breath, they try again: “Um, sir, I’m the person you can talk to. I’m with First National Trans-Federal Mutual Corp” they repeat, implying, “it’s okay, we’re Big Business, you can trust us!”, which leads to a proverbial fork in the conversation.

The low road, the easy route, is to just play dumb. These folks may not understand the problems of mutual authentication, but they are wonderfully well-prepared to deal with someone who’s, shall we say, cognitively challenged. They’ll regurgitate some thank-you-for-your-business and can-we-talk-to-the-head-of-your-household speech before eventually giving up.

But occasionally I get into a benevolent mood and elaborate on why it is I don’t trust them. More often than not this leads to the same speech. But sometimes I’ll find myself debating the security of 512-bit RSA encryption, and modern applications of Merkle’s Puzzle in telemarketing… at which point I know i’m talking to a scam artist and not a real customer support person.

I recently stumbled across a nice thread cutting across my favorite comic strips. The latest XKCD.com strip features a quite literal mashup of XKCD’s stick figures and Bill Waterson’s Calvin & Hobbes. And Bill Waterson was an unabashed admirer of Charles Schulz and Peanuts, as shown in the piece he wrote for the LA times article.

Unlike Watterson, I haven’t always been an admirer of Peanuts. As a child, I was an avid reader - I read every Peanuts collection I could get my hands on - but I drifted away from Peanuts in my late teens and early twenties. The strip often lacked the comic “punch” that other strips had, and I became rather disenchanted and critical to the point I wondered why it was even still in syndication. Even resenting the fact that it was always given the headline spot on the comics page.

Looking back, it’s apparent that my childhood instincts were dead on - Peanuts is a wonderful strip. But it took an NPR interview with Schulz for me to realize that as an adult. I don’t remember the exact phrase, but I do remember Mr. Schultz saying something to the effect, “each day when I sit down to draw the strip, I never really know what these kids are going to do.” I.e. Each strip was a process of discovery for him, exploring this world he’d created. From that day on, whenever I read Peanuts, I come to it with no expectations about what kind of humor or drama it should present. I am simply along for that 30-second ride that Schulz crafted, frame-by-frame.

It is unfortunate that Charles Schulz is gone, but there is no arguing about the incredible legacy he leaves behind. For a little more insight to the gentle character behind the strip, check out the Morning Edition interview with Charles Schulz.