Month: April 2005

The weather forecast? Sunny, warm, and expensive

This is mind-boggling. Josh Marshall reports that Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) wants to prevent you and me from having direct access to weather data that the Federal government collects. Instead, he wants it to be available only for redistribution by paid services:

This page right here is the one I go to to check the weather. It’s put out by the National Weather Service. It’s a lot like some commercial ones, only it has more information, costs nothing and contains no ads.

But as the Carpetbagger Report notes here, Sen. Santorum (R) of Pennsylvania has introduced a bill that would ban the federal government’s meteorologists from making this information available for free since that creates a problem for outfits like The Weather Channel and AccuWeather, which want to sell it.

I looked up the proposed National Weather Services Duties Act of 2005, and Marshall’s report is exactly right:

The Secretary of Commerce shall not provide, or assist other entities in providing, a [weather-related] product or service … that is or could be provided by the private sector unless … the Secretary determines that the private sector is unwilling or unable to provide such product or service …

Data, information, guidance, forecasts, and warnings shall be issued … through a set of data portals designed for volume access by commercial providers of products or services …

Marshall calls this a rip-off, and he’s absolutely right. This would be a taxpayer-funded gift to the private sector and a huge setback to the cause of making information publicly available. In 2003, a committee from the nonpartisan National Research Council, part of the National Academy of Sciences, released a report called Fair Weather, and concluded that the cost of making this data public is trivial:

The committee noted that for NWS to fulfill its mission of issuing timely weather warnings, it must collect high-quality global data and develop and run atmospheric models, so in most instances the large and expensive infrastructure needed to generate forecasts has already been paid for by taxpayers. These data, models, and forecasts are made available to the public at marginal additional cost, satisfying the government’s obligation to make its information widely accessible.

The NRC also reviewed the original National Weather Service policy, which was written in 1991, and concluded that the Internet changed everything:

[The committee] called the current policy ambiguous and said its guidelines were “untenable” because there may be good reasons for the agency to continue to carry out certain activities for the public, even if the private sector could do them. Moreover, any language that suggests NWS should not disseminate information electronically and to as wide an audience as possible is inconsistent with federal regulations requiring full and open access to data. Finally, the policy was written before use of the Internet became widespread, altering the capabilities of both NWS and the private sector, and the way they interact. …

The report emphasizes that NWS should continue to pursue activities that are essential to protecting life and property and enhancing the national economy, including issuing forecasts and providing unrestricted access to publicly funded observations. Weather-related damages amount to $20 billion a year in the United States.

NWS should make its observational data, models, and other products available in Internet-accessible digital form, the committee added. The information should be stored in a standard format that can be accessed by the public and used by all those involved in the weather and climate enterprise.

So why propose this bill? This story from the Palm Beach Post includes a pair of revealing quotes:

Barry Myers, AccuWeather’s executive vice president, said the bill would improve public safety by making the weather service devote its efforts to hurricanes, tsunamis and other dangers, rather than duplicating products already available from the private sector.

“The National Weather Service has not focused on what its core mission should be, which is protecting other people’s lives and property,” said Myers, whose company is based in State College, Pa. Instead, he said, “It spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year, every day, producing forecasts of ‘warm and sunny.'”

Santorum made similar arguments April 14 when introducing his bill. He also said expanded federal services threaten the livelihoods of private weather companies.

“It is not an easy prospect for a business to attract advertisers, subscribers or investors when the government is providing similar products and services for free,” Santorum said.

No, it certainly isn’t easy to compete by trying to convince people to pay for information that is collected by a government agency for the public good and made widely and freely available by that same government agency. Maybe the AccuWeather folks need to rethink their business plan. They were founded in 1962, so they’ve surely had to reinvent themselves a few times to deal with changes in technology. Other companies have figured out how to add value to publicly available information and charge customers for it. The privately owned EDGAR Online, for instance, sells reports that you can get for free from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR database. They’re not asking for Congress to lock up the SEC archives to improve their business prospects.

In fact, I was able to look up the full text of Sen. Santorum’s bill using the free Thomas database at the Library of Congress. The tagline on that page says it all: “In the Spirit of Thomas Jefferson, a service of The Library of Congress.” Sen. Santorum would be well-served to think more about Jefferson and less about fund-raising. Although I’m sure his support for AccuWeather’s quest to shut down public access to NWS data has nothing to do with the campaign contributions from the Myers family (including AccuWeather’s president and founder Joel Myers).

If Sen. Santorum has his way, raw data that can be of enormous use to individuals, researchers, and the public would be locked up behind a paid firewall, with fees going to corporations. Every branch of government should strive to make as much information as possible available to the people. The rush to privatize, monetize, and classify information is insane. This would be a very good issue to write your Senator about.

Tip of the day: Troubleshoot programs that start automatically

Windows XP includes a System Configuration Utility, Msconfig.exe, which is incredibly valuable and often misused. It allows you to see most of the programs that run at startup and selectively disable programs for troubleshooting purposes. To start the System Configuration Utility, type msconfig in the Run dialog box and press Enter.

The Startup tab of the System Configuration Utility is intended for use as a troubleshooting tool (it’s not intended to be a full-time startup manager). By clicking Disable All, you can clear every check box in the list, preventing Windows from starting any programs automatically at startup; then, through an iterative process of restoring one or two programs at a time to the list, you can restart programs and see which one is causing a particular problem.

Msconfig
[Click to see a larger image]

To test whether it’s safe to remove a single program from the list of those that start automatically with Windows, clear the check box to the left of the program’s name on the System Configuration Utility’s Startup tab and restart your computer. After verifying that your system works properly without that program starting automatically, you can safely reconfigure the program so it doesn’t start automatically.

If you’re experiencing problems that start immediately after you start your computer, troubleshoot by clicking the Disable All button to clear every program from the list. Restart and see if the problem goes away. If it does, add a handful of programs and restart (I recommend that you add no more than five at a time). When the problem resurfaces, you can focus your attention on the last batch of programs you added.

Should you use Msconfig as a startup manager? I strongly recommend against it. This tool was designed for troubleshooting, not for everyday use. You’re much better off removing auto-starting programs manually, using one of these methods:

  • Look first for an option in the program itself. Most programs that start automatically allow you to change this behavior by clearing a check box in an Options or Preferences dialog box. It might take some digging around, but this is always the preferred option.
  • Remove the program shortcut from the Startup folder. Be sure to look in the Startup folder for your profile and the corresponding folder in the All Users profile. This option won’t work if the auto-start option is set in the registry. You can move the shortcut to another location if you think you might want to restore it later.
  • As a last resort, edit the registry manually. This technique is messy, risky, and not always successful; some particularly persistent programs will restore the startup values in the registry the next time you run the program.

Easiest of all, use a third-party tool like Mike Lin’s excellent (and free) Startup Control Panel or Autoruns from Sysinternals. Both allow you to temporarily or permanently remove an item from the auto-start list. And if you can’t figure out what each item on the list does, look it up at Paul “Pacman” Collins’ most excellent Start-Up Applications page.

Gmail blocks phishers

I just received yet another “phishing” attempt from someone trying to get me to give up my eBay account information. It came to my Gmail account, and like most such attempts it was a painfully obvious fraud.

What was most impressive, though, was how Gmail handled the message. For starters, it landed in my Spam folder, with a big red banner at the top of the message warning me “This message may not be from whom it claims to be.”

Ebay_phish

Even better, the URL in the message had been disabled. I was able to dig deep into the Gmail interface and find the HTML source code of the original message, where a link to the phisher’s Web site was buried. But that clickable link didn’t survive in the message that actually landed in my Inbox. And finally, the More Options button on the message window included a Report Phishing link, which I used.

Very nice work, Google!

Oh, and I have yet another stack of 50 Gmail invites, so if you’re looking for your own Gmail account, send a note to edbott (at) gmail.com and I’ll send you an invite.

This is how a book review should be written!

I toyed briefly with the idea of picking up New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s new book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. Until I read Matt Taibbi’s review, that is. It is the single most devastating book review I have ever read. Funny, perceptive, and absolutely vicious. A sample:

The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of each single word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I’ll give you an example, drawn at random from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here’s what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that’s guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.

There’s so much more, including some great observations on outsourcing, wireless technology, the Konica Minolta Bizhub, and uber-steroids. Great reading. Maybe I’ll get Blink instead.

This might actually be an interesting presentation

From today’s WaPo: MIT Prank Paper Accepted for Publication

Three MIT graduate students set out to show what kind of gobbledygook can pass muster at an academic conference these days, writing a computer program that generates fake, nonsensical papers. And sure enough, a Florida conference took the bait.

The program, developed by students Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn and Dan Aguayo, generated a paper with the dumbfounding title: “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy.” Its introduction begins: “Many scholars would agree that, had it not been for active networks, the simulation of Lamport clocks might never have occurred.”

The proposal even included some randomly generated charts and graphs!

Interestingly, their second bogus submission, “The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on Networking,” was turned down. The three students have raised $2000 in contributions toward travel expenses, but alas, the offer to present their paper was rescinded. “We wanted to go down there and give a randomly generated talk,” Stribling said.

I’ve been to conferences where I thought the content of some presentations seemed a little random, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen someone explicitly create their presentation that way. Heh.

Tip of the day: Send a blind copy

Do you want to send a copy of an email message to someone without letting the main recipient know you’re doing so? That’s the primary purpose of the Bcc (blind courtesy copy) field, which is available in any Internet-standard e-mail program. It also comes in handy when you want to send an e-mail message to a group of people without broadcasting the entire list of addresses to every recipient. Use the Bcc field for the addresses of all the persons you want to receive your message. Those addresses do not appear in the headers of any message, thus protecting the privacy of your recipients.

Most mail programs allow you to leave the To: field blank. The lack of a recipient can cause spam filters to tag your message as junk mail, however, so I recommend that you use your own address in the To: field instead.

By default, Outlook Express hides the Bcc field, but you can make it visible with just two clicks. From a new message window, pull down the View menu and choose All Headers. In Thunderbird, click the down arrow to the left of the To: field on any address line to choose the Bcc field. In Microsoft Outlook, the option to show or hide the Bcc field is on the View menu when you create a new message.

Update for DVD creation on Media Center

You’ve probably already heard about the Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 Create DVD Update. According to the official write-up, this patch … oops, I mean update … “enables increased reliability when creating a video DVD using recorded TV files (.dvr-ms).” I won’t be installing it, though, until I have some more information. For starters, my home-built Media Center machines don’t have the Sonic DVD creation software that comes with every MCE machine sold by a big-name OEM, so I suspect the patch update won’t do me any good. Why is that? It makes no sense to treat white-box builders, do-it-yourselfers, and upgraders as second-class citizens, and it confuses the hell out of people, even when they’re already experts.

Not to mention the other problem with burning DVDs from content recorded in .dvr-ms format: You have to re-encode it before you can squeeze a two-hour movie onto a single DVD. Re-encoding is CPU-intensive, time-consuming, and general PITA. There are some great tutorials out there, but it really needs to be one-click easy.

Update: Matt Goyer confirms that this fix is only for systems with the Sonic burn engine, and specifically only for PAL systems (primarily European). So I won’t be installing it, and if you’re an American Media Center user you probably shouldn’t, either.

Tip of the day: Create an instant System Restore point

Today’s tip is shamelessly stolen from Jerry Honeycutt, author of the definitive Microsoft Windows XP Registry Guide from Microsoft Press:

You can script System Restore to make taking snapshots quicker and easier. Wouldn’t you like to have a script sitting on your desktop that you can run before making changes to the registry? Here’s how to create a script that will create a restore point when you double-click it:

Using Notepad, type the following listing and save it with the file extension .vbs and make sure that you enclose the file name in quotation marks so Notepad doesn’t add the .txt file extension to the name.

    Set SRP = GetObject( "winmgmts:\.\root\default:Systemrestore" )
CSRP = SRP.CreateRestorePoint( "Hacked the registry", 0, 100 )
    



Double-click the script file any time you want to make a snapshot, presumably before opening the Registry Editor to tweak the registry.


Update: If the word “hacked” bothers you, feel free to modify the script. Just change the text within quotes to something more generic, such as “Manually created restore point using script.”