Not a good job for the FTC

According to the Associated Press:

New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the [Federal Trade Commission] can go after bloggers - as well as the companies that compensate them - for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of interest.

Such activity seems out of place for American society. We normally allow wide latitude in speech about products, and because of that we get robust protection against biased claims. While people can claim any number of things I would rather they didn't, it is equally easy for others to rebut those claims. Each individual who cares then holds a personal court to weigh the arguments they have heard. It's a beautiful system in theory, and it seems to have worked well in practice. Societies where speech is monitored for impropriety, in addition to being rather unpleasant, tend to have individuals with worse information. The censors damp down everything, not just the bad information.

Given this rich history, what is the argument for doing things differently for blogs? After such good experience with free speech, why flirt now with gossip police?

My best guess is that the FTC is fighting to expand its scope. Especially if broadcast TV declines, which seems inevitable given its many competitors, the FTC might fear having a number of censors on hire but no content to monitor. That would be bad for the FTC, but it looks good for the public.

Can you spot Frankie?

He's skittish, and he hides all the time. However, he's not very good at it.

Google Wave Announced

Google Wave was announced yesterday.  If you haven't yet, check it out.  It provides a hosted messaging service that, with a few simple features, supports all of: email, instant messaging, and collaborative document editing.  It also has an open extension mechanism, so it can be used as a substrate for specialized applications, like blogging, photo album sharing, and issue tracking.

I haven't perused all the web information myself, but I hear that the Tech Crunch article is quite good.  Also, if you have some time, the demo is mind-blowing.

Features and vision aside, I must say they made an excellent choice in implementation technology.

Star Trek Rocks (spoiler free)

The new Star Trek movie is just great.  If you liked the original series, go see this.  If you liked making fun of the original series, still go see it.  Just be careful what you say to your Trekkie friends, because they might bite.

The new movie has all the old characters back, but this time with more life and before their rough edges were sanded off.  McCoy is more paranoid than ever.  Spock is more infatuated with logic than ever, yet less equipped due to being just out of college.  Scotty is crazier and drunker than ever.

Somehow they all come off as much less stiff this time around.  In the original series, you could almost see the rod going up their backs--whooooaaa, Trekkies.... take it easy.  They looked like they could put on a snappy 50s-era suit and be right at home carrying a briefcase and shaking hands.  This time, they have big gestures.  They move around.  When Scotty is needed in engineering, or Chekov is needed in the transporter room, they RUN there.  Except Spock.  He's an uptight nerd with pursed lips and a bad poker face, and it stands out wonderfully as the guy you don't want at a party.  My favorite?  The security guards are no longer polite.  You meet them as they start a bar brawl and beat the crap out of someone you like.  Later, when the stuff hits the fan, you're glad they are there.

The fight scenes are upgraded, too.  Kirk still has his signature endless haymakers--gut and face and gut and face.  The others have branched out, though.  Best is that one of them fights with a sword.  All movies should have ninjas or samurais, if not both, and now Star Trek has a futuristic samurai.

I'll admit that the movie is a rather strong cheese, difficult at times to get down.  I love that they say all their old lines, straight, but those lines have been jokes for so long that it's hard to stay in the movie when they say them.  Many scenes are way beyond believable, and you just have to go with it.  Chance encounters, gauntlets of fire, diseases with effects that aren't physically possible--they're all there, and you have to simply enjoy the cheese.

Overall, I give it a hearty thumbs up.  Go see Star Trek if you haven't already.

One cat, a chihuahua, and a turtle

After a sudden decline, our cat Einstein had to be put to sleep after fifteen years.  He had been stable but slow-moving for months.  Last week, soon after a slight change in his meds, he hit a hard enough bump in the road that he just stopped eating.

Deciding how long to give him before letting him go was an awfully hard decision.  This cat has been with Fay through multiple life phases.  We wanted to give him every chance possible, but not to draw things out and make him miserable.  We did our best.

Here he is playing with the baby cat:

Here he is concentrating on something he heard outside:

Bye bye, kittie.  Our place is emptier now.

A high-level language on the JVM

Alex Payne: I think programmers who’ve never worked with a language with pattern matching before should be prepared to have that change their perceptions about programming. I was talking to a group of mostly Mac programmers, largely Objective-C developers. I was trying to convey to them that once you start working with pattern matching, you’ll never want to use a language without it again. It’s such a common thing that a programmer does every day. I have a collection of stuff. Let me pick certain needles out of this haystack, whether its based on a class or their contents, it’s such a powerful tool. It’s so great.

Robey Pointer: I wanted to talk a bit more about starting to use Scala. It definitely wasn’t a flippant choice we made over a few beers one night. We actually agonized over it for quite a while. Maybe not agonized, but certainly discussed it for a long time. One of the biggest draws for us to Scala as opposed to another language, was that once you’d started writing in a really high level language like Ruby, it can be difficult and kind of annoying to go back to a medium level language like Java, where you have to type a lot of code to get the same effect. That was a really big draw for us. With Scala we could still write this really high level code, but be on the JVM.

That's from an Artima interview about the guys behind Twitter evaluating Scala.

It sounds about right to me.  Scala is adventuresome in the high-level features it gives you access to, e.g. pattern-matching, higher-order functions, and mixins.  However, it runs and is integrated with the JVM, so you can always use a Java library or write in low-level Java if you run into performance issues or need some API that Scala doesn't provide.

SMTP relaying from OS/X

I like to relay my laptop's mail through a personal mail relay, so that no matter where I send mail from, it has a tunnel to a mail server that can send it on to the outside world.  I previously posted the details for doing this on a Debian laptop.  Here's what I have found for an OS/X laptop.

There are two things that I have found that should be changed to use the external relay: Mail.app and Postfix. Mail.app, the built-in mail reader, can be configured through its preferences GUI.  I don't remember all the individual steps, but I remember it being straightforward.  The first time you send email, you'll be warned about an untrusted certificate.  In that dialog, you can specify both that the certificate is good for sending email through, and that the certificate is in general legitimate.

The other thing that might need modifying, depending on what you do with your laptop, is Postfix.  From some web searching, I found this page by Michael Prokop.  In short, the magic contents of /etc/postfix/main.cf are as follows:

relayhost = mail.vc-graz.ac.at
smtp_use_tls = yes
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/smtp_auth
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous

Note that if your mail relay runs on port 26, you can put the port number on the relayhost line, like this:

relayhost = mail.vc-graz.ac.at:26

You then have to set up /etc/postfix/smtp_auth with your client password information.

Overall, it takes a few minutes to set it all up, but you end up with your laptop being able to send email from pretty much any Internet connection.  I'm posting it here in case anyone else finds it convenient.