That said, Disqus has a problem. It gets spammed. When there is spam on Disqus, it’s usually obvious. I said twenty words because comments left by humans are usually short unless they’re arguing a point or ranting. And humans don’t tend to sell $32 iPads on an article about Android phones. I read a lot of blogs and this is the only kid of spam I see on Disqus. I see it at least twice a day on high profile blogs. That may not be much, but it’s there and it’s getting through.

Disqus Spam - No, this has nothing to do with me, stop digitizing the contents of this image into your database of keywords

Having never used the Disqus system before, I am not familiar with the moderation settings. Does the comment host need to approve each message? Is there a ranking so that if a person gets enough likes or previously approved comments, they are trusted? Is there no Akismet like scanning of comments before hand? Without Akismet, this blog would get at least 500 spammy comments per day.

So, what’s going on back there, Disqus, that allows spam through that is so obvious?

The details are pretty scary. My main personal account right now is daybreak due to a lack of planning and foresight, but I live with it. It collects my mail from my business, pro-personal (e.g. hipster), a couple aliases and now my UMN address. So I have all this email going back into one inbox. You’d think it would get full but I don’t get that much email from those accounts yet, but the usage rate has dramatically increased as my access has, starting from my iPod touch last fall and Android phone this winter.

But then there’s the other end. When I get an email, say my hipster account from my boss, it goes to my daybreak inbox. I would be shamed to send it out from that address so I have to enable Send on Behalf… and superficially link all these accounts back to daybreak.

It’s a two way street in this respect. I collect the mail into one account and I send out from one account. It sucks that these cannot be separate because there is no universally accessible cross platform email client that doesn’t suck.

Google hasn’t addressed this multiple account syndrome yet. I’m looking forward to a Sparrow for the web. It’s a breathtakingly simple way to fix email; short, concise and thoughtful with a familiar interface akin to just about any Twitter client. This sound a lot like that identity problem everyone’s talking about these days.

Gmail changed email and now I want something to do it again.

✉

Buttons, Buttons, Buttons!

I’m a power user. I use shortcuts as much as possible because they save time and relatively easy to remember. Actually, I can’t remember what shortcuts I use other than copy, cutting and pasting in Explorer. What else is there? There is no other purpose than to move files around either by copy or simply moving. I suppose it’s useful for opening files up too, but that doesn’t require any shortcuts.

I showed my mom today the new UI in Windows 8 for Explorer. She has used Office 2007 and Office 2010 at home, but uses 2003 at work. Here’s what she said:

Well, I don’t know what any of that means.

She can figure out how to move her pictures on her own, but only as long as that little pop up comes up when you plug in a USB camera. She gets confused with folders but generally manages well. When she needs to copy something, and I’ve seen her do this, she will not go to the menu but instead she will right click and hit copy. She had no reaction to the UI changes. I don’t know if this means it doesn’t matter until she uses it or if she doesn’t care how it looks.

But you know, when I showed her Word in Office 2007 the first time, she hated it. She liked her menus. She loved them. She protested slightly less with Office 2010 but still disliked it. In contrast, in Office, I think it makes sense to have the ribbon. Advanced tools are brought to the forefront. I always set paragraph styles via a context menu in Office 2010 but it’s also much easier to add page and column breaks in Office 2010 than it ever was in Office 2003.

Here’s a comment I wrote to someone on Google+ about this.

I like the ribbon in office. It exposes a lot of useful things buried in menus. The ribbon makes sense when there was no other way to get to the functionality, e.g. a context menu. I always change paragraph settings by high lighting my text, right clicking and then selecting the paragraph style settings. I have no idea how to do it from the ribbon because it doesn’t have anything to do with the ribbon, it’s based on context. On the other hand, there is no better way to insert different types of page or column breaks than by using the ribbon.
I almost feel like the ribbon makes more sense now that I have a Mac. OSX had right clicking, but it didn’t embrace it, instead there would be palettes, menus and buttons.

I like the idea of exposing functionality but all it needs is a cleaner presentation.

In two weeks, this will die down and nobody will care. That’s what Windows 8 will be like unless their is a massive overhaul; that won’t happen. I assume most Normal People™ will not care what it looks like. If a button says copy instead of right clicking, they will hit the button.

When I get a chance, I will ask some real Normal People™ what they think of these changes.

People like buttons.
Didn’t someone say 90% of people only use 10% of the features?

The Windows behavior is simple: you switch through all open Windows, even if they are the same application. However, on the Mac, Command + Tab does something similar but different enough to be unexpected and initially annoying. It switches between applications. For example, if you have two Safari windows open along with Mail, Command + Tab will switch between Safari and Mail, but with only one window of Safari. Windows would cycle would through all of those windows.

So what’s the deal? My fingers need to migrate. There is an elegant solution. Command + Tilde. What does that do? Does it cycle through all Windows? No. Does it cycle through application windows? Yes!

It’s a simple thing. I thought at first that Lion made this change. I used Leopard and Snow Leopard and I’m sure I never had this Command + Tab identity crisis. Luckily, I’m adjusting well and I will survive.

The App Store has clear back/forward buttons in the top left corner. If I navigate into See All in the New and Noteworthy section, I would be in a hierarchy like Home > New and Noteworthy. I should be able to, like in Safari, 2-finger swipe to the right to move up the hierarchy right back into the Home screen of the App Store.

The bigger problem is Finder. If I’m using the Finder and I drill down a six folders, I need to move quickly. There is a shortcut for back/forward in the Finder, Cmd+[ and Cmd+] respectively.

The shortcuts work just fine, but I thought we were trying to establish a fantastic experience with the trackpad. Apps with visible back/forward buttons also must implement 2-finger gestures to mirror the buttons.

Where is 2-finger swiping in Finder & and in the broader OSX Lion system?

Flash Player 10.1 is not current available for Internet Explorer 9 (64-bit) Beta.

Download a preview release of Flash Player that includes optimized support for Internet Explorer 9 Beta (32-bit and 64-bit) from Adobe Labs.

Over at Adobe, there’s a lame page that says there is no Flash Player for Internet Explorer 9. Well, that’s what it would say if I didn’t know what I was reading, it explains though poorly that this warning is for 64-bit versions of Internet Explorer. Adobe does not help at all – instead of telling users that they are using the wrong Internet Explorer, because obviously users know what they are doing if they are indeed using IE, they tell them to download some non-existent beta version of Flash Player 10.3 instead. Normal People™ would be confused at this point and probably just quit what they were doing and complain to their kids, “Johnny! The computer’s not workin’ again! Can ya fix it for mama?” Something like that.

No Flash Player for Internet Explorer 9 (64-bit)

I wouldn’t advocate even upgrading from old Internet Explorer to a new Internet Explorer. The fault goes three ways in this case.

• Adobe – At fault for not providing a reasonable message, like, “Dear user, you are using a special version of Internet Explorer. This special version does not support plugins like Flash Player. To use Flash Player, close this window, click the start menu, go into ‘all programs’ and finally, use the Internet Explorer that does not have the 64-bit in its name. Thank you.”
• Microsoft – At fault for putting two Internet Explorer choices in the start menu. Not only does it confuse Normal People™, but also launchy.
• Me – And of course, it was my fault for even having the thought, the inclination, the gall to even use Internet Explorer.

Rant complete.

A Song of Ice and Fire - Box Set

Are you ready for this? Okay – one book from that set, in paperback, from Amazon, would have costed about $10.50. That would be The Game of Thrones. So that’s the retail price of a mass market paperback book that’s been around since 2003. Fine, whatever. That same book though is $8.99 in the Kindle bookstore. That’s not cheap, but admittedly, the book is nearly 900 pages. So again, fine, whatever.

Imagine that same absurd pricing system used for the three remaining books in the box set. That’ll bring us to the insane pricing system for the box set.

Ready? Okay – the list price for the set makes sense if each book is $10 or so, it comes in at $35.95. That’s the price I’d expect of a box set and that’s great. The Amazon price is $19.77 which means we’re getting a 45% discount. That’s spectacular. That’s for the physical books. Why wouldn’t the Kindle versions be priced as aggressively? Because. That’s why.

No, not at all. The Kindle version of the box set makes its own sense. It is precisely $29.99. Why does that make sense? If the box set were at retail list price, it would be a groundbreaking 25% discount. That’s pretty good, but since we’re not at the list price anymore in the real world, there is price discrepancy between that and this Kindle-world version. I realize a 45% discount on real book is indeed, a deal. That’s great and all, but the point of Kindle books was to eliminate part of the price and charging more for for copies of books that are not redistributable doesn’t make much sense.

One of my friends recently bought a Kindle. I tweeted to him that he’ll have to watch out for the absurd pricing. I think he was under the impression, like me and many others initially, that Kindle books would be universally cheaper than their printed counterparts. The printed book has its own value, yes, but then they have their own internal content value. That would make sense, for instance, if there was only a 10% discount on the prices, but often, there is an price premium on those Kindle book versions. Is having the ability to get books instantly a reason to make the Kindle books 10%-30% more than their paperback counterparts? Something just doesn’t add up.

This is yet again another instance of some strange conspiracy going on in the land of publishing and Amazon. There is no choice but to sell at the price the publisher wants, but at the same time, there should be some pressure.

Happy reading.

I’m not giving up on Amazon or Kindle books yet. I was browsing through my favorite, the fiction section. I found two books. One was published by Random House and the other has no denotation and it makes me assume it was published on Kindle and via some form of physical Amazon self-publishing.

The first book looks pretty interesting. A Game of Thrones. So this is a long book at 864 physical pages or 2062 KB of data. Either way, you’re getting something pretty good. Here’s the price break down though.

• List Price: $17.00
• Amazon Paperback Price: $10.20
• Kindle Price: $8.99

Can you see the downward spiral in pricing? The discount between the list price and Amazon price is 40%. But then, the discount between the paperback price and the Kindle price is only a tiny ~12%. That’s fine, maybe, if you’re coming from the store and seeing that original list price but you’re not – you’re seeing it on Amazon. The insanity of it all.

The second book is probably one of those self-published Amazon books but I cannot tell for sure. Annihilation: Love Conquers All. I admit this is very different from the previous book in terms of length. At a mere 262 pages or 435 KB, this book is a quarter in length compared to The Game of Thrones. Here’s the price break down.

• List Price: $14.95
• Amazon Paperback Price: $14.83
• Kindle Price: $2.99

And here’s the bombshell price. The discount between the list price is a mere ~1%. But then, the discount between the paperback and the Kindle price is a huge ~80%. That’s what I’m looking for.

$2.99 is a reasonable price for a short book I cannot give away to anyone else, ever again. It’s like a rental. Fine, that’s just fine. Remember that first book? That $17.00 list price book? A Game of Thrones? It’s from 2003 and it’s probably well read by now. So why not allow the Kindle price to be discounted by 80%? It would end up around $3.40 which is again, like an Amazon Rental or an Apple TV rental.

Buying a book and owning it and also have the rights to redistribute it later is what I’m paying for, right? And additionally, if those rights are being withheld, then I think a rental price is in order.

Happy reading.

Just before I finished high school, I donated 164 books which I had accumulated since middle school. That’s about five years of books or about thirty-two books per year. That’s a lot of books. If I were to price those books at a common retail value, I would say that’s it’s about $800 worth of books. So I donated that many books because I read them already. I received some great pleasure from completing the story, finishing the series and concluding the epic journey. Reading is a lot of fun and there is no reason to with hold that fun from others and what better place is there to read than in a school library?

And now that Kindle. For instance, the prices for new releases are pretty competitive, usually undercutting eight to ten dollars off the retail hard cover price. That’s a good deal. The deals get less spectacular for new paper back releases though. The general price for a Kindle-paper-back is about $9.99 while the paper version actually remains at about $13.99, brand new. There in lies my problem. Why am I paying $10 for a book I cannot give to someone else when for a little more, I can buy a redistributable copy. I’m not even complaining yet that some Kindle books are priced at more than their paper-back equivalents despite not getting the now incredibly important redistributable property .

Kindle offers the lackluster publishing house powered method of loaning books to people for fourteen days, once. To make it apparent, you can only loan the book once to a person and you can only loan it for fourteen days. If they haven’t completed it by then, tough luck. Being publisher based, they have the power decide if the books are even loan-able in general, which is a special power they cannot exercise in the real paper back world.

My sticking point is this: Kindle books are not priced for redistribution. One of the now apparent attributes that physical books, regardless of price, is that once read, they can be given to another party. That might be selling, donating, re-gifting or whatever else. What would I settle for if Kindle books couldn’t be given the same redistributable property of real books? I would take the absurd prices of $9.99 and cut them in half or more. A book that’s physically redistributable can cost $13.99 – that’s no big deal anymore, I understand it now. But $9.99 for a book I can:

1. Only read on a Kindle device or a device with a Kindle app
2. Only loan for 14 days, once

I would ask for half that price for those conditions. Why? $4.99 for a book I can’t do anything with after reading it compares very well with an iTunes movie rental, or a few Redbox rentals. While it’s not really the same, renting a movie or reading a book – the scales of time are different, the premise is the same. You don’t care what happens to the content after the initial consumption. I’ll pay $4.99 for a book I can’t do anything with afterwards. I will pay $13.99 for a book I can give away afterwards.

Want to whine about the author not getting any real profit? Change the margins then. Amazon will take their customary 30%, of $4.99 that’s $1.49, and then there is $3.50 left. The publisher that really did no work at all, well, they can get their weak share of $.50. Actually, I don’t care as long as the publisher does not make more than the author.

My Kindle purchasing forecast for the near future, the next few months, is bleak. One would have expected that my purchases would increase because I have more time to read during the summer months. I doubt there will be any kindle of resolution either, so perhaps my buying spree is just about over.

We noticed an issue yesterday and wanted to alert you to it. As a precaution, we’re also forcing you to change your master password.

We take a close look at our logs and try to explain every anomaly we see. Tuesday morning we saw a network traffic anomaly for a few minutes from one of our non-critical machines. These happen occasionally, and we typically identify them as an employee or an automated script.

In this case, we couldn’t find that root cause. After delving into the anomaly we found a similar but smaller matching traffic anomaly from one of our databases in the opposite direction (more traffic was sent from the database compared to what was received on the server). Because we can’t account for this anomaly either, we’re going to be paranoid and assume the worst: that the data we stored in the database was somehow accessed. We know roughly the amount of data transfered and that it’s big enough to have transfered people’s email addresses, the server salt and their salted password hashes from the database. We also know that the amount of data taken isn’t remotely enough to have pulled many users encrypted data blobs…

On the same post, many commenters aren’t happy.

This is very disturbing. Whilst it may well be overkill and paranoia, the fact that attempts and anomalies are being logged doesn’t make one confident in storing their data with LP :(

LP have continually dismissed independent auditing. I ask now…isn’t it time you gave in and let a 3rd party audit you so you can find these things such as “server open to UDP more than it needed to be”??

Seriously dude, this is bad stuff. I’m locked out of ALL my different accounts, and it isn’t accepting my lastpass master passphrase. I guess I learned my lesson here. There is no way in hell that I’m storing my important logins/passwords in the cloud again.

A lot of us are effectively shut out from our own information for the time being. It’s not mere inconvenience if there is urgent matter at hand for a customer.

And of course there are many more. I understand what these people are trying to say. It’s annoying that this service , of all services, would have issues. The cloud as we know it is new and there are new issues to deal with. So I understand where these people are coming from. However.

If you’re using LastPass and you discovered it on your own, you’re probably geeky enough to take the next logical prudent steps. What steps? Every Tuesday, I have a special day that I download and make backups of everything I own. That includes: my email, my calendar, my drive files, my LastPass, my kindle books, my music, all of my blogs, my bookmarks and so much more. Every Tuesday. My calendar alerts me and I generally get it all saved away before 8pm. It’s not that hard.

Let’s focus on LastPass though since the concern. I backup my LastPass account in the following way. I have two flash drives. I plug both in and I use the aforementioned LastPass Pocket. Essentially, I log in and ask Pocket to grab my blob by the LastPass servers. Then, once loaded, I go to File - Export and save the blob in the same LastPass folder on my flash drive. I then close Pocket and attempt to load the blob from the flash drive to ensure it works. If it does, I repeat the process for the other drive. I have two discrete copies of my LastPass blob on two different physical devices.

Sounds like a lot of work? It’s not really. These things happen and one day I might be without internet access but I might need to give someone my password for something. It’s all on the drive ready to go. I keep one with me and one at home. It’s that easy. The passwords are always at most a week out of date. I never thought it would happen but I knew it could. That’s the point. I think most people using LastPass are wise enough to understand this. I hope.

Another sentiment is about the email verification method.

Bastards! How the hell can I login to my email without the “one password”? The disconnect the internet hack doesn’t work on any of my extensions and pocket won’t let me login because of an IP change. In case you haven’t figured out, some of us have dynamic IPs that change every now and then.

Okay. So you’re telling me that you used LastPass to generate a insanely secure password but did not write it down for your master email account? Seriously. Good move there. I wrote down four passwords that I generated with LastPass. These are all on a tiny unlabeled piece of paper stashed in a night stand. Gmail, my bank, 1and1 account and LastPass itself. None of them are labeled and look very much like gibberish. I trust LastPass and all, but there is no way I trust one single method to access my master email account. Without that, I really have no recourse – not just for resetting LastPass, but for doing anything at all.

This has been quite a rant. LastPass’ post reports that there may have been a breach, but it’s only passwords that are weak that are vulnerable: like all passwords. The moral of story – assume nothing is infallible, always backup, be prepared and accept whatever comes down the pipe.