Pedro Vera's Web Log

New experiment: Amazon Kindle Wiki

2008-09-09T05:09:00.004+01:00

Now that I am starting to get a hang of the Kindle, and my friends are slowly embracing it, I decided it was time to put together some kind of online reference.

The obvious candidate for this is some kind of wiki. I have setup a Google wiki at http://wiki.pedrovera.com to see how that goes. Right now the wiki only holds general information about the device, but it also has a section where you can download my two novels in the Kindle format, plus plain text and PDF.

The Kindle version is far from perfect, mostly because the conversion tool that I used is still in beta. I would really like for Amazon to release the full specification of their digital publishing platform, for example, the proper way to tag for title and author.

iPhone 3G

2008-08-30T16:20:00.001+01:00

The Vera household has been a bit hostile since my dear mother in law came for her yearly summer visit. I love my mother in law, god bless her, the problem is her daughter, that is, my wife.

Whenever her mother is here she goes batshit.

This time the ordeal started because MIL wanted to buy an iPhone 3G for her other daughter, who is already with AT&T in Puerto Rico.

The problem: nobody would sell her one at the upgrade price, she needed the account holder in person.

After a week of FAIL, and without asking me, All Mighty Alpha Nerd and Master of Technical Decisions in the Vera Household, they decided to upgrade Ivette's iPhone 8GB to an iPhone 3G 16GB, then the deactivated iPhone 8GB could go to her sisters. That's a $300 upgrade for a phone that commands more than that on eBay.

I was furious, because as All Mighty Alpha Nerd and Master of Technical Decisions in the Vera Household, I feel entitled to always have the newest toy. I could not tolerate using an iPhone 8GB when my wife had an iPhone 3G 16GB.

No god damn way.

Of course, I couldn't afford to pay for upgrading my own, at least not yet, so I resorted to bitching and moaning. And lecturing.

For example, they went out for a drive and called me in a panic because they got lost in South East DC.

While carrying an iPhone 3G, which has fucking GPS in it.

Yeah, you can feel the rage already. It takes two lousy clicks to find out where you are at:

Click on the maps button

Click on the location button

That's it, you are done. If in range of GPS, it tells you exactly where you are at. Otherwise it tries to use cell towers and known wifi hotspots to give you a circle of uncertainty. The smaller the circle, the better the prediction is. In my old iPhone I had the triangulation peg my location within a car length, which is pretty damn impressive when you take into account what happens to GPS if selective availability happens to be enabled for your area.

After a week of bitching, moaning, pleading, etc. I wore them down and they upgraded mine, so now I also have an iPhone 3G 16GB, and my old phone (sorry Brian) is going to be my MIL's.

Now comes the best part: what the fuck for?

From my desk I still can't get 3G (but the Kindle can see it just fine, thank you). And my wireless access point decided that it won't let me login so I can add the mac address of the new phones, so I am surfing on EDGE while sitting 6 feet away from a wireless access point connected to 16MB cable!

What's different about the new phone?

It's lighter.

The buttons are chromed.

It smudges twice as much as my old one, because the back is now glossy black.

Now I don't have a dock.

And the AC adapter is maybe 1/4th the size of the old one, so it is even easier to lose.

And except for 3G, and it having twice as much storage capacity, and GPS, the device has the exact same feature set as my old phone.

The bill is now magically $15 more per phone.

The camera doesn't have the weird color spot that the old phones have, at least as far as I can tell.

Maybe it is a placebo effect, but normal voice calls are a bit better.

That's about it.

In terms of aesthetics, I still think the original back cover looks classier than the new glossy back. I haven't seen the white phone in person, I imagine it will be the ultimate chick phone (sorry Brad).

Flip Video Ultra

2008-08-30T16:04:00.001+01:00

Now that we are more or less having family gatherings once per month, I thought it was worth it to take another shot at making videos, since there is only so much you can convey from photos.

I was hoping to score something flashy, but the kind of HD camcorder that caught my eye is still in the $1000 range, and that's too damn much.

Worse, most of these videos would eventually end at youtube, so HD was really a god damn waste of resources, even if it was worth it for archival purposes.

Almost by accident, I ran into the Flip Video series. By looking at the specs it did not look like much, a tiny camera, almost no zoom, and one hour of video capacity.

What the hell is that going to be good for?

I got sucked into the reviews big time: pretty much everyone loves the damn things.

Why? Because they are simple, and they work.

Two weeks ago I took delivery of a Flip Video Ultra, it was $117 at Amazon and shipping was free. And that's where the fun started: In two weeks I have shot more video than the total amount of video I shot during the year that I owned my previous camcorder, a JVC miniDV that I sold in pristine condition more than five years ago (it was a year old, yet it had not been used for a full hour of total recording time).

See some of my videos at Youtube.

The reviews are right, this thing is basically perfect for the job. The quality of the video is not stellar, it looks a bit washed out but I was able to clean it up a bit with iMovie 7. Everything else is great. I can take videos of PJ, plug it into my Mac Book Pro and in less than half an hour I have already edited the video and uploaded it to youtube. VLC doesn't like the audio codec, but that's the only thing I have seen so far.

I have seen the output of the camera as:

Youtube, web resolution. Looks as bad as every other youtube video, no surprise here.

Youtube, AppleTV. Looks much nicer.

Youtube, iPhone. Looks fantastic.

AppleTV, h264. Looks very nice, not as nice as Youtube for iPhone.

I haven't made DVDs yet, so I have no idea what it looks like.

So far the videos have been a hit, and even PJ likes to watch himself on youtube, which is kind of funny in a meta way.

The good:

Inexpensive (not "cheap", it feels very solid, a quality product, not a cheaply made piece of shit). < $120 is a lot of bang for the buck.

It does one job, and it does it well.

It's fun to use.

The not-so-good:

I am a moron, because I did not read the instructions booklet I missed that the battery compartment has a lock button, so I spent my first week constantly pulling out the damn door by mistake.

The record button doesn't give enough feedback, so it is hard to tell if it engaged unless you are looking at the LCD.

An SD slot would have been great, but I am not losing sleep over it.

Amazon Kindle

2008-08-30T15:43:00.001+01:00

I was a very early reader. My mother taught me how to read by the time I was four, and I was reading Sherlock Holmes and Jules Verne novels before I was out of elementary school. At least in my school district this was a rarity, even in high school when a teacher wouldn't believe me that I had read a novel (I am sure it was by Isabel Allende) on my own, not because I was being forced to.

It got me out of my normal Spanish class and into the "lit" class for a week or so, which was nice.

In US Army basic training you are forbidden from reading anything that isn't published by the Army, and you are handed a paperback, the "Smart Book" (Tradoc Pamphlet 600-4). Whenever you are not doing anything, you better be reading that book.

I carried it on my left leg pocket of my BDUs. On the right leg pocket I carried Clive Barker's Imagica. From 6 feet away it looks about the same size as the Smart Book, and I never got caught reading it. I had the Smart Book since before basic training and was already bored, so I needed the novel just to keep me sane.

Years later, I am still reading nonstop. It doesn't even bother me the cost, since there is always a decent selection of discounted books at every chain bookstore you can think of. The problem is storage.

A book per week habit means a collection of hundreds of books, which basically eat up your living space since you are only reading one at a time. In our case, we have a full wall covered with bookshelves, crammed to the top with 14 years worth of book purchases. And this doesn't take into account the books ruined over the years by insects, water, etc. If we still had them all we would need a second full wall.

And here comes the Kindle. The Amazon Kindle is an e-book reader with prepaid 3G wireless connectivity, and integrated into Amazon.com. This means that, without even using a computer, you can browse the Amazon Kindle store from the device, pick the books that you want and they are delivered to your device in minutes. Want to read a sample first? No problem, you can download a sample and pay to turn it into a full version later, and it never expires.

It is being marketed as the iPod of the book world.

It is also ugly as murder, since it is not an Apple product people will bitch and moan about how ugly it is, but the truth of the matter is that once you are reading, you don't pay attention to the device, all that you do is look at the screen and it looks perfect.

People also bitch about the price: $359. What everyone seems to be missing is that this device comes with prepaid 3G cellular connectivity, which is expensive. My iPhone 3G costs $30/month to access the same kind of connectivity. With the Kindle, you pay $359 and off you go. I am sure that at least $200 out of the $359 is due to the prepaid connectivity.

Now, here is the smart thing that Amazon did, that Apple didn't: Amazon stores all of your paid content for you, and you are free to re-download as many times as you wish.

Fried your Kindle? You can pull all of your purchases with your replacement unit, no charge. You can't do that with iTunes and an iPod.

Ran out of space and are too cheap to buy a $8 2GB SD card? Delete some of your books, you can always pull them down again. You can't do that with iTunes and an iPod.

I also like that I can add my own content to the device. I can either plug the Kindle to USB, or I can remove the (optional) SD card. If I plug the Kindle to USB, both the internal memory, and the SD card, show as two separate storage units. There is no science as of how to add content, you simply drag files in the allowed formats into the documents folder in the Kindle or SD card and off you go.

If you want to convert your files to the AZW format, then you can try Stanza, which so far rocks.

Still, there are things that could be better:

The previous/next buttons need more resistance, to account for accidental hits.

The wheel button eats the battery if the device is asleep and the cover is closed.

The retention tab for the cover is a joke.

The rear door opens too easily. At least it needs a lock button.

The two most important buttons, the power and wireless buttons, are in a really stupid place if you are expected to use the cover.

Search sucks.

It doesn't allow you to arrange your books as folders. I added a few dozen files and it drove me crazy trying to figure out what was what.

Those are all minor nags, and Amazon is rumored to be already working on version 2. I would expect Amazon to address some of the usability issues, but one thing is for sure is that there is no way in hell Amazon is going to show up with a $99 Kindle, that is, unless it comes with a cellular service contract for $X/month.

Veraperez.com pwn3d again

2008-08-03T18:14:00.004+01:00

"Fuck me once, shame on you. Fuck me twice, shame on me."
- Cedric Daniels, The Wire.

Veraperez.com got hit with a Google black list again (thanks to Brian for catching this). And for the same bullshit as the last time. Parties unknown inserted an IFRAME with links to malicious code. Google automatically checks for these to protect their users. Anyone seeing Veraperez.com as Google search results is warned that the site links to malware. Anyone using Firefox and attempting to visit the site get a big red nasty sign explaining that the site is potentially dangerous.

On one hand, I can't complain about Google fixing my fuck ups, it beats the hell out of having to explain to my visitors why I let THEIR computers get fucked up by MY website.

On the other hand I am god damn furious that this is the second time in a month that this happens to me with a properly installed Wordpress. Am I the only one?

This time I went as far as to assume that maybe the account password was compromised, so I ended up changing my passwords in a bunch of sites (good luck using a dictionary attack now, assholes). Still, the damage is done, I will lose at least two days of traffic to this bullshit.

If three weeks ago I was concerned about Wordpress, right now I am downright fucking scared of it. I don't think I can justify offering Wordpress to any of my customers when they can run a proper blog off Blogspot with their own domain names and with a hell of a lot less concern for security issues than when trying to run Wordpress stand alone.

Domino's Scientists Test Limits Of What Humans Will Eat

2008-07-26T02:27:00.000+01:00

Domino's Scientists Test Limits Of What Humans Will Eat

Word cloud

2008-07-25T15:04:00.001+01:00

Here is the Wordle.net map for this blog:

And here's the one for Veraperez.com:

Frustrated

2008-07-23T16:09:00.001+01:00

We have a code word/meme that is used a lot by #asp regulars, it is used to convey frustration with something that is work related:

This is how I feel right now.

Another seemingly infinite wikipedia session

2008-07-23T05:26:00.001+01:00

I know more than a few people that can't help but get sucked into wikipedia whenever they go there just to check for one specific thing. It scares me because whenever I get sucked in, I blow hours at a time. Here is the result of just two hours worth of wikipedia browsing/reading just for this evening:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Scientology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia%2C_Pennsylvania

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltpeter_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltpetre

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Valley%2C_Washington%2C_D.C.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonopah%2C_Nevada

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bannack%2C_Montana

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feisal_I_of_Iraq

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._E._Lawrence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Revolt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auda_ibu_Tayi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Ferrer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_bridge

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Sharif

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Delon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Pillars_of_Wisdom

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_of_Arabia_(film)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_town

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Ohio

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaumont_Reserve_Fleet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Oriskany_%28CV-34%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Langsdorff

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianetics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroaster

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thus_Spake_Zarathustra

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_%28Ayn_Rand%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Szandor_LaVey

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_Prince_of_Wales_and_Repulse

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_battleship_Strasbourg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vichy_France

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casabianca_%28Q183%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coup_de_main

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuttling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Guernica

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_battleship_Yamato

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Normandie

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsize

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuttling_of_the_French_fleet_in_Toulon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_Anton

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Torch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condor_Legion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Franco

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Romero

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_%28Spain%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror_%28Spain%29#Red_and_White_Terrors

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palacio_de_Lecumberri

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram%C3%B3n_Mercader

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror_%28Spain%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trotsky

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Dali_Young_Virgin_Auto.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Virgin_Auto-Sodomized_by_the_Horns_of_Her_Own_Chastity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dal%C3%AD

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeois

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surreal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_universe_%28fiction%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hill_%28film%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hill

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen

The list is backwards, so my session starts at the bottom of the list with the Watchmen page.

Savage calls autism a "fraud and a racket," the blogosphere calls Savage every name in the book

2008-07-22T17:33:00.000+01:00

And then some.

Freedom of Speech is being able to go on national television, and with no preparation or knowledge whatsoever, state that autism is a fraud and a racket, that 99% of autistic kids are spoiled brats. This is what Michael Savage did.

Freedom of Speech is also being able to say something like this: "Michael Savage is a sorry piece of shit that intentionally riled up one of the most vocal parental advocacy groups in the country in order to gain notoriety." That's what I just did.

You see, I don't have the burden of kindness that my friend Karla has, who wrote a very painful rebuttal to Savage's moronic rant, so I feel absolutely no guilt or remorse about calling him a sorry piece of shit.

I am one of the lucky parents of a child that has just mild autism. PJ doesn't rock himself for hours while staring at space, he hurts himself more by doing something stupid like climbing too high, than by hitting himself. He has made incredible advances in speech, thanks to the priceless help from the Fairfax County (VA) special education programs that he qualified for since he started school. He is emphatic, and most of the times he cheerfully meets new people. But he is still autistic.

My house is in an eternal state of disarray. We clean on one side while he wrecks havoc on the opposite end. He loves pizza, which means that he will ask us to order him two regular sized pizzas, enough to feed two or three people, and he will carry them throughout the house for the next day or so. Oh, and he is one of those people that like cold pizza straight out of the fridge.

When we have fried chicken, he has to be served exactly five legs. Not four, not six, five. He likes to fill up his own balloons with helium, a kit is $24. If he doesn't get at least two of those per week, he melts down.

Oh, yes. The meltdowns. Imagine a temper tantrum where the kid is not trying to blackmail you into doing whatever it is that he wants. A tantrum in which the child has absolutely zero self control. That's an autistic meltdown. PJ gets one or two per day, which is awesome. Almost everyone else I have checked with tells me of days with constant meltdowns from the moment the child wakes up until it is time to bed.

When the poor kids finally fall asleep, you feel sorry for them because you just can see that they are completely drained.

Karla is not exaggerating about the house damages. I also got the broken wallboards and the paint stains. I also got yogurt stains in my ceilings. Oh, and he is an escape artist. I am in constant terror that he is going to take off running and end up under a truck in Wielhe avenue. We have locks in all of the windows, the sliding door to the patio is blocked and the balcony is useless to us. The door has a lock on the chain.

About a month ago I realized that, if you don't count the kitchen cabinets, the fridge and the stove, and a shower sliding door, there is not a single thing in this house that is older than PJ. Everything else, even bathroom cabinets and BOTH toilets, have been replaced at least once in the past 9 years.

One autistic kid in the family is extremely expensive. Two? I can't even begin to visualize that. And PJ has no dietary restrictions, there are many autistic kids out there with serious gastric problems, and that means spending even more money for groceries.

By the way, the end result of this incident with Michael Savage is that he is going to come out and pour his heart out and tell us all how he did not mean to do that, and how he really feels the pain of the autistic parent. And it will all be a crock of shit.

The car won't start

2008-07-20T19:20:00.000+01:00

And there I was, with a really sore throat, which made me cough like crazy (and that hurts even worse), when I heard somebody knocking just minutes after Ivette left for work.

It was Ivette.

"The car won't start."

Had this been in the middle of winter, I wouldn't had panicked (it's a no-brainer). But a drained battery in the middle of summer? It opens all sorts of possibilities.

Of course, Ivette being a woman, her immediate reaction was to call roadside assistance. That wouldn't work yet, so I told her I would take a look at the Jeep.

The sonofabitch was dead! The car's power locks would not even work, the only light inside the car came from the odometer, which is obviously powered by a small battery.

Fine, I thought, I'll pop the hood. The battery terminals were covered by neat mounds of acid foam. It looks as if the battery simply blew up from the heat, it was not the kind of acid residue I would have expected.

Fine, I thought, let's get a can of soda. With the terminals now clean, I tried again. Still dead.

Part of me prayed that it was only a dead battery, and not a fried alternator or worse. I called the local service shop to see if they had the battery in stock.

$100, and they would return $15 once we handed back the old battery. Oh, and they did not deliver, there was no way to get the battery unless I went to pick it up. I only have one car, so this is definitely a problem.

Ivette called a coworker, and 20 minutes later I had the new battery. Oh, and it was now over 90 degrees.

Overweight + sore throat + coughing + black car + 90 degrees < > fun

One would think that this is the end of the bad luck, but for some reason, some piece of shit with a sense of humor decided to specify metric bolts that were so close to their English equivalent that it took me almost half an hour to be convinced that I had the right socket.

On top of that, there is a plastic wedge, kept in place with one of the magic metric bolts, that is used to keep the battery clamped down. That bolt was exactly two inches deeper than the extension that I had at hand, so for half an hour (or so it felt like) the wrench was making three clicks per attempt. I was not using my own tools, so I had not noticed that the kit had a universal joint, which was not needed but did add another two inches to the total reach of the socket wrench. I was finally in the game.

It took me over an hour to remove the old battery, and I don't think it took five minutes to get the new battery installed. By then I was already resigned to the idea that the car wouldn't start and I would still need to call roadside assistance.

The sonofabitch started on the spot. It was the stupid battery after all. By then I was so drained that I could barely carry the dead battery to put it in the trunk so we can exchange it later.

By the way, the car is 5 years old, and that was obviously its first battery, so I am amazed that nobody tried to sell my wife a new battery the last three times she had the oil changed. You can always count on them to try to up-sell, so it shocks me that none of them noticed that the battery was on its last legs.

WTF is going on in the US Air Force?

2008-07-19T20:45:00.001+01:00

What the hell is going on in the Air Force? Loose nukes, breakdown of military discipline, top leadership firings, and now they are trying to spend millions because their top generals don't fly with enough comfort already?

Did these dumbasses forget that they work for a branch of the military instead of a Fortune 50 company?

And worse, even after they are told not to do it, they still keep on pushing? What about a half-dozen generals wasting valuable time bickering over the right color shade for the leather in their flying Lazy boy chairs? I flew across the god damn Atlantic Ocean in a C-141 in seats made with canvas or nylon strips. It's funny because this was also the flight where I had the most leg room anywhere, since we were sitting in the cargo bay, and our baggage was strapped down on the floor in the middle of the cargo hold. I had at least one yard from my feet to the closest object.

I flew in the opposite direction in a C-5 Galaxy, the biggest cargo plane that we have. I actually had an airliner-type seat, which faced backwards and was slightly tilted down. It was a miserable flight.

And it was free, since it was a space available flight.

Why are the US Air Force Generals burning taxpayer money in flight accommodations that are even more luxurious than one of our DoD owned small executive jets? And why not keep using the silver bullets?

The silver bullets are small trailers that fit inside most of our cargo jets. A VIP, say Jack Ryan, can sneak into a cargo plane with a silver bullet, where he can work for most of a transatlantic trip and still have a chance to take a quick nap and a shower. The end result is that the VIP gets to use most of that idle time for work purposes, and is mostly ready for action once he lands.

They could have probably bought a few more of those trailers and keep them low profile. The emphasis on this approach is comfort and convenience, not luxurious excess. I am sure the mattress probably sucks, but sleeping in one has to beat the hell out of sleeping upright in a god damn parachutist jumper seat.

If your VIP can remember the specific shade of the color of the leather seats, then he is the wrong guy for the job.

Another thing that is bothering me: why in the fuck are we ferrying around top USAF brass? What is it that they need to do that can't be done with a secure video link? We are not building new strategic Air bases out of the US, so it is not like they need to inspect these (what you need for that is a good civilian engineer). The Air Force is fighting their wars with strategic bombers dropping non-nuclear ordinance, and UAVs that can be piloted from across the world. So, why do they need to go outside of the US? Any why aren't the Army and Marine generals being treated with the same kind of concern about their comfort?

Do you remember the last time a Marine general complained that he did not like the shade of the leather in his Lazy boy chair?

And for the record, I would rather fly in the cargo hold of a C-141 than in a MATS charter jet that feels like it is about to disintegrate as soon as it takes off. The C-141 was louder, but it felt rock solid, while the charter jet felt like it was falling apart.

Don't tell me it is free and then ask me to pay for a different thing as a condition

2008-07-19T16:16:00.001+01:00

Lulu.com is advertising a "limited offer" for a distribution package that includes a free ISBN. ISBNs are usually $125 when you buy them one at a time, and you can only buy them in batches of powers of ten. I thought that it sounded too good to be true, after all, I had to buy my first two ISBNs.

Well, the reason that it sounded too good to be true is that there is no way to get this free ISBN unless you purchase a hardcopy of your book from Lulu.com. If you don't buy the hardcopy, you don't get to move to the final step, where the ISBN is submitted to bowker.com.

No free ISBN for you.

Why not just advertise the package for whatever it costs to print one book? Th end result is the same, but you are not lying to people.

How not to ride a Segway

2008-07-19T13:08:00.002+01:00

Don't do this with your Segway (from The Fail Blog):

Now available in the Amazon Kindle Store

2008-07-19T01:43:00.000+01:00

Both of my novels are now available at Amazon's Kindle Store:

Book #1: Shining Star, first published July 2004

Book #2: Pulling Strings, first published January 2006

If you are either published, or self published, and you are interested in publishing your books through the Kindle, all you need to do is join the Amazon Digital Text Platform. It is free, you retain full ownership of your work, and the royalties are no worse than what you can get elsewhere. I did it because I can't turn down the opportunity to open one more sales channel for my books.

From the technical standpoint, the process is very simple. For each of your books you do the following:

1. Fill a section with the ISBN (as far as I can tell, it isn't mandatory) and a few more details about the book, including five categories plus a list of keywords. You also upload a cover image.

2. Upload your final copy of the book, they accept most common formats. I tried with MS Word, HTML and PDF. I got more control by using PDF. Amazon provides plenty of documentation for those that would like more control of the formatting.

3. Use the book preview utility to verify that the book is rendered the way you want it to.

4. Enter your sale price.

5. Hit publish.

You are done. From the moment that you hit publish, to your book first showing in search results you can expect anywhere from 12 to 72 hours. One of my two books made it to the search results in ess than 24 hours, the second one is up and running but it is not showing up in searches yet.

A cool thing I noticed is that since HTML gives you the most control, you don't really have to waste time agonizing over your layout and then generate the perfect PDF. I was using Open Office 2.4 (had to downgrade from 3.0, it ran like shit even on this Mac Book Pro 2.33) and I remember how much trouble it was to get the stupid formatting of the headers, footers, pagination, etc. done right. Now I know this is trivial, so I can go back to writing and not having to worry about formatting.

Things I did not like:

1. Some things are done with AJAX functionality that actually works better in Safari than in Firefox, a first for me. Uploads in Firefox worked maybe half of the time.

2. The cover upload failed about half of the time.

3. I did not see a way to buy an ISBN. ISBNs can be bought directly from Bowker for $125. You can get them as cheap as $50 from other sources, but then you won't have control over the publisher name listed with the ISBN. I got my two ISBNs through Lulu.com, it was less than $100 each.

Except for those three things, it is pretty nifty.

Veraperez.com is back on business

2008-07-19T01:17:00.001+01:00

After four very stressful days, Veraperez.com is back in business.

The good news is that the Google mechanisms to detect and block malware distribution sites seems to work.

The bad news is that the Google mechanisms that detect and block malware rely on the cooperation of your browser. Safari loaded my site every time, there was no warning. Firefox would not load ANY of the subdomains, or even the control panel. I did not bother to try with IE because I could not risk infecting my XP in Parallels.

Still, I have two huge concerns:

1. How the fuck did I get infected? I was using the most current version of Wordpress, and I never work on my sites from Windows, so how the hell did the IFRAME get injected? Wordpress 2.6 came out AFTER I was informed that the site was infected, and I did not see any security advisory, so I can't tell if it was injected through a direct exploit, or through the comments.

I really want to know what happened, because I know too many people that use Wordpress, including a lot of my customers, and I need to be prepared to help them.

2. The cleanup process is way above the heads of most normal Wordpress users. I am a nerd, and it still took me four days to completely clean the site. I don't even want to think what would happen to the thousands of people that installed Wordpress because it promised them a simple, 5-minute install. On top of this, the Google diagnostics page gives you very little details on what was wrong, or so it seems. All information that I needed was right in front of me, but I did not notice it. Had I searched my Wordpress database for the IP address of the malware site that the IFRAME was loading from, I could have fixed this mess in half as much time.

If you are running Wordpress, and you are stuck with it (more on that later), then search your posts and comments for IFRAMEs, and make sure that you are on the most current version of Wordpress. There should be a feed that tells you when new releases are out, so you might as well subscribe to that too. If you are not using Spam Karma 2, go get it. It's free software, so all you have to do is download and install it. If you are running multiple copies of Wordpress, consider switching to Wordpress mu, so you only need to update one copy.

Stuck with Wordpress: that should be a very small percentage of users. In my case, I need Wordpress because I use a custom plugin for my text link ads. The only blog system that they support is Wordpress, so that is what I need to keep using. If you don't belong to that group, then maybe it is time to consider letting somebody else to run it for you. Wordpress.com has free Wordpress hosting, and Blogspot is not that much different from the workflow perspective. When was the last time that either Wordpress.com or Blogspot botched an install, or got pwned?

Also, just because you use a free blogging account doesn't mean that you can't use a personal domain name for it. I am on Blogspot, yet I am using Pedrovera.com for it. Wordpress.com has a similar feature but I don't know if it is free.

Will the iPhone 3G blend?

2008-07-17T16:45:00.002+01:00

The only reason that I can stomach this is because I haven't upgraded my iPhones to 3Gs:

(found through TUAW)

God Bless The Internet.

Veraperez.com got PWN3D

2008-07-17T02:18:00.000+01:00

Yup, it happened.

It doesn't matter how hard you work at it to keep a site up and running with proper software, somebody always finds a way to go around and exploit it. In my case, somebody, somehow, managed to inject one blog posting with an iframe that points to a known malware distribution site.

Assholes.

The sad thing is that the site was compromised just four days before Wordpress 2.6 came out, not that I know for sure if this new version has fixed that problem.

And people still ask me why I am blogging from Blogspot instead of hosting my own Wordpress. When was the last time that Blogspot was compromised?

Happy Birthday, Trinity!

2008-07-16T14:03:00.000+01:00

Trinity was the first test of technology for a nuclear weapon. It was conducted by the United States on July 16, 1945, at a location 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on what is now White Sands Missile Range, headquartered near Alamogordo. Trinity was a test of an implosion-design plutonium bomb. The Fat Man bomb, using the same conceptual design, was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, a few weeks later. The detonation was equivalent to the explosion of around 20 kilotons of TNT and is usually considered as the beginning of the Atomic Age.
[From Trinity (nuclear test) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

The threat of nuclear annihilation for us all became real 63 years ago. Since then, we have all been sons of bitches. Mutually Assured Destruction came and passed us. Now we are living in the age of the dumb bomb and the dirty bomb.

And social networks. Just think what a pain in the ass archeologists are going to have 1,000 years from now, trying to figure us out.

Portable paintball auto turret

2008-07-13T21:31:00.002+01:00

Alec Esotérica showed me this abomination:

There is a project page at http://www.paintballsentry.com/.

Yahoo rejects joint proposal from Microsoft, Icahn

2008-07-13T13:16:00.001+01:00

Sometimes you wish for problems to just go away, and it happens for a little bit. Then something like this comes up:

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Yahoo Inc. has rejected Microsoft's latest attempt to buy its online search operations in a "take or leave it" proposal that Yahoo said would have dismantled its Internet franchise.

As described by Yahoo in a statement released late Saturday, Microsoft packaged its latest offer with activist investor Carl Icahn, a billionaire who is seeking to overthrow Yahoo's board of directors in a shareholder meeting scheduled for August 1.
[From Yahoo rejects joint proposal from Microsoft, Icahn - CNN.com]

The whole Yahoo dilemma is turning into a death watch. A really slow one. It makes you wonder if Microsoft is even interested in all or part of Yahoo, or they simply want to create enough disruption to make the company collapse onto itself.

The sad thing is that the damage is already done. Right off the bat it cost Jerry Yang his job, since there is no way in hell that he is going to survive the board of directors meeting. Icahn is only counting his beans, so if what makes sense is to wrap it up and deliver it to Microsoft, that's exactly what he is going to do. If instead makes sense to slice and dice Yahoo, and give Microsoft the parts that they are willing to buy, then he'll do that.

Two outcomes: Microsoft eats Yahoo as a whole, or Microsoft gets the Yahoo units that it wants, and the rest gets spun off (thanks God Flickr doesn't suck!). Both paths mean no more Yahoo.

And if there is a third way out of this mess, nobody has bothered to mention it. I found three quarters that had rolled under my laptop long ago, but I don't think I want Yahoo even if they sell it to me for 75 cents.

Flickr? I'll give them 25 bucks for it.

A long trip

2008-07-12T14:40:00.001+01:00

I spent a few years as one of the thousands of drivers that risk their lives on a daily basis in the Washington, DC beltway. In my case, it also included the Dulles Toll Road, which means an extra dosage of danger. These are very wide, multilane roads, where almost everyone seems to be driving no less than 20 MPH over the speed limit. Risk driving slower than the pack and it feels like they are trying to run you out of the road.

If the weather cooperated, it was not bad. I had a 1993 Mazda Miata LE, basically a street legal club racer. As long as I stayed the hell away from semis and taller vehicles, most of the other cars seemed to see me fine. If they did not see me, I had air horns in the car, which made it sound like, well, a semi.

I also cheated. I was on flex time, so I would start work at the house, until around 9:00 AM. If I took the old Georgetown Pike, I could avoid the Dulles Toll Road completely, while still having a blast. By that time the Pike is clean, and the Miata loved that road. This left me just a few miles of beltway, then off as soon as I crossed the American Legion bridge for more back roads into Bethesda, MD.

In the afternoon I left at 3:00 PM unless we wanted to golf at River Road in Potomac, MD. If I could leave Bethesda at 3:00 PM it meant avoiding the traffic flow issues when River Road hits the Beltway. I could go home and work a few more hours, having spent less than two hours in the day actually driving.

Had I tried to drive at the normal hours, it would have meant up to an extra hour a day just driving.

When I switched jobs, my new office was across the street from a metro rail station. A month later I had given away my Miata to a charity, since I did not feel like paying insurance on a car that was being driven less than 50 miles per month (down from 300).

In this current job I telecommute 100%, I only go to one of our offices a few times per year. Yesterday I had to go to a different office, 50 miles away. 50 miles back when I was in Germany, or during my first few years in Virginia would have not made me blink. That was then. Now? It might as well be 300 miles.

I decided to try to use a GPS receiver, a TomTom One 130. It was the first time that I ever used GPS in a vehicle.

It was awesome. The device was able to predict my arrival within one minute, and I did not get lost until the last 40 yards of the trip because I did not believe that it was telling me to make the right turn that I needed (I was wrong of course). The only problem is that it took me through the beltway and I95, so it was basically white knuckles all the way.

For the return trip I forced it to ignore I95, the beltway and the three biggest roads close by. The end result? A slower route that was 10 miles short. For the first 15 minutes or so it sent me through back roads with really beautiful scenery. I was a bit concerned that it was driving me in circles, but it was obvious that I was making progress. It sent me through back roads almost all the way to Rockville, MD. From Rockville it told me to hit I-270 (AKA "The Parking Lot") which was empty at that time of the evening, then a few miles of beltway into Virginia.

This is an area that I know well, so I could have driven over I-270 and keep going straight until I hit the Potomac, which would have let me skip all of the beltway on the Maryland side until just before the American Legion bridge.

After I crossed the bridge I skipped the planned route, it wanted me to hit route 7, but I knew that the Georgetown Pike would be empty. The GPS receiver did not struggle recalculating, but it did keep trying to give me ways to re-join route 7.

Not too bad a trip, and even with the detour I again arrived within one minute of the original predicted ETA. After this I don't think I can drive a long distance without GPS. Even if I know where I am going to, it is just too nice to have an accurate ETA prediction based on your position and speed.

Blogo

2008-07-09T04:35:00.000+01:00

This is a test entry made with Blogo.

Things I like/dislike (most of these will be judged against Ecto, my golden standard for blogging):

The preview actually pulls my blogspot template, pretty sweet.
The way that the lists toggle works is a bit confusing.
I don't see an HTML view.
It uses less screen space, yet doesn't feel crowded.

I am going to quote this sentence.

I am really liking the live preview. It's a no-brainer.

I just noticed that it keeps track of multiple images embedded into a post. I have no idea how I am going to make it work with Flickr, but direct files seem to be working.

I just managed to crash it.

I have no idea how to paste html into an entry. I have an image tag generated by Picasa, which is also how it would work in Flickr and Youtube.

Bummer.

What?

2008-07-03T18:53:00.001+01:00

Thanks to Alex Esotérica for showing me this:

Twitter Bashing

2008-07-02T14:11:00.001+01:00

It seems this is the month for the haters to get out of the woods and crank up the bashing against Twitter. It is one hell of an idea, with a horrible execution. The powers-that-be have figured out that instead of letting it crash hard, they can turn off certain features, so the service stays up in a stripped-down fashion. I actually approve of this, but only if it is done by design.

Plus what the hell, it is a business decision, they are trying to trade outages for (user) outrage. People will complain no matter what you do.

There is also a lot of noise making the rounds about their choice for the technologies used to build and run Twitter. I know almost zero about Ruby on Rails, and I am a card-carrying Microsoft-dot-whore that also happens to be a fan of PHP and Perl, so I can't really tell what is going on there except that two of the most powerful websites that I know, Fark and Slashdot, never seem to go down and both are built on older but proven technologies.

It is obvious that they have growing pains to deal with, but I am hoping that this is not the engineers wearing blinders and insisting on a technology just because they want to do it and not because it is the right thing to use.

On top of this, there are also some challengers that are ready to take advantage of all of this turmoil. Just last night I was checking FriendFeed, and I am impressed enough that I set up an account.

I was using a similar service in the past, but it was pure aggregation, while FriendFeed allows me to post directly to it, plus pulling a lot of the stuff I do in other sites.

Kickass.

Am I going to dump Twitter? Nah. I'm a Twitter Shitter, I can't go back from that, and a few of my friends actually started using Twitter just because of that comic. I really like it because sometimes I want to post something here and all I have is a sentence or two, and I don't like to throw stuff in the blog unless it is semi-readable.