Terry Fisher is reading from his book, Promises to Keep on Monday, Nov. 8, 7pm at the Harvard Coop. Chapter 6, in which Terry proposes his solution to the copyright nightmare, is online. Would people put up with a tax-and-royalty scheme? I’ll bet you can ask him exactly that — along with the usual briefs or bvd questions, of course — on Monday. See you there.

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When your wifi card doesn’t work under XP, after spending three hours futzing with drivers, I suggest you try this:

Control Panel > Administrative tools > Services. Look for Wireless Zero Configuration. Click on it. If it’s stopped, start it. If there’s no start or stop button, double click on it and change “Startup type” to “Automatic.”

Or you could get a Mac which, because it is a closed environment, tends to be easier to live with.

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IMO, X1 beats Google desktop search in every regard but two: price and branding.

I like X1 better because:

– More parameters mean more flexible search

– X1 lets me tell it to update the index once a day rather than continuously; I don’t like giving up even my idle cycles.

– If I exit Google, it doesn’t pick up whatever came in while it’s off. That’s a bad design flaw

– X1 shows me many more results at a time than does Google

– X1 shows me the entire document, not just a sentence or so. I don’t have to open the originating app. I can even copy from the doc.

– X1 indexes more than just Microsoft products, including Netscape and Eudora (It temporarily has stopped indexing Thunderbird, but they’re working on it.)

– X1 has been incredibly responsive to suggestions and beefs over the past few years. We’ll see how Google does.

X1 is on sale for $75 (usually $100), which is infinitely more expensive than free. If I didn’t already own it, I might buy it for $75, but if I were X1 I’d drop the price to $49.00. Ah, free advice, what can’t it recommend?

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In the ’90s, IBM had a machine translation project that bested rule-based translators simply by using probabilities deduced from analyzing the word usage patterns in a large corpus of manually-translated material. (They used the French and English versions of the proceedings of the Canadian Parliament.) Now Bayesian spam filters are all the rage, using word frequency analyses of known spam and non-spam to decide which folder to put a particular message in.

So why not use similar analyses to guide spellchecker alternatives? An analysis of my corpus of documents would reveal that the putative word “cheast” is more likely to be “cheats” if used near the word “game” and “stuck,” but more likely to be “chaste” if used near “Britney” and “supposedly.” Given how well Bayesian spam filters work – they work really well – I might even want to say that if the spellchecker is, say, 95% confident, it should make the change without asking me, while enabling me to review all the auto-changed words, of course.

I am a genuine admirer of Microsoft Word’s spellchecker; in fact, it’s one of the things keeping me from switching to Open Office. Not only does Word’s UI let me correct errors the way I want, jumping from clicking on a list to editing in context, but its first suggestion is almost always the right one. So, I assume Microsoft has analyzed some generic corpus to get the probabilities right. Why not analyze my corpus, too? And do it folder by folder, across time, and by document type. Why not?

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Here’s a boring photo I ftp-ed to my site. In both FireFox 0.9 and Internet Explorer, the bottom two thirds are purple. Yet if I download the very same file to my Windows XP and use a local viewer (ACDSee or the one built into PowerDesk) it looks fine. It seems to happen with any photos over a certain size. This leads me to think that it’s a display glitch in the browser…but in both browsers? Any explanations forthcoming from you oh-so-smart people?

The problem seems to have been a bug that’s fixed in the latest version of imagemagick. The image was corrupt, and now it’s not.

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Apparently, my article on how we’re going to manage when we each have tens of thousands of photos on our hard drives is in the latest issue of Wired. As usual, I’m afraid to read it.

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Jon Lebkowsky at WorldChanging blogs a message posted by Frank Coluccio referring to the October Scientific American (which I have not yet seen) that talks about “Internet Zero,” “an architecture that defines the protocols and internetworking relationships of everyday objects found in the home and the business place.” As Jon says, “As networks grow and evolve and we add more devices (as with Internet Zero), it’s important to be explicit and forceful about the requirement to deep it open and ‘dumb’.”

Around 1990, I had this great idea: DataTotes. Y’see, you plug this little device into the household objects you want to configure — thermostat, VCR, A/C — so it could read the current settings. Then you plug the little device (a DataTote, get it?) into your PC where you could use your keyboard and mouse to configure the settings the way you want. Then you make one more trip back to the device to upload the new settings. And all it would require is for every manufacturer to insert a chip and a dataport into every item they manufactured, and agree to accept my data standard. A million dollar idea! I was just ahead of my time, in the sense of being wrong about every piece of how “datatoting” would be accomplished. starting with the fact that data wouldn’t be toted.

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Miles, the tinyapps.org guy, points us to a an article about yet another Microsoft vulnerability. It turns out that there’s a way that just downloading a jpg can let a virus in.

You can run a utility on this page to see if your machine is vulnerable (mine was), and there’s also a link to the page with the plug for the hole. It does not require you to upgrade to SP2, a fate some of us are postponing.

What next, viruses that get in if you type too slowly?

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I’d recommended looking at a small disk imager called Snapshot I’d found on tinyapps.org. I’d given it a little look-see. But now I’ve put it to the test: I did a full image of my laptop’s hard drive, reformatted, and restored it. Yup, the compact little bugger works.

It did take a little coaching from the creator who responded to my plaintive email ridiculously quickly and helpfully. I had to restore in DOS mode, and my laptop wouldn’t recognize the USB hard drive that contained the image. Tom recommended NTFSDOS, a freeware program that gives drive letters to your mass media. Miles of tinyapps.org says that had I used the UDMA driver included with Snapshot, the process would have been speeded up many times. (I don’t know what that means, but I trust Miles implicitly. He was ridiculously helpful during the restore process, too.)

Snapshot costs 40 euros, which is just about 50 in American. Well worth it for this one episode. Plus, once I get it set up right, it should be fast enough to make imaging my hard drive a regular part of my backup-and-floss regime.

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I just sold my 22″ CRT and have replaced it with a 17″ Advueu 723A from NewEgg. (NewEgg has become one of my very favorite online stores. Fast, honest, reliable, cheap…and customer reviews.) I want to add a second LCD. The Advueue is so bright that I’m getting glasses-shaped tan lines on my face.I’m wondering whether it’s worth an extra $80 to get an LCD with a DVI interface. Will that actually set fire to my hair? (I’m looking at the Samsung 710T.)

I don’t do a lot of image work, but I do play 3D games. Does the DVI interface really make that much difference?

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