How To Limit the Buttons on the RTE Toolbar For a Particular User or Group

Posted on April 3, 2007

One of the nicer features of TYPO3 is its Rich Text Editor (RTE) API, which allows many different WYSIWYG content editors to be plugged in to the CMS as extensions. I use the HTMLArea RTE, which comes with newer versions of TYPO3, but thanks to the API if you prefer a different editor you can easily plug one in.

A common question I’ve encountered about using the RTE is this one. Imagine that you’re the administrator of a TYPO3 site, and you’ve delegated content management to one or more site editors. These folks are not necessarily technical, so you’ve configured their TYPO3 accounts to only have a limited number of options. But when they go to edit content, they get an RTE with three toolbars full of confusing-looking buttons, many of which would allow them to add in esoteric markup that can break the semantic structure of the page.

So how do we limit the range of things they can do in the RTE? The answer is pretty simple: just go to that user’s TSConfig and add in the following directive:

options.RTEKeyList =

… followed by a comma separated list of the buttons you want them to have access to.

The names of the buttons will vary depending on the RTE you’re using; consult its documentation for a list. For HTMLArea, this is a common setup I use to provide access to a limited number of useful RTE buttons:

options.RTEKeyList = bold, italic, underline, subscript, superscript, orderedlist, unorderedlist, outdent, indent, insertcharacter, line, link, findreplace, spellcheck, copy, cut, paste, undo, redo

Note that if you have more than one or two backend users, it’s usually simpler to manage things like this by creating backend user groups and setting TSConfig for the whole group, rather than user by user. The same TSConfig above should work fine if applied to a group rather than to a particular user.

For a more detailed look at configuring the HTMLArea RTE, including how to allow access to your own classes and how to clean up the output so that it’s XHTML compliant, check out Cast Iron Coding’s "Recommended Configuration for HTMLArea" document.

Das Leben Des Anderen (The Lives of Others)

Posted on April 2, 2007

Photo from "Das Leben der Anderen", © 2006, Sony Pictures Classics

I got the chance this weekend to see the movie that won the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar for 2006 — Das Leben des Anderen (The Lives of Others).

It’s a pretty goddamned outstanding film. You should see it. (To whet your appetite, here’s the trailer.)

The story takes place in East Germany in 1984-85 — a period when it still seemed that the Communist government would last forever. The protagonist, Captain Gert Weisler (played by Ulrich Mühe) is a gray little man who makes his living spying on his fellow citizens for the Stasi — East Germany’s notorious secret police.

Stasi agents were so pervasive in East German society that they kept files on more than a third of the entire population of the country. Hundreds of thousands of citizens were used as informers — either willingly, or through coercion. It was perhaps the most extensive program of internal surveillance anywhere in the world at the time.

The result was a kind of culture of paranoia, where everybody assumed that the Stasi was listening to every word they said. Even things you said behind your own doors — even things whispered across pillows to your lover. Who knew if the Stasi had bugged your apartment? Who knew if the Stasi had threatened to send your lover’s father off to prison if she didn’t inform on you?

Captain Weisler is a cog in the machinery of the surveillance state. And one day, he gets a new assignment — to monitor a playwright, and the playwright’s lover, to discover if they are engaged in any "subversive" activities. There’s no reason to doubt the playwright’s loyalty — he never criticizes the state, and his work stays within the Communist Party line. But someone in the government has a grudge against him, and in East Germany, that was enough.

So Weisler bugs their apartment and starts listening. But what he hears isn’t what he was expecting to hear. And the more he hears, the more he finds himself wondering if he should be listening in the first place, and if he should be doing anything to help the playwright as the Stasi’s net closes slowly around him.

It’s fascinating to watch Germans come to terms with the legacy of the Communist state. In some ways, Das Leben der Anderen can be read as a kind of rebuttal to another German film, 2003’s Good Bye Lenin! That film was actually a comedy — in it, a woman in East Berlin falls into a coma before the Berlin Wall falls, and comes out of it afterwards. When she comes to, the doctors warn her son that any sudden shocks might kill her. So, naturally enough, her son and his friends simply fail to tell her that the government has changed; and then they find themselves going to more and more absurd lengths to keep the fiction alive.

Good Bye Lenin! is a funny movie. But it also embodies a certain strain of nostalgia that can be found among some Germans who lived under the Communist regime. Sure, they argue, life was tough, and the government listened to everything you said, and people disappeared off the street for daring to criticize — but you were also guaranteed a job, and health care, and security. In the new capitalist economy, you have to fight every day to win those things, and to keep them. And that fight can be exhausting, especially if you didn’t grow up with it.

Das Leben des Anderen is a bracing rebuke of that nostalgia. When you see the surveillance state in action, it’s hard to believe that any amount of security is worth the price they paid. And as our own state creeps ever closer towards becoming a surveillance state, that’s worth remembering.

In Which Something I Predicted Five Years Ago Comes True

Posted on April 2, 2007

In my second post to this blog, back on January 17, 2002, I wrote:

What amazes me is that the music business is so obtuse, they are refusing to learn from the experience of the last major intellectual property industry to fall for the copy-protection hustle — the software business. Back in the 1980s, the nascent microcomputer software business seemed like it was under a mortal threat — the consumer could copy any software he or she liked and give it to all their friends for free. And why would anyone pay for Lotus 1-2-3 or WordPerfect when they could just snag a free copy?

So the software publishers threw themselves into a frenzy of copy-protection. All sorts of complicated schemes were tried. In the end, though, they all failed because they didn’t stop professional software pirates, who could easily foil any copy-protection scheme by throwing cheap Asian programmers at it, while simultaneously they were a HUGE inconvenience for honest, legitimate users who had to fumble with key disks and hardware dongles and manual word lookups.

In the end the software industry pretty much abandoned copy protection and started trusting that their customers were not petty thieves. Worked out pretty well for everybody.

And today, a press release from music label EMI Music announces "EMI launches DRM-free superior sound quality downloads across its entire digital repertoire":

EMI Music today announced that it is launching new premium downloads for retail on a global basis, making all of its digital repertoire available at a much higher sound quality than existing downloads and free of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions.
 
The new higher quality DRM-free music will complement EMI’s existing range of standard DRM-protected downloads already available. From today, EMI’s retailers will be offered downloads of tracks and albums in the DRM-free audio format of their choice in a variety of bit rates up to CD quality. EMI is releasing the premium downloads in response to consumer demand for high fidelity digital music for use on home music systems, mobile phones and digital music players. EMI’s new DRM-free products will enable full interoperability of digital music across all devices and platforms.

The tracks will cost a little more — $1.29 per song rather than $0.99 — but I will happily pay thirty cents extra to get a file I can play on any music player I will ever own, now and forever, instead of a file that can only play on one particular player.

Of course, this still doesn’t do me much good, since the iTunes store is closed off to Linux users. But it’s a big step forward nonetheless, and the language in the announcement indicates that iTunes will only be the first of many outlets to which EMI will make these products available; presumably one of them will have a standard Web front-end to their store, rather than relying on a big old desktop app, so that anyone can use it.

Much praise is due to EMI for being the first label to trust its customers are actually customers and not thieves. Let’s hope this outbreak of common sense spreads quickly!

Homebrew Air Force in Sri Lanka

Posted on March 27, 2007

The Tamil Tiger rebel group in Sri Lanka appears to have invented the world’s first guerrilla air force:

A Tamil Tiger light aircraft bombed a Sri Lankan air force base next to Colombo international airport before dawn on Monday, killing three airmen and wounding 16 in the first such air strike by the rebel group.

Wired’s excellent defense-technology blog Danger Room summarizes why this is an important development:

According to Jane’s, this represents the first use of conventional air power by a “non-state armed group.” Global Guerrillas claims that the rebels’ half-dozen aircraft — at least one of which is a Czech-made Z-143 two-seater trainer — were built from smuggled kits. Jane’s official stance is that the modest rebel air force’s potential for traditional missions is limited. But Reuters quotes one Jane’s analyst saying otherwise:

“This air attack appears to have taken the air force by complete surprise, and this is confirmed by the delayed response, by which time the attackers have been able to return to base,” said Iqbal Athas of Jane’s Defence Weekly… “It is a significant threat for a number of reasons. What they did, although they may have failed to achieve their target, is to demonstrate that they have such a capability,” Athas said. “The larger offshore patrol vessels of the navy can become vulnerable, troop transport ships can become vulnerable and so can armed groups leading an offensive on the ground.”

The use of kit aircraft for military purposes just illustrates how far the amount of money required to field an armed force has fallen these days. You can buy a ready-to-assemble kit aircraft for $100,000 or less — even lower if you go to the “light sport aircraft” category.  They can’t carry much of a payload, and they certainly wouldn’t stand up in a fight against “real” fighters, but they’re probably sufficient to chuck a few bombs around, or for aerial recon — and as the Tamils have demonstrated, they can potentially surprise the enemy just by appearing over the battlefield, which helps too.

Just a Thought: Community Dictionary for Firefox Spell-Checker

Posted on March 19, 2007

Mozilla.org honcho Asa Dotzler posted on his blog today about user interface problems with Firefox’s built-in spell check feature.

In the comments to that post, several people mentioned a related issue with the Firefox spellchecker — the dictionary it uses is out of date, and lacks many commonly used words. The result is that users have to add lots of words themselves, which is a pain.

I had an idea for solving this problem that I thought was a pretty cool one (if I do say so myself). I wrote it up in the comments to Asa’s post, but I thought I’d post it here too so folks could comment on it if they wish.

Here’s the idea:

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the dictionary for inline spell check is stored as a file on the local machine, right?

If so, an interesting way to tackle some of the problems outlined by other commenters above might be to add a web-service model where words added by users to their personal dictionaries are pinged to a server somewhere, and if enough people have added that word, it gets added to the "main" dictionary. Then updates to the main dictionary can be pushed out periodically with FF point releases, so you get a constantly improving dictionary.

Some folks might not be comfortable with this, so there’d need to be a way to turn it off; but I’m a pretty rabid privacy advocate and I can’t see why this would be bad, esp. if it’s not tied to an identifier of who or what machine it came from. The biggest challenge would be figuring out what the right number of adds for a word would be to merge it into the main dictionary; too low and you get lots of junk words, too high and good words get missed. Could probably be determined with some experimentation though.

Ian Murdock Joins Sun

Posted on March 19, 2007

This seems like a Big Deal: Ian Murdock has been hired by Sun Microsystems as the new leader of their operating systems strategy unit.

If you don’t know, Murdock is the founder of the Debian Linux distribution. ("Debian" is a contraction of two names — "Ian", and "Deb", his wife.) Debian is one of the most influential distributions out there; beyond those who run it directly, it provides the basis for many other popular distributions, including Ubuntu. Debian has been renowned for years for its commitment to reliability, its innovative package management system, and its dedication to providing a 100% Free Software platform.

I’m not sure what this means for Debian (I don’t know exactly how active Murdock is these days with the distro, since the community around it is large and vibrant), but it’s definitely a great move for Sun, who will now be able to apply Murdock’s expertise to their own Solaris operating system, as well as to the problem of getting Linux to play more nicely with Sun hardware.

UPDATE: Via Slashdot, I found this interview with Murdock where he describes some of his frustrations with Debian of late, describing the current state of Debian as "process run amok". Which might explain why he went to Sun

Sunday Morning Talk Shows: Fire Hoses of Bullshit (Part II)

Posted on March 18, 2007

This morning’s Meet the Press featured a panel discussion on what we should do next in Iraq.

The four-person panel had two members defending the Administration’s current policy, and two criticizing it.  The two people chosen to defend the current policy were Richard Perle and Tom DeLay.

Wha? 

Richard Perle was one of the key planners of the Iraq War. He had been arguing for an invasion of Iraq since at least 1996 — five years before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In the fall of 2003, when it was becoming clear that a resistance was brewing in Iraq that was stronger than any of the planners had anticipated, Perle was saying:

The problems in Iraq are ahead of us, but we’re doing better than people think. And a year from now, I’ll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush. There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they’ve been liberated. And it is getting easier every day for Iraqis to express that sense of liberation.

Yeah, that’s exactly how things went down.

Tom DeLay is the former Majority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives.  In 2006, he stepped down from that office and chose not to run for re-election after he was indicted by a grand jury in Texas for illegal funneling of corporate money into state political campaigns, and after he was connected to now-disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He was never active on foreign policy issues.

In other words, Meet the Press chose to present a proven idiot and a known criminal as voices Americans should listen to.

Some simple questions: why should anyone care what Richard Perle and Tom DeLay think about Iraq? Why should "respectable" news programs like Meet the Press treat their opinions as worthy of listening to, considering their abysmal histories? And if Meet the Press truly believes their opinions are worth airing, why should it be treated as "respectable" and not tabloid trash?

And exactly how badly does one have to fail these days to be well and truly disgraced?

Bad Ideas, Poorly Executed

Posted on March 16, 2007

Via AssignmentZero, I discovered this manifesto from a supposed new "open source political party" in Massachusetts that says their aim is to start by electing a member to the Boston City Council.

This is our 10-point platform:

1. We support the democratization of local governments through the use of digg-style lawmaking.
2. We believe social media websites represent the future of participatory governing.
3. We believe traditional voting processes should be augmented with secure web-based voting systems.
4. We want to see open source software, formats and philosophies replace proprietary products such as the ruling Microsoft monopoly in public agencies.
5. We demand that all politicians keep regularly updated blogs, with open comment systems, to maintain contact with their constituents.
6. We want to see wiki-style collaborative writing of proposed laws and bills.
7. We demand that all governing bodies publish Youtube-style video of all public meetings and votes.
8. We support a total reform of patent, copyright and intellectual property law to reflect free and open Creative Commons-style licensing.
9. We are against the implementation of draconian DRM systems.
10. We want open VOIP, email and IM lines of communication with our elected officials.

Two reactions:

1. "Digg-style lawmaking"? Sweet Jesus, I can’t think of anything I would want less. Would we really be better off if the Congressional Record looked like this?
2. Some of their goals are laudable (limiting DRM, more openness/transparency, copyright reform), but they have nothing to do with the actual business of the Boston City Council. These issues don’t get decided at the city council level; mostly they’re set by Congress and state legislatures. And beyond that, it’s bad politics to run a campaign on issues that have nothing to do with the office you’re running for. People want their city council members to fix potholes and buy snowplows, not reform copyright. These guys should be running someone for the Massachusetts state legislature if they’re gonna bother with this at all.

Call for Inspiration

Posted on March 15, 2007

I’m feeling uninspired today… so I thought I’d call on the Super Awesome Just Well Mixed Community to fix that.

We’re almost 25% done with 2007 already, so it’s not too early to ask this: what’s the coolest idea you’ve discovered this year?  And what makes it so cool?

Discuss in the comments. 

P.S. If any of you say "Second Life", you will taste my wrath. And nobody wants that. 

UPDATE (Mar. 16, 2007): Wow, 24 hours and nobody’s responded.  Thanks a lot!

My readers suck.  Discuss in the comments. 

Using TSConfig to Ensure Dynamic Page Elements Are Always Up to Date

Posted on March 14, 2007

A common use for TypoScript (at least on my TYPO3 sites) is to dynamically generate lists and menus of other content items in the CMS, based on some set of criteria, and then insert these into a page.

For example, I might want to have a “5 most recent items posted to site section X” menu on my homepage.  With TypoScript, this is (reasonably) easy to do.

However, in some cases this can cause problems with TYPO3’s internal caching mechanism.  TYPO3 caches content aggressively to minimize the load on the database of generating lots of pages — which is exactly what it should do. But when you have pages that depend on the content of other parts of the site, you can run into problems where those pages don’t update immediately when you alter the sections they’re tied to, requiring you to empty the cache manually.

There is an easy way to avoid this, however. Just add the following command to the TSConfig of the page where you are adding the content items that are listed in your list/menu:

TCEMAIN.clearCacheCmd = <list of page-ids>

The value of this command should be a comma-separated list of all pages where your dynamic list appears. This command will automatically rebuild those pages whenever you add something to this page, which means users will always see the most up to date list.

"12 Byzantine Rulers"

Posted on March 13, 2007

If you’re looking for something to listen to during your commute, and you like history, I highly recommend Lars Brownworth’s excellent “12 Byzantine Rulers” series of podcasted lectures.

Mr. Brownworth is a history teacher in New York who developed “12 Byzantine Rulers” as a way to share his love for the history of the later Roman Empire. His lecture style is engaging and personal; it never devolves into boring recitations of dates and places, instead giving colorful descriptions of each of the emperors he looks at, as well as the times they lived in.

So far there are 13 lectures, covering 9 of the promised 12 Byzantine emperors; Mr. Brownworth does this project in his spare time, so it takes a month or two for each new lecture to be released. They are definitely worth the wait, though. “12 Byzantine Rulers” is a unique resource; I highly recommend it.

Dear Search Engines

Posted on March 12, 2007

Would it kill you to assign accesskeys to your search results?

Years of computer use have left me with a mild case of repetitive stress injury, so I try to avoid using the mouse as much as possible — it’s much easier to do everything from the keyboard.

However, browsing search results via the keyboard is an absolute pain in the tuchus. There’s no way in Google, Yahoo! Search, or Windows Live Search to select a specific result, or to click the “More” or “Next” links, without going to the mouse. None.*

This exact scenario is why the W3C invented the accesskey attribute. Adding an accesskey attribute to any element (like a link) automatically gives focus to that element — just like clicking it does — whenever the user pushes the key you specified as the accesskey. So if I set accesskey=”1″, for instance, pushing “1” jumps to that link. But no major search engine uses this feature.

You can get around this with extensions like Search Keys, or with Greasemonkey wizardry, but you shouldn’t have to. One of the principles of accessible technology is that the user should be able to do everything via the keyboard; mousing is a minor pain for me, but some folks simply can’t use a mouse, which is why the W3C invented accesskeys in the first place. It would take all of 10 minutes for a search engine to incorporate them into their results page templates. So why haven’t they done it?

Maybe they have — I only checked the three engines listed above. Have you found a search engine that respects its users by providing accesskeys for search results? If so, sing its praises in the comments.

(* Well, that’s not 100% true.  You can use the Tab key to tab through the list of search results. But your average results page contains so many links that tabbing through them link by link is an incredibly inefficient way to reach a given link.)

How To Stop Getting Credit Card Offers In the Mail

Posted on March 4, 2007

If you’re like most people, your mailbox is stuffed with “pre-approved” offers for credit cards. This may just seem like an annoyance, but in fact it’s worse than that; it’s a direct risk to your financial well-being. Why? Because these offers are treasure troves for identity thieves; by simply rifling through your mailbox or your trash, they can get everything they need to open up a credit card account in your name — or, if the company is particularly dumb, pick up identifying information like your date of birth, social security number, etc. that they can use in other scams.

The first thing you should be doing is shredding these letters before you throw them out — but that doesn’t protect you from someone grabbing them out of your mailbox before you do, plus it means a giant volume of shredded paper you have to deal with. It’s a much better idea to simply turn off the firehose and stop the letters from being mailed to you in the first place. Here’s how to do that.

As it turns out, the big credit bureaus (of whom we’ve already spoken earlier) are the source of the vast majority of this junk mail. That’s because they sell lists of credit-rated consumers to the people who send all the mail. Using these lists, lenders target the type of consumer they want, and then bombard them with unsolicited offers. Some percentage will eventually break down and take the offer.

That’s another reason to hate the credit bureaus. But, perversely, the fact that they are the ones enabling this abuse also made it easier to solve; instead of a consumer having to opt out with every potential lender, they can simply tell the credit bureaus to stop including them in the lists they sell and the mail will dry up.

What’s more, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) banged the heads of the credit bureaus until they agreed to all have a single, common opt-out list — so there’s only one place you need to go to get off the lists of Experian, TransUnion, Equifax, and a couple of others too.

To opt out of credit card mailings, call 1-888-5-OPTOUT or visit http://www.optoutprescreen.com/.  These are the gateways to the FTC’s unified do-not-mail list. They’ll ask you for some information to process your request; don’t be spooked when they ask you for your Social Security number, these are authentic government resources and can be trusted with that information. (A good strategy to avoid identity theft is to never give out your SSN, but in this case, it’s OK.)

Then you’ll be asked what kind of opt-out you want to do. In their inimitable style, the credit bureaus have designed the choices to maximize the potential that you’ll choose the wrong one.  The first option is a so-called “Electronic Opt-Out”, which they can process right then for you on the phone or the Web site. The other choice is the “Permanent Opt-Out By Mail”, which requires you to get a paper form (either by printing it from the site, or having them mail it to you), fill it out, and mail it back to them to be implemented.

“Electronic Opt-Out” probably sounds convenient, but there’s a catch — it’s only good for five years. After that, they’re free to start spamming your mailbox again, unless you remember to call up again and re-opt-out. Which, let’s be honest, you will probably not remember to do until your mailbox starts getting jammed again.

“Permanent Opt-Out By Mail” is what you want. This takes longer to process — there’s the delay in mailing the form back and forth, plus another delay after they receive it for processing, during all of which you’ll still get credit card come-ons — but once it’s processed, you’re off the lists for good. Which means almost no more credit card offers by mail. (You’ll still get a few, from organizations like alumni groups and your current bank that get their names from other sources; but the volume will drop dramatically. As an example, I went from getting 1-2 credit card offer letters a day, to 1-2 a month after opting out.)

Want more info? Here’s the FTC’s page on opting out of pre-screened credit and insurance offers.  But now that you’ve read this piece, you have all the information you need to turn off the firehose once and for all.

How To Slash the Amount of Money You Spend On Laundry Detergent

Posted on March 4, 2007

Look at the little plastic measuring cup they pack in the box.

Seriously, that’s it. That’s all there is to it. But most people, it turns out, never do that; they just fill the plastic cup up to the line near the top.

If you take the time to look at the cup, though, you’ll find out that line is waaaaaay more detergent than you need for a typical load of laundry. There are other lines farther down the cup, too. On the cup that came with my last box of Tide, for example, there are three lines: one near the top (labeled with a prominent number "2"), one about halfway down the cup (labeled with a less prominent number "1"), and one below that at about 3/8ths of the way up the cup, carrying no label at all.

When you read the instructions on the box, you discover that the lowest line is all you need for your typical washing machine load —  line #1 (half the cup) is recommended for "large loads", and line #2 (nearly a full cup, the one people instinctively use) is for "heavily soiled large loads". 

If you start using the lowest line, you’ll see absolutely no difference in the quality of the wash your clothes get (unless you use an abnormally large washer), and you will double the number of washes you get out of a single box of detergent. Which means that you’re cutting the amount you spend on detergent in half.

Now you know why they give you a plastic measuring cup, rather than just telling you how much detergent to measure out — if you were using your own measuring cup, you’d actually measure the detergent. By using their measuring cup, they can take advantage of your inattention to get you to use more than you actually need.

And the landfills fill up with used plastic measuring cups, too! Joy.

(Thanks to Raymond Chen for bringing this to my attention in the first place.) 

How To Get a Free Credit Report That’s Actually Free

Posted on February 28, 2007

One thing that just about everybody is concerned about is the state of their credit. Even if your finances are in great shape, you can find yourself having trouble getting loans for things like cars and houses if there’s a mistake on your credit report.

To make it easier for you to find those mistakes, Congress in 2003 passed the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA, also known as the "FACT Act"). One of the key provisions of FACTA requires the three major credit bureaus — Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion — to provide you with a free copy of your credit report once every 12 months, should you request it. After FACTA passed, it became common knowledge that you were entitled to a "free credit report".

But how do you get it? The answer is probably not what you think.

If you’ve turned on a TV anytime in the last few years, you’ve probably seen an ad for a site called FreeCreditReport.com (a site sponsored by the credit bureau Experian). The ads tell you that this is the place to go to get your free annual credit report.

What they don’t tell you (except in the fine print) is that FreeCreditReport.com’s reports aren’t actually free. To get them, you have to subscribe to a credit-monitoring service called "Triple Advantage" — which carries a monthly fee of $12.95/month.

In other words, FreeCreditReport.com is Experian’s attempt to take lemons — the requirement that they give consumers a free credit report — and make lemonade, by confusing you into thinking that you have to subscribe to their service to get your "free" report. Fostering that confusion is why Experian spends so much money advertising FreeCreditReport.com — they want you to think of that URL when you think "free credit report". After several years of saturation advertising, most people probably do.

You don’t need to pay anyone anything to get your free credit reports, if you know the right place to go.  Under the direction of the Federal Trade Commission, the three credit bureaus set up a central Web site where people could obtain the credit reports they’re entitled to under FACTA, without any bait and switch. That site is AnnualCreditReport.com, and it’s where you should go to get your credit reports.

Unsurprisingly, Experian doesn’t spend any money advertising this site. But the FTC says:

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the nation’s consumer protection agency, wants you to know that, if you want to order your free annual credit report online, there is only one authorized website: annualcreditreport.com.

Many other websites claim to offer “free credit reports,” “free credit scores,” or “free credit monitoring.” But, be careful. These sites are not part of the official annual free credit report program. And in some cases, the “free” product comes with strings attached. For example, some sites sign you up for a supposedly “free” service that converts to one you have to pay for after a trial period ends. If you don’t cancel during the trial period, you may be agreeing to let the company start charging fees to your credit card.

In other words — don’t be suckered by a catchy jingle into giving Experian permission to rack up charges on your credit card. You’re entitled by law to a free credit report, and you can get it from one place only — AnnualCreditReport.com.

(And be sure you check your spelling; other unscrupulous parties are trying to pull their own bait and switch by setting up sites at addresses like AnnualCreidtReport.com — note the misspelling due to the switched "d" and "i" in "credit". My links above all point you to the right site.)

UPDATE (March 4, 2007): One other thing you should know is that the credit bureaus have found another way to make lemonade out of the free-credit-report law; if you request your free credit report, they put your name on the lists that they sell to the companies that send you all those annoying unsolicited credit card offers in the mail. (If you’ve used a credit card in your life, you’re probably already on those lists; but anything that could mean more of those letters is a pain.)

To help you out, I’ve also posted instructions on how to opt out of those lists so that you stop getting the unsolicited offers for "pre-approved" credit cards once and for all. 

Things I Learned the Hard Way, Volume XXXVI

Posted on February 22, 2007

When you park your car in a church parking lot, then step out, immediately slip on black ice, fall down and land directly on your kneecaps, it’s not a good idea to yell out "Ouch!  Jesus H. CHRIST!"

Because the other people in the CHURCH PARKING LOT are gonna look at you funny if you do.

You’re welcome.

At Microsoft, We Listen To Our Customers! Eventually

Posted on February 22, 2007

Well, it took them a decade, it only works in Office 2007, and you have to download an optional add-on to do it, but you can finally have a "Save as PDF" option in Microsoft Office. No more need for hacks like a PDF printer driver.

Of course, the add-on also lets you save your file in XPS/"Metro" format. (XPS is Microsoft’s new PDF-killer.) Which should be useful for all of five or six people.

UPDATE (March 4, 2007): Raymond Chen points out in the comments that Microsoft would have had "Save as PDF" earlier had not Adobe threatened to sue them if they did it. Which probably explains why the "Save as PDF" feature is provided as an optional download for Office 2007, too, rather than an out-of-the-box feature. Raymond is one of the world’s better-known programmers, so I’m a little flattered that he bothered to take the time to correct me 🙂

HOWTO: Fix Audio CD Playback in KDE Apps

Posted on February 16, 2007

I recently reformatted my Kubuntu partition and reinstalled the OS from scratch.  Just about everything went fine, except that suddenly all my KDE applications (like Amarok, and the audiocd kio-slave) were unable to read audio CDs.

After much digging I found the solution. Go into the KDE Control Center and, under the "Sound and Multimedia" category, choose "Audio CDs". The first option in that dialog is labeled "Specify CD Device", and it’s where the path to your CD drive should be. Kubuntu had provided the path as "/media/cdrom0", which is the default mount point for the first CD drive in a system. But for some reason KDE doesn’t like it if you give it the mount point; it wants the actual name of the device that was mounted there. I replaced it with "/dev/hdc" and all the problems went away.

Just thought I’d share, in case anyone else runs into this issue down the road…

Why I Can’t Take Digg Seriously

Posted on February 15, 2007

This sums up pretty well why I have trouble taking Digg seriously as a news site:

Only two of the Top 10 stories for today are anything I would actually call “news” (the one about the teacher getting fired because of pop-ups, and the one about Wikipedia) — and even those are pretty juvenile.

Digg is what a newspaper would look like if it was edited entirely by 15-year-olds.

This Thursday, Be a Dodo!

Posted on February 13, 2007

As you may or may not know, Monday was the birthday of Charles Darwin.  To mark the occasion, my friend Randy Olson is going to be having the DC premiere of his new documentary, "Flock of Dodos", this week — Thursday night, to be precise.  "Dodos" is a funny and insightful exploration of the "intelligent design" movement, and the failure of mainstream science to effectively rebut it. 

Randy’s personal cause is to help scientists communicate their work in plain English to the rest of us, so this isn’t your standard "evolution true, ID false" screed; it challenges both ID advocates (for misleading the public) and evolution advocates (for failing to reach the public effectively). If you’re interested in evolution specifically, or science in general, you will enjoy this movie. I’ve seen it and I believe it deserves a wider audience, which is why I’m letting you know about this opportunity.

Here are a couple of reviews of "Flock of Dodos", if you want more information:

• New York Times
• National Public Radio

The premiere is happening this Thursday, February 15, at 8:00 PM at the Avalon Theater in DC.  Tickets are $12 each, and there will be a Q&A with Randy after the film. This is the only DC showing currently scheduled, so if you’re interested in seeing this film, now’s your chance.  Tickets can be purchased at the box office, or via the Avalon web site on this page:

* http://www.theavalon.org/news.cfm?id=71#dodos

I’m going to be there, so if you come, find me in the audience and say hi.  Hope to see you there!

(And if you’re not in DC, don’t despair — check and see if there’s a screening in your town.)

HOWTO: Pretty Up Firefox/Thunderbird UI Fonts

Posted on February 12, 2007

One of the few things I don’t like about the default settings in Kubuntu are the fonts.  They’re atrocious.

As you can see, the default fonts have weird proportions; everything looks too wide and fat. 

Thankfully, most systemwide fonts can be changed easily enough through the KDE Control Center (I like the Deja Vu Condensed family, myself). However, you’ll notice after tweaking your fonts there that Firefox and Thunderbird don’t respect KDE’s font settings. This leaves those apps looking weird when everything else is prettied up.

Why is that? The answer is because Mozilla apps don’t have their user interface drawn by the system — they use their own graphical toolkit, called XUL. 

At one level, this is annoying, because it means Firefox & Thunderbird don’t follow the rules all other apps do. But on another level, it’s kind of cool, because XUL is just a specialized dialect of XML + CSS + JavaScript. So you can actually customize Firefox/Thunderbird’s UI fairly extensively with the skills any web developer possesses.

The key to all this is a special file in your profile, called userChrome.css (it’ll be in a subdirectory of your profile, called "chrome"). In userChrome.css, you can drop in CSS rules that can affect the whole user interface, or just the parts you specify.

So for instance, say we want all the UI fonts in our Mozilla app to be 14pt Deja Vu Sans Condensed.  We just open up userChrome.css and drop in the following rule:

* {

    font-family: "Deja Vu Sans Condensed";

}

Then just restart the application, and the whole UI will be in the font you specified:

Pretty cool! There’s a lot more you can do with userChrome.css, but this is an easy, useful tweak.

Remember, if you use both Firefox and Thunderbird, you’ll have to do this twice — once in your profile for each app. In Ubuntu, your Firefox profiles are typically stored in ~/.mozilla/firefox/, and your Thunderbird profiles in ~/.mozilla-thunderbird.

(One more thing: this tip works in Windows & OS X, too. I just classify it as a Linux tip because it’s only on Linux that the default fonts are annoying enough to make me want to change them.)

UPDATE (March 2, 2007): One thing I noticed after writing this was that not all my KDE apps were using my new font choices after I changed them in the KDE Control Center. Adept, for example, was still using the old fonts. It took me a while to figure out what was up — programs that you run as an administrator via sudo don’t use the preferences you set in the control center when you’re not an administrator; you have to run the control center itself via sudo to set the preferences for the apps you run as an admin.

It’s easy enough to run the control center in admin mode:

kdesu kcontrol

does the trick fine.

Finally, An Airline That Understands Service!

Posted on February 12, 2007

Note for frequent flyers: on Quantas, the service really is better in First Class:

A female flight attendant has been suspended by Qantas after an "in-flight incident" with the actor Ralph Fiennes, the Australian airline said yesterday.

The star of The English Patient and Schindler’s List allegedly became "amorous" with Lisa Robertson, 38, in a lavatory on a flight from Australia to India last month.

At least two crew members saw the pair leave the cubicle within moments of each other during the flight from Darwin to Mumbai on Jan 24.

Sunday Morning Talk Shows: Fire Hoses of Bullshit

Posted on February 11, 2007

I Tivo the Sunday morning talk shows and listen to them while I do my ironing on Sunday afternoon. Mostly I do this because I find ironing incredibly tedious, so anything to occupy my mind is welcome; and also because I have a reasonably high tolerance for pain.

The one thing that I come away with each week is a sense of amazement at just how distant everyone who participates — journalists and politicians alike — are from anything you or I would recognize as objective reality.

Some examples:

This morning on NBC’s Meet the Press, Republican House Leader John Boehner said of Iraq that

I believe that victory in Iraq is the only option… if we don’t—if we don’t have victory in Iraq, the consequences of failure are immense: a destabilized Iraq, a safe haven for terrorists, possible access to their oil revenue, destabilizing the greater Middle East. What happens to Israel? And if, if this isn’t bad enough, who doesn’t believe that if we withdraw and leave that chaos in the Middle East that the terrorists won’t follow us here to the United States? Victory, victory is the only option.

"Victory is the only option".  Gosh, that sounds stirring! It’s like something the guy from Braveheart would say (except with a Scottish accent).

The only problem is that any reasonable observer would say that any chance we had for "victory" in Iraq is probably irretrievably lost. Things over there are so dire now that all we can do is choose which bad outcome is the least bad. The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq released last week says as much:

Iraqi society’s growing polarization, the persistent weakness of the security forces and the state in general, and all sides’ ready recourse to violence are collectively driving an increase in communal and insurgent violence and political extremism. Unless efforts to reverse these conditions show measurable progress during the term of this Estimate, the coming 12 to 18 months, we assess that the overall security situation will continue to deteriorate at rates comparable to the latter part of 2006.

If strengthened Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), more loyal to the government and supported by Coalition forces, are able to reduce levels of violence and establish more effective security for Iraq’s population, Iraqi leaders could have an opportunity to begin the process of political compromise necessary for longer term stability, political progress, and economic recovery.

Nevertheless, even if violence is diminished, given the current winner-take-all attitude and sectarian animosities infecting the political scene, Iraqi leaders will be hard pressed to achieve sustained political reconciliation in the time frame of this Estimate.

Put more simply, unless the Iraqi Army transforms from its current sorry state into a unified, disciplined force, we’re screwed. And the odds of that happening are about the same as the odds that it will rain chocolate milk tomorrow.

The only people more delusional than the politicians are the journalists. Later on Meet the Press, the "roundtable" of DC journos assembled to discuss the burning issues of the day. Among these was the ongoing trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby — a trial at which Tim Russert, host of Meet the Press, was called to testify this week.

So what did the Enlightened Journalists think of this development? They thought it was bad for journalism:

TIM RUSSERT: Howie Kurtz, I want to ask you about the Scooter Libby trial. William Powers in the National Journal has an interesting column where he thinks that the fact that journalists have to testify is good because it will open up in terms of the public being able to see how reporters cultivate relationships to get information. You have a different view of that?

HOWARD KURTZ: Yeah, I certainly don’t think it’s a good thing at all, and I think the reputation of journalists in this Libby trial have taken a hit…The problem for us as a profession is this: When journalists get up there and testify, beside—leaving aside the First Amendment question—it looks to people like—out there like we have become too cozy with senior Bush administration officials, not so we can ferret out information about national security, not so we can find out about corruption, but, in this particular case, in some cases, acting as a conduit for White House effort to put out negative information about Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame’s husband, a big critic of the pre-war intelligence. And I think that the people out there who don’t follow this all that closely think that we have become part of the club, too much the insiders. And that is a problem for journalism.

(Emphasis mine) 

So the Libby trial is a problem because it’s giving people the impression that journalists have cozied up to powerful insiders too much, choosing to just pass along whatever they’re told rather than challenge their sources and dig deeper.

I wonder why they would have gotten that impression?

Memo to Tim Russert: Dick Cheney thinks he controls you.

This delicious morsel about the "Meet the Press" host and the vice president was part of the extensive dish Cathie Martin served up yesterday when the former Cheney communications director took the stand in the perjury trial of former Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Flashed on the courtroom computer screens were her notes from 2004 about how Cheney could respond to allegations that the Bush administration had played fast and loose with evidence of Iraq’s nuclear ambitions. Option 1: "MTP-VP," she wrote, then listed the pros and cons of a vice presidential appearance on the Sunday show. Under "pro," she wrote: "control message."

In other words, Dick Cheney’s staff believes that Meet the Press is a venue where the VP can spew any bullshit he likes, secure in the knowledge that Russert won’t call him on it.

Any reasonable person, looking at the evidence coming out of the Libby trial, would think that the solution to this problem of reporters being too uncritical of their subjects would be to establish some distance between the reporters and the subjects. But the Enlightened Journalists on Meet the Press took away a different lesson. In their minds, the lesson of the Libby trial is that journalists shouldn’t have to testify in court:

RUSSERT: David Broder, Judy Miller, Matt Cooper and myself, and now Bob Woodward, Andrea Mitchell, Walter Pincus—you’re going to have a significant number of journalists going before a court, which will be all covered. What does that do to journalism?

DAVID BRODER: Well, it hurts.

Oh noes! It hurts that we might find out that they suck at their jobs. Wouldn’t we be happier, they ask, if we simply didn’t know that?

It must be nice to live on a planet where that’s considered a reasonable position.

Oh Noe!

Posted on February 5, 2007

Seen on FoxNews.com this morning:

They must have hired Dan Quayle as a copy-editor.

The Coming War With Iran

Posted on February 1, 2007

It’s becoming increasingly clear what line the Administration is going to use to justify expanding the war into Iran.

This morning, I listened to an interview on NPR with Nicholas Burns, the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, who said:

[T]here’s been increased evidence over that time that Iran has given this kind of assistance to the Shia insurgency groups in southern Iraq. They’ve attacked British soldiers near Basra, and they’ve now begun to mount those operations throughout the country, at least in the Baghdad region as well. And so we’re very concerned about it…

[T]he larger point is this: Iran is seeking a position of dominance in the Middle East. It’s very clear. Iran has a regional agenda, which is very much at odds with that of the United States…

[T]he Iranians need to understand they can’t come barging into a situation, and express what they want and seek a position of dominance, without some kind of reaction from the moderate Arab states and from the United States.

So that’s going to be the justification: the Iranians are meddling in Iraq, and providing support (either directly or indirectly) to the insurgency in hopes of becoming a regional hegemon, so we have to strike at them. Or so the argument will go.

Of course, this is ridiculous. I have no doubt that the Iranians are meddling in Iraq and supporting the insurgency. But put yourself in their shoes: a nation that has declared them to be part of an "Axis of Evil" has occupied their next door neighbor. Would you want that nation to be next door forever?  Hell, no. You’d want them gone, and you’d be happy to support any rebel groups who felt the same way. Even if you didn’t want to confront the occupier directly, the future direction of your next door neighbor would be so critical to your own security that you’d be derelict if you didn’t try to get it moving your way.

(Imagine if Iran was occupying Mexico. Do you have any doubt that we would be making belligerent noises and running arms, money and advisors to any Mexican insurgents who were fighting to kick them out? Would that necessarily mean that we had designs on seizing Mexico for ourselves?)

When I first heard that the Administration was considering an attack on Iran, I thought it was ludicrous. As more and more officials start to parrot the same line, though, I’m beginning to believe it’s more inevitable than anything else.

Which means the only question remaining is: how does the rest of America, and the Congress, respond when the Administration tries it? And is there any way to get them to reconsider before they force us to that point?