Tomalak Geret'kal

Movie audiences will be treated to a new process that will add scents to the Irish hunk's latest movie, "The New World."

NTT Communications will synchronize seven different odors to parts of the flick in which Farrell plays colonial leader John Smith.

A floral scent will accompany a love scene, and a mix of peppermint and rosemary will be emitted during a tear-jerking scene.

I'm really not sure I'd want smells forced on me during a movie. I can't really explain why but it would bring the whole thing from being a window on another world (with video and sound) to that movie world actually seeping through into reality.

That might sound cool, but IMO it's a blessing that we don't have to smell love scenes in the theatres. I prefer the smell of popcorn to remind me that, no, it isn't actually real.

Continuing my saga of interesting PlusNet happenings…

My ADSL Broadband account with them started off on Option 1, which is the base option. It gives speeds up to 8Mbit and something like 15GB peak time bandwidth per month.

Although my line is capable of receiving only 1Mbit, the other Options provide more peak time bandwidth allowance, and occasionally I get interested in upping this bandwidth limit.

So, from time to time I have braved the "you can only talk to us if it's absolutely neccesary" support ticket system which doesn't seem to account very well for the possibility that I want to talk to them about something they haven't thought anyone would ever ask.

I've done this having progressed through the "Upgrade" system to change my account, and subsequently downgrade my account back to Option 1 when I feel like I don't need more than 15GB bandwidth during peak time hours (4pm – midnight).

You'd think this would work fine, except that their system automatically sticks a one-off line regrade fee of £14.99 on the upgrade/downgrade. I guess they assume that if you change your product, you're doing it to get extra speed on your line. Well, not only am I incapable of receiving any other speeds than 1Mbit, the product change I requested was for a variation of the same product. Changing from Option 1 to Option 2 (or vice versa) doesn't affect the service at all, except for how they bill you for bandwidth usage.

It even says as much in the Terms of Service, if you bother to try to figure out what rules apply when. Their TOS are like badly written CSS in multiple files.

So, every time I've gone through this I've had to go to the support system, explain that they do not have to get BT to do any line tests to change my bandwidth allowance, then explain again when they don't listen to me. Eventually and inevitably they come to the same conclusion as I, and some helpful support agent puts the account change through manually.

I did this maybe three or four times over the year, as and when I needed to.

Bold-faced lies

This month, I needed to downgrade again. I'm leaving home for Uni in a few weeks and I know that paying an extra £8 for my family to download more than 15GB/month in peak-time hours is extravagant. So as usual I popped onto the site to get the ball rolling on an account downgrade.

To my surprise, they'd made some improvements to their automated account regrade service by adding a screen which asked if your account change involved a line regrade or speed change. On the same screen, it made very clear that you would have to pay a one-off fee of £14.99 if you chose 'Yes' for a speed change.

I chose 'No', hoping I would not have to contact Support directly this time. It seemed to have been taken care of.

That is, until I got to the next screen, and I was being billed £14.99 for the account change. The account change without speed change. Rrrright.

I wonder how many customers don't notice/understand this and end up paying 7 beers that they've just been told they don't have to pay.

Cute timing

Naturally, I got back on the support system and pointed this out, on top of my usual account change request. After discussion my account was flagged for the downgrade to Option 1. Problem solved, right?

Wrong.

This time around, the account change was flagged as asked, but set for the day after that on which I am billed. I am hence set to be downgraded as requested tomorrow (18/08/2006) to the £21.99 plan, but have just been billed the full £29.99 from the original price plan.

I don't know if this is an error or not but it's incredibly cheeky to flag this change for as close as possible after my next billing date so that I have to pay the full price anyway… seemingly deliberately.

Someone at PlusNet is intent on making the most of those customers who either don't care enough, don't realise they should, or aren't savvy enough to try to find the corner of the PlusNet support system which allows you to write free-text complaints about things.

Something's wrong when you call your ISP to report a broadband fault, and after going through the long-winded automated system you are told to leave your account details and that a technical person will call back within eight hours.

Forty-eight hours later, still nothing. So then, after three days with no internet service whatsoever, you finally bite the biscuit and brave the support service, trying the "I already reported a fault" option. Joy of joys, it seems that this will take you through to a technical support advisor.

So that's the obvious option to choose. You'd hope you'd be able to ask the advisor what is taking so long and what's wrong with your broadband.

After 28 minutes holding, the music stops and suddenly it starts ringing. Fantastic….

"Yea, hi, I called three days ago to report a broadband fault but I still haven't heard back. I was wondering if you could check up on this for me?"

"I'm sorry, is it fire, police or ambulance you want?"

A blank look creeps across your face. "Er, I'm calling PlusNet technical support…"

"I'm sorry, you've dialled 999 emergency services. You must have misdialled?"

What. The. Fuck.

How does that even happen. Did PlusNet's switchboard get me to the end of the half-hour hold queue then send me to the freakin' Emergency Services? And how many false 999 calls do they get from people trying to report faults?

Gees.

After upgrading my beloved UltraEdit-32 to UEStudio '05 some way through last year, I began noticing that if I copied text from that program into, say, a text field in Firefox, £ signs would become œ signs. Other characters were also affected.

I'd just gotten a new laptop so I figured that SP2 might have had some weird codepage anomaly, and eventually got used to manually altering some characters when I pasted draft journal entries from UEStudio into textfields on the web.

But then I noticed the same was happening on my home PC.

Occasionally, I'd take a shot at figuring out just what combination of codepages and locales might possibly lead to this bizarre effect. But, with Wikipedia as my sword, I was unable to figure out any single or double codepage translation which would translate £ into œ. I learnt a lot about Unicode, though.

Eventually I just sort of gave up… until yesterday, when I discovered the "OEM Character Set" option on UEStudio's "View" menu, which is automatically checked. The UEStudio menubars have images on some of the options such as this one, making it difficult to see that they are checked. And having gone through all of UEStudio's codepage options, I figured I'd covered all my bases.

But no, after turning off that option, I find that everything is as it should be.

So, the question is, why does UEStudio have this (apparently) useless option on by default, and why did it take me so long to find it? And I wonder if the latest standalone versions of UltraEdit (i.e. not in the Suite) have the same "feature"?

Shan from "noise to toaster" posted this entry about a new joint musical endeavour by Greg Kurstin and Inara George. I'm a bit of a fan of Inara George's through her work on Grey's Anatomy, so I figured I might as well mention it, although I haven't yet found the spare bandwidth to download the new track and hence listen to it. *shrug*

The BBC is reporting that our esteemed transport secretary Douglas Alexander is up for national tolls on trunk roads to help "combat congestion". The article makes no mention of the direct benefit to people who will start being charged even more for necessary journeys.
I'm already paying more than enough on taxes to the government to run my car, not least on fuel and road tax itself.

Pricing roads isn't going to stop people taking journeys that they must to get to work or to clients, it's just going to further annoy them and drain their money.

Does the government really think people drive up and down congested motorways just for fun?

It would be nice if the millions of pounds already handed over to the government for maintenance of the roads would provide alternatives to those travelling by car every day – dare I demand better public transport? – rather than trying to come up with a reverse incentive by punishing people for using their own independence.

Meanwhile, I do think congestion is a problem. I would just really rather not be charged even more for my necessary travel.

So in this week's episode of Stargate SG-1, "Insiders", the writers/producers decided to change the duration of a Stargate trip again.

Throughout the original movie and the early years of the show, it clearly takes travellers and most obviously MALPs 8 or 9 seconds to get from the SGC gate room to the other end. This ties in with both of the visual effects used, both the old and the newer version of the "I'm in a wormhole" effect.

The only time this was contradicted was in Season 3's "Shades of Grey", when O'Neil appeared to go straight through from one planet onto another planet. I always figured this was a simile put in place for dramatic effect, which worked well.

We've always had to wait a while for a MALP to get through and start transmitting. In "Red Sky" Sam was timing a wormhole trip to stop in the middle of a sun… and the whole affair clearly was designed to take more than 0.3 seconds.

And yet, in Season 9's "Ripple Effect" this is exactly how long the writers decided they wanted it to take for someone to step through the gate and arrive at the other end. At first I thought I might be able to shrug it off as a mistake and ignore it from the canon.

Then they threw it into blatantly unnatural exposition in "The Scourge", when Carter is explaining to Woolsey about the whole wormhole thing. It was almost as if the producers wanted to show off their new shiny number that they'd never had before. But it is still the wrong number.

Back in "Ripple Effect", the idea was that an inter-dimensional bridge had lengthened gate travel from 0.3 seconds to 3.4 seconds, and this was how Carter was able to tell that the other SG-1s were coming from other universes.

And now, in "Insiders", apparently every gate journey takes 3.2 seconds. Not 8, not 0.3. But 3.2. That's the third gross misrepresentation of a core piece of the show's technological makeup.

Matters are made worse when it was implied that Mitchell was able to think up a joke during those "3.2 seconds" that he was split into constituent molecules and thrown through a wormhole, despite Carter having said herself even as late as "Ripple Effect", after 0.3 seconds was made up, that the journey feels instantaneous.

Now, for the most part I enjoyed the episode. I have nothing against the new cast or the new enemies or much else about last year's shake-up. But it's forced exposition ("Impossible is a word I haven't used since ten years ago when I joined the Stargate Program", says Sam totally unneccesarily) and atrociously careless handling of established series facts and the way they hold onto their replacements "facts" as if canon of a totally different show.

And that annoys me. A lot.

I wrote the other day about replacing phpBB's inbuilt CAPTCHA mod with a more effective one. Whilst researching the issue a little further, I came by this W3C Working Group note, condemning the entire CAPTCHA practice as critically prejudiced against the disabled.

Let's see.

This type of visual and textual verification comes at a huge price to users who are blind, visually impaired or dyslexic. Naturally, this image has no text equivalent accompanying it, as that would make it a giveaway to computerized systems. In many cases, these systems make it impossible for users with certain disabilities to create accounts, write comments, or make purchases on these sites, that is, CAPTCHAs fail to properly recognize users with disabilities as human.

OK, so that's true. It's a well-known, regrettable fact that the most useful technologies are totally discriminatory. It's also pretty well-known that the W3C is anal about the issue.

Don't get me wrong, I am a web purist and I love web standards. I also appreciate semantics, correctly formed XHTML, and only using <em> for logical linguistic emphasis (although often, even I don't bother going that far).

But when it comes to disability discrimination, as much as I'm all for being kind to the less priviledged, I think we've all gone a little ape.

In recent times, however, inaccessible-by-design technologies such as CAPTCHA have spread to smaller sites, and to new applications which further confound assistive technology. Banking site ING Direct's "PIN Guard" [PINGUARD] uses a visual keypad to associate letters on the keyboard with numbers in a user's passcode. Users who cannot see the code, or understand the juxtaposition of letters and numbers, are unable to access their own financial data on this site.

I'd rather ask such customers to go to their local branch than possibly make my financial data easier to steal. I get the impression that much of the W3C working group is inherently liberal.

Anyways, I don't bank with ING Direct, so…

CAPTCHA is now in frequent use in the comment areas of message boards and personal weblogs. Many bloggers claim that CAPTCHA challenges are successful in eradicating comment spam, but below a certain threshold of popularity, any other method of comment spam control should be reasonably successful — and more accessible to users with disabilities.

Yea, they haven't ever run a popular blog, have they? Nor have I, but from what I've heard people are crying out loud for more efficient spam systems, notably stopping it at the source rather than attempting to tidy it up afterwards with ever-less-effective word filters and such.

It is a logical fallacy, then, to hail CAPTCHA as a spam-busting panacea. Even 10% accuracy by a computer amounts to system failure, just at a slower rate. It is also faulty logic to believe that the adoption of CAPTCHA in large sites is evidence of its supremacy in fighting spam. Indeed, a number of techniques are as effective as CAPTCHA, without causing the human interaction step that causes usability and accessibility issues.

True, true, true, true, true… but so what? I still don't see the reason not to try to develop this technology. The W3C are ignoring the fact that there are some strong CAPTCHAs in use, if only a few, it's just that the largest corporations (read: Microsoft, Yahoo) refuse to use them on their websites.

To reframe the problem, text is easy to manipulate, which is good for assistive technologies, but just as good for robots. So, a logical means of trying to solve this problem is to offer another non-textual method of using the same content. Hotmail serves a sound file that can be listened to if the visual verification is not suitable for the user.

In fairness, I'm not too keen on that approach either. The web is visual. My computer screen is visual. I've always been wary of sites that blare background music at me, or require me to listen to a .wav of someone talking. If I really wanted to listen to things I'd probably get away from my computer screen and go find someone real.

Logically, I don't suppose there's any reason the web shouldn't be audial as well as visual. But it just doesn't sit right with me.

Still, my preference has nothing to do with the W3C's arguments.

Users who are deaf-blind, don't have or use a sound card, work in noisy environments, or don't have required sound plugins are likewise left in the lurch. Since this content is auditory in nature, users often have to write down the code before entering it, which is very inconvenient.

Who doesn't use a sound card? If I choose not to use a monitor, will this persuade the W3C to discourage the continued primary emphasis of websites on graphics and text?

Don't have required sound plugins? Get them. You managed to find monitor driver software fine, and as far as I know everyone has at least integrated sound and a generic driver installed.

In any case, audio CAPTCHAs were never designed to work alone. They are there as a fallback for when the visual version isn't appropriate. For example, for the blind. If you're deaf and blind then I'm kind of wondering how you intend to access anything on the web. I'd sure love to give Braille ALA a try… not.

Finally, a paragraph about biometrics just made me laugh and give up on the whole 'debating' affair:

Again, the weakness here is based on infrastructure. It will take several years for biometric hardware to penetrate a market, and some political and social issues exist which may hold back the process. Biometric systems will also have to take into account the fact that not all people have the same physical features: for example, retinal scanning does not work for a user who was born without eyes.

Excuse me? "Retinal scanning does not work for a user who was born without eyes?!" OK, some people are blind and might want to use the internet. Some people are deaf and also may fancy a peak at the odd site or too. It may even be conceivable – although I'm not yet sure how – that one of your average, casual surfers might turn out to be both deaf and blind.

But in the practical world, is it really worth abandoning a useful anti-spam measure on the basis that your average website visitor was born without eyeballs?

Answer: No. Don't be so bloody stupid.

Lastly, new approaches focusing on using exclusively visual or auditory means for access control, such as the "PIN Guard" mentioned above, should be scrapped until a reliable method exists for users who cannot access them to authenticate themselves. A short-term security benefit is not worth threatening a person's autonomy by denying them access to such important data as their finances.

Oh, nice dig at one specific implementation. If I couldn't see or hear I'd have my carer take me to the local branch. Come on, I know I sound prejudiced but I'm really just being practical. The continued efforts to really push anti-discrimination proposals to their limits is hampering continued industry, development and enterprise. It really is. So much for evolution.

Thanks to the following contributors: Kentarou Fukuda, Marc-Antoine Garrigue, Al Gilman, Charles McCathieNevile, David Pawson, David Poehlman, Janina Sajka, and Jason White.

Yes, on behalf of all of us with no eyes or ears, who have a serious hair shortage and stand only three feet tall, I would thank you. Except I can't, because I have no arms and haven't yet learnt to type with my toes. Come up with an accessibility document for that.

A mate of mine from Uni lives in Nottingham with his family. A few weeks ago, he found a tiny article in the local Evening Post about a proposed new Uni campus. Well, we all sort of knew that was coming, and it goes some way to explaining the deserted Uni-owned wasteland opposite Jubilee on Triumph Road.

But what I for one was not expecting, was this promised paradise:

The resemblance to Starfleet Academy in TNG's San Francisco is hard to ignore:

I fully intend to get the most use out of the new campus when it's built at the start of 2008 (yea, right). To be honest, it looks like something from another country: it would look lush in Cyprus where the white floor would stay white and reflect in the sun. I could even study a Masters just to enjoy the Babylonian environment before all the students ruin it.

Still, it's only an artists impression of something that hasn't even been started yet, so.. best not to get too excited, eh?

Every so often, someone pops into #mIRC on EFnet with a question that has been answered many times before. So I keep fragments of code handy, ready to post back into the channel every now and then.

But then I got to thinking… wouldn't it be cool if I had an URL to send people instead?

So now, the URL will be to this blog. And more specifically, to posts just like this one.