point Index, January 2008



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PGTS Blog: January 2008

After a long, long silence, I have decided to resurrect my blog. One of the things that prompted me was the news that our new government is contemplating introducing mandatory Internet Filters. So I want to ask: What about those promises of accountability and fiscal responsibility?

Note: This blog is in reverse chronological order. So the most recent entries are at the top. The index, just below is in chronological order.

Blog Entries:

The Other Format War - ODF vs OOXML - Maybe It Is Serious After-all

Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2008 17:59:11 +1100

The question of OOXML has been around for quite a while now. When I first heard of it I assumed it was just another example of Microsoft trying to dilute and/or subvert an established Open Standard.

Microsoft has always had a culture of paranoia. This goes back to the clever and devious way that they wrested the PC market from IBM last century. Since then they have been wary of being duped in a similar manner. In this paranoid world view, the money being spent by Sun (and to a lesser extent IBM) on ODF is not done for altruistic reasons. It is nothing more than a tool employed by Microsoft's rivals to eat away at the rivers of gold that the MS Office Suite and Windows Operating Systems represent. Continuing in this paranoid view it easy for them to imagine that the Open Source community is being used to leverage the money contributed by their rivals. Perhaps this is why in a recent branch stacking fiasco in Portugal, IBM and Sun were excluded from meetings of the Technical Committee when it was time to vote on OOXML.

To some extent this may explain the support for OOXML. However, the story has stayed simmering away on the back-burner for over a year, now. And it seems that Microsoft are determined to plough a lot of money and effort into getting it working. As mentioned above this includes the time-honoured (at least in Australian political circles) technique of Branch Stacking in order to rig the vote in favour of OOXML. It also includes a considerable amount of effort in preparing documentation and publicity, as well as engineering Office 2007 to support the format. Most surprising of all is I see, from some mailing lists, that Microsoft have initiated dialogue with the Open Source Community. All of which makes me wonder if perhaps there is more to this than just an attempt to sabotage ODF (Open Document Format) with the usual dirty tricks of co-option and corruption.

Granted that when you have as much money as Microsoft, the expenditure may not be that considerable, relative to the overall budget. In which case, perhaps Microsoft was prepared to spend a little pocket money on reversing the Massachusetts decision. Nevertheless, the amount of effort makes me think that Microsoft really do want OOXML to be adopted as a standard.

The success of Firefox has guaranteed that for the time being browser technology will continue to be an Open Standard. In it's own small way Safari has contributed to this. On the other hand the slow steady growth of Open Office and the equally slow but steady growth of concern about proprietary standards and long term data integrity of data stored in proprietary standards may be about to deliver another success story.

Add to this the slow uptake of Vista by corporate and government purchasers and there may be hint of desperation, perhaps even a little bit of fear in Microsoft's response to ODF?

The OpenOffice website claims to have distributed a hundred million copies, as well as capturing between 5 and 20 percent of the market. The variation in these figures is so large because it is difficult to estimate. OpenOffice cite various surveys by third parties. On the other hand many Microsoft retailers claim a market share greater than ninety percent, with some claiming as much as ninety-seven percent.

It doesn't seem possible to get the true facts about sales figures for Office 2007. Any figures are somewhat muddied by the fact that new Vista systems often ship with Office 2007. If Office 2007 is such a raging success and MS Office really does have 97% of the market, why bother trying to get OOXML adopted as an ISO standard?

On the other hand, if MS Office 2007 has not been as successful as Microsoft had hoped, the standard double backwards compatible maneuver that has performed so well for them in the past, may have back-fired. This time they may be hoisted to their own petard.

Is it possible that Microsoft have their own data which indicates that OpenOffice is beginning to make some serious gains? In which case, if they factored in the concerns starting to percolate up from local government and other organisations about long term support for data in proprietary formats (particularly with regard to data archiving), Then they might have concluded that ODF will soon start to bite deeply into those precious rivers of gold.

At least that might explain why Microsoft continues to devote time and energy to the OOXML ISO project.

And so what is the difference between ODF and OOXML? Well for those of you who don't know already, ODF is an Open XML interchangeable format that evolved from the the one proposed early this century after Sun released the source code for their StarOffice suite. Interested parties were invited to comment and suggest modification to the specification during the development phase. ODF was tailored to suit the needs of the developers and the end users who responded. OOXML, on the other hand, was presented to the public by Microsoft at the end of 2006, mainly as a response to ODF. Interested (and disinterested) parties were invited to accept it. It was tailored to suit the strategic corporate goals of Microsoft, who did not ask for or accept input from other parties during the development phase. Various standards committees now have been pres-ganged into the drive to accept it (or reject it?).

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Internet Cops - Who Needs Smart Users When We Have Smart Software?

Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 20:13:24 +1100

An article in today's edition of The Age by Brad Howarth, quotes extensively from an interview with Russian entrepreneur, Eugene Kaspersky. Kaspersky is chief executive of Kaspersky Lab, an anti-virus and software security company which he helped setup in Moscow. The journalist uses material from the interview to illustrate the extent of the threat of malware. Kaspersky on the other hand uses the publicity to promote his firm and the services they offer. Kaspersky Lab is currently expanding into the global market. This article is another example of a convenient media symbiosis that so many Internet careers are built upon. Kaspersky, in effect says that maybe it is time we had some Internet Cops.

Russia has acquired a reputation for being the source of a lot of sophisticated cybercrime. The most notable example of large-scale computer crime this century, purportedly of Russian origin, was the DOS (Denial Of Service) attack on Estonia, which practically brought down the infrastructure of that country. These days, being Russian, with the proximity of all that Russian cybercrime, can be quite an advantage, if you are selling yourself as an Internet security specialist.

The DOS attack on Estonia is mentioned also in this article. It is, however, fairly old news. The incident occurred back in April 2006. It was a co-ordinated DOS attack using Microsoft Zombies. A more detailed and much scarier account of it can be found on the ABC website. Last year, on the 24th of June, the radio program, Background Briefing produced an excellent report on Internet security titled Your Money Dot Com. It was repeated in the ABC summer series. If you want to hear the full program you can still download the podcast. Even though the program is almost a year old, it is still a good summary of many of the issues tied up with Internet Security and guaranteed to scare the pants off the average user ... or it should.

One of my favourite quotes from the Background Briefing story was this from David Vaile (University of NSW):

There's a growing suspicion that in fact the security model for the Internet and for a lot of modern software may actually be broken in a fundamental way. Because in the beginning most of the people who used the Internet, who used the software, were reasonably technically literate. These days, you can't make any assumptions at all about the level of computer literacy, or their appreciation of all the sort of complicated risks and dangers and precautions that might actually work. So consequently when you get someone saying, 'Oh, the security certificate for this page that your batch is out of date. Click here, Yes or No', no-one's got a sensible answer to that. Yet the assumption that you can make it all work by asking those sort of questions still seems to be the basis on which the protection's sitting.

How could this happen? If the aviation industry had promoted airplanes that were user-friendly and so easy to fly that any idiot could fly them, without even the slightest inkling of the basics of aviation safety and rules, would this have been allowed? If the motor vehicle manufacturers promoted vehicles that were so easy to drive that anyone could use them even if they did not have a basic knowledge of road rules or vehicle safety and maintenance, would this catch on? More likely any manufacturer who tried such an approach would be put out of business by civil proceedings, class actions and regulations. So how have computer manufacturers managed to do this with a product that is at least as complex and technically difficult to master as a vehicle? i.e. Software that is so smart, that any dummy can use it. And users that boast of being computer illiterate Probably because unlike vehicles, no-one gets killed if a cybercriminal hijacks your workstation, or you crash on the virtual highway because you don't know the first thing about computer safety or the road rules.

But it seems as if gradually, ever so gradually, the problem of Internet Security is starting to paint on the radar screen. There is one valuable piece of information missing from many of the mainstream articles on this issue. And that is the fact that one can download effective anti-malware software. It's called the Ubuntu Download, and it's absolutely free. This won't be a total solution to all your Internet Security concerns but it will be a big step in the right direction.

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Fresh Pages For GoogleBot

Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2008 22:33:19 +1100

After I started posting my blog, earlier this month. I went to check on my rating in Google. I was disappointed to discover that Google had not even crawled my site. As I've always suspected, Google has some software that detects how often pages change. My site has lain dormant for so long that Google now considers that most of the pages on my site are static. Which is true. Or so it has been for the last two and a half years.

The one exception was the user agents page, which is poorly maintained but constantly changing. I do intend to fix it up this year. In the meantime, in order to entice the GoogleBot to my blog, I put a link to it on the Web Agents pages.

I'm happy to report that Google has now rediscovered my site and is now starting to index the new pages that I put up.

I have also included a new article for January, explaining why I changed ISPs. The main reason was the help desk support. Or more precisely the complete lack of help desk support. I'm sure everyone has a hideous anecdote about ISPs. But it seems that my previous ISP, TPG is making a strong bid at wresting the worst-ISP-downunder crown from BigPond.

Why would they bother? Well, it's all about profits and how to maximise them.

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Who Needs a Policy? - The Great Firewall of Oz (2)

Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2008 18:59:04 +1100

A little background research has revealed that Internet Filtering has been official Labor Policy for some time. It seems that the devil was in the policy details.

On the 22nd of June, 2006, when the government of the day unveiled their Free Internet Filtering Software for families, Kim Beazley, opposition leader at the time, on the next day in parliament, criticised the proposal for going soft on porn. Big Kim stated that Labor would require ISPs to install Internet Filters to protect our kiddies and called on the government to do the same. The response from the Prime Minster was that Labor's policy would impose "unreasonable restrictions and cost burdens". He was quite scathing about the idea of mandatory Internet Filters. Earlier that year (in March, 2006), Government Senator Coonan (then Minister for C&IT) had also ridiculed Labor's policy, stating, amongst other things, that:

According to research conducted by the Government's Internet safety organisation, NetAlert, the kind of server-based filtering proposed by Labor has been found to have a major adverse impact on network performance.

And I concur -- I might remind you dear reader, that when I made my first blog entry on this topic, I proffered a similar opinion! Generally speaking the Howard government managed to get it wrong when it came to IT and communications policy. However on that one occasion, Senator Coonan was unusually well-informed and persuasive.

Much later, caught up in the giddy exhilaration of the great going out of business sale election campaign, Prime Minister Howard and Senator Coonan announced another big spending program for Internet Safety. On the 11th of August, 2007, in what amounted to a complete back-flip, Prime Minster Howard announced a new policy which his minister, Senator Coonan, enthusiastically endorsed. It was, in fact, the very same policy that she had so comprehensively bagged, the previous year. And true professional that she is, she did it without even the slightest hint of embarrassment . For her boss JW Howard, who also managed to keep a perfectly straight face, it was another case of Me-To politics.

And so both major parties went to the polls, with the same badly flawed policy on Internet Filters.

The idea of Internet Filters has not been a huge success. The most well-known example is the Chinese "Golden Shield Project", which many netizens refer to, disparagingly, as The Great Firewall of China. This is an obvious reference to the fact that this latter day electronic wall is similar to the ancient earth and stone Great Wall of China, which was also large, expensive, built to impress, difficult to maintain and ineffective at keeping out the barbarians.

It's a pity you didn't read their policies a bit more carefully. If you had you might have voted for the Greens.

Related Entry Here.

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Format War Endgame - Is It All Over For HD-DVD?

Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:49:00 +1100

Since the story of the Warner Bros. Blu-ray decision, there has been a lot of net chatter about "endgames" and the "demise of HD-DVD". It is probably a bit too soon to declare the war over. However HD-DVD may be in serious trouble. There are quite a few expensive Toshiba laptops (e.g. the Qosmio G series) that may come down in price.

Meanwhile it seems that LG have indeed brought out a DVD player which plays both formats. Is it too late? Quite a few pundits seem to think so.

And as the media conglomerates seem to be about to settle the squabble about how to distribute the profits from HD movies, how to lock up the content with the right sort of DRM, and possibly put an end to the format war, there is an ongoing dispute about the writers' share. Of course we all know that the pen is supposed to be mightier than the sword. But will it prove to be mighty enough to defeat the media oligopolies? Last year, the Writers' Guild started their campaign, including various stunts like mailing pencils to producers and mock exorcisms (with Warner Bros as the Target).

It is possible that the Golden Globe Awards and Oscars ceremonies may be cancelled. It appears that without someone to write the patter, acceptance speeches etc, the celebrities would not be very impressive. Some of them (celebrities) may also be reluctant to cross the picket lines. This would mean that the ceremonies, which at the best of times are as dull as ditch-water, might be about as exciting as watching a fresh coat of paint dry on a humid day.

It seems that the corporations cry foul when pirates "steal" the Intellectual property, which they claim to own. They cry loud and long about the theft of this content. And they remind the public of the writers, actors etc, whose property is being stolen. It comes as no surprise to discover that a lot of writing staff are hired on contract. And when there are further sales (e.g. DVD sales), many of them miss out altogether. So just whose Intellectual Property is it? And who are those naughty pirates actually stealing from?

And there is always the danger that the goose that lays the golden egg might get slaughtered in the process ... It looks like 2008 is going to be an interesting year for the entertainment media.

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Format War Heats Up - The Blu-ray Empire Strikes Back

Date: Sat, 05 Jan 2008 15:13:04 +1100

Just now on ABC RN, I heard a news report that Warner Bros have announced that they will be releasing their movies exclusively in the Blu-ray format. Logging in to my workstation, I can see that Google confirms this. The news is on the Reuters feed and there is an article titled "Warner Backs Blu-ray, Tilting DVD Battle", in the New York Times, dated January 5th, 2008.

For those of us observing the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD conflict, this is an interesting development. The Format War, after a few initial skirmishes, akin to a phony war is now an intense battle, that may decide the outcome. Of course, with technology as it is today, it seems strange to me that no one has created a player capable of reading both formats. But in this case, the protagonists seem to prefer a battle to the death rather than a diplomatic truce.

In August 2007, the HD-DVD team triumphantly announced that they had exclusively signed Paramount and Dreamworks. Since Dreamworks is one of the most popular studios in the world and was about to bring out the hits Shrek The Third and Transformers (exclusively in the HD-DVD format) this was deemed to be a significant development. Although it was probably not as significant as the HD-DVD team would have had us believe, since the deal runs out in 2009, and consumers who remember the last format war are wary enough to keep their options open.

But it looks as though the Blu-ray team have hit back. Warner Brothers announcement means that most of the major media consortiums have signed up with Blu-ray. We need to get some more detailed analysis of the agreement. But if it really is an exclusive deal this could be an important turning point.

The Blu-ray team is led by Japanese behemoth Sony, by now a seasoned and battle-hardened format warrior veteran, who lost the most famous (arguably the definitive) format war of all time, last century (VHS vs Beta). Did they learn their lessons then? Or are they destined to suffer another defeat? In some ways the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD war has echos of that old battle. Like Beta, Blu-ray is reputedly a superior format. Sony made the mistake then of promoting the superior quality of their format, but the consumers were more interested in total playback time and price. Nowadays, in this latest foray into format warfare, they have been more circumspect. They have not been overly concerned with rushing to market and have been careful to keep the price of their products down. The recent downgrading of the PlayStation 3, in order to make the price more competitive was an important tactical response in the format war as well as an attempt to match the price of the Xbox 360. The PlayStation 3 is now an attractively priced Blu-ray player, considering that it is also a powerful gaming platform. There are also rumours of lower priced Blu-ray players in the pipeline.

On the HD-DVD team is Japanese giant Toshiba in an unlikely alliance with the Evil Empire, Microsoft. The Redmond team, in what could best be described as a courageous decision (for a software company) threw their substantial bulk behind the HD-DVD format and have used their Xbox platform to promote it. Microsoft have shown their preference for zero sum games in the past. One rather suspicious Hollywood film director, Michael Bay, accused Microsoft of deliberately fomenting the format war, for sinister reasons of their own. In this regard Bay might have been paranoid. It is far more likely that Microsoft just got it wrong. Their target was much more likely to have been Sony. If the deal with Warner Bros. is indeed a death-blow for HD DVD, there will soon be an announcement of a Blu-ray accessory for the Xbox. What is interesting, however, is Bay's assertion that Microsoft actually paid many of millions of dollars to encourage studios to sign up to HD DVD on an exclusive basis. This is more like the usual monopolistic behaviour that we have come to expect from Microsoft. Although there were probably secret deals on the both sides. The grinding relentless drive to sign up studios for exclusive support was an attempt to cutoff the rival's oxygen supply and it was battle of attrition that in a virtual (and non-lethal) manner was just as ruthless as the "Battle of Britain", last century.

But who is playing the role of Luftwaffe and who is the RAF?

Yes it's Godzilla vs King Kong. But which format will we be viewing it on?

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You Just Can't Keep a Bad Idea Down - The Great Firewall of Oz (1)

Date: Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:24:31 +1100
But the cat came back the very next day,
The cat came back, we thought he was a goner,
But the cat came back.
No, he wouldn't stay away ...

-- Trad Folk Ballad

I recall the old Irish drinking song, The Cat Came Back which was played often in the sixties on the airwaves in Darwin, where I grew up. The song, sung by an American folk singer with a Southern accent, describes the (rather ghoulish) extremes that a farmer resorts to in order to rid himself of an old yellow tom cat. As each verse describes a more extreme cat extermination technique, the listener should suppose, "Well that's the end of that old cat -- for sure!" But the chorus just keeps repeating ... about how the cat keeps on coming back. He always comes back! It seems that there are some bad ideas that are so bad you just can't keep 'em down either. Like farmer Johnson's old yellow cat they just keep on coming back. Ideas like turning all of Australia's rivers back inland, in order to solve our water crisis (if you don't understand thermodynamics). Or invading Russia (if you are Napoleon or Hitler). Or invading Iraq (if you are a neo-con). Or forcing ISPs to censor our Internet content so that we don't have pornography (if you are an unimaginative Australian minister for communications).

During the election campaign our previous prime minister promised an additional 70 megabucks to clean up the Internet. At the time he was wildly flinging money around like a drunken sailor. He was going to clean up the Internet, fix up the hospitals, solve the water resources problem, investigate petrol prices and still give us tax-cuts! The money was flowing free and fast. Roll up folks! Everything must go! It was a genuine going out of business sale! Those of us with longer memories, recalled that The Libs had already tried to introduce a Net Filter program (that also cost several megabucks). And it was truly underwhelming even by the amazingly low standards the Howard drongos had already set in IT and communications.

And even though it sounded like a lot of money. It was a paltry amount, never intended to be more than window-dressing. An effective ban on pornography (i.e. one that actually works) would be orders of magnitude more expensive. And a considerable amount of the cost would be borne by the private sector, who would (sic) pass it on to their customers. It would also have a deleterious effect on the speed of the Internet connection (as if we needed to slow it down any more?). The problem is that the Internet is decentralised and an attempt to impose control from on high is cumbersome and inefficient. And even when a central governing body is prepared to throw serious money at the attempt (e.g. the Great Firewall of China), it is destined to fail.

The best defence against offensive and undesirable content on the Internet is a large pool of well-educated and empowered users. Such users can actively block such content. However, people who don't understand computers or the Internet, people who are still living in the previous century, cannot imagine this. They can only envisage a broadcasting paradigm. They can only imagine a model where consumers sit mutely in front of their computers and passively absorb the content broadcast from remote central hubs. During the years of the Howard government we have had ministers in the important folio of IT and communication who were only capable of thinking in this paradigm from ye olde twentieth century. They were yesterday's men (and women).

It seemed as though the most important qualification for being in charge of IT and communications was a deep, undisturbed but profound ignorance of the technology and a determination to do as little as possible while giving the impression of doing something.

And so we went to the polls, and in the final wash up, John Weasel Howard, the great Wedgemeister of Oz, although he had ably demonstrated that he was competent at fooling all of the people some of the time, and truly excelled at fooling some of the people all the time, was unable to fool all the people all the time. As we now know, voters rightly dismissed the Howardites for their lack of vision. Although this issue of Internet filters did not figure in the election, a well informed voter could ask this: If a government really did have gigabucks to spend on Internet filters, why not spend it on education, training and improving our bandwidth? In these areas, the investment would return much better dividends! Not only would it yield sustainable, self-regulated protection of kiddies, it would also provide a better educated workforce and a more robust economy.

And so now we meet the new boss ... Same as the old boss, it would seem ... Our new Minister for Telecommunications has announced plans to introduce mandatory Internet filters, to protect our children. It seems that this idea, has more lives than a cat. Even Farmer Johnson's old yellow cat. Rather than a cat, on closer examination this little brainstorm resembles something the cat dragged in. Now, I do have a few little questions ...

Over the next few months, I will keep track of these questions, and look for answers.

Umm Minister, If you ever actually used a computer to search for information ... and you happened across my humble little website, can I say that you have made a very courageous decision. Can I also point out that the distribution, downloading, uploading, dissemination or manufacture of Child Pornography is already a criminal offence in this country. Check with our new Attourney General, and I am sure that he will back me up on this one. It is definitely against the law ... if you're not sure how to spell that word (law), check with your colleague, Mr Keating, one of our legendary former prime ministers ...

Oh and if this little scheme was actually your boss' idea, can I suggest that he should have started with something a bit easier ... like turning the rivers back inland ... or invading Russia?

Oh yeah, and ... I guess this means that the honeymoon is over? Right?

Related Entry Here.

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The Deadly Effect of Sarcasm - According to Conservapedia

Date: Tue, 02 Jan 2008 23:03:00 +1100

After a long silence I have made a new year's resolution, to get my blog back on the road. So here is the first entry.

Although written communication is probably one of the most significant human inventions ever, it does not have the advantage of conveying subtle emotional nuances as quickly and accurately as conversation. This means that writers have to be cautious when employing sarcasm. I sometimes labour the point by using sarcasm tags. For example I might write about the <sarcasm>Nice</sarcasm> Mr. Howard when referring to our former prime minister. So in case my reader has had a total sarcasm-bypass and doesn't realise that I am actually employing the lowest form of wit when I refer to that Nice Mr Howard, I can use the sarcasm tags and thus avoid the tedious explanations that must ensue when such ironically challenged individuals then go to great lengths to point out out that: (1) Purging the Liberal Party of all liberals, (2) Persistently, consistently and habitually lying, (3) passing off the regressive, gormless, cobbled-together GST legislation as "Tax Reform", (4) Imprisoning refugees and their children in detention camps, (5) Speeding the redistribution of wealth to the extremely wealthy, (6) Reviving and nurturing the very worst atavistic Australian elements of racism and intolerance, (7) Denying, and than later just obstructing any consensus on climate change, (8) Supporting the Bush regime in the invasion of Iraq, (9) Generally supporting the Bush regime in the most obsequious and embarrassing manner imaginable (10) Abandoning his colleagues and destroying his own party rather than let Costello have a chance at leadership ... were none of them very nice, although that last one did have a certain piquant poetic justice that can be enjoyed along with a chilled glass of schadenfreude.

A conversation, on the other hand, is so much quicker, and easier. The listener can, within three-tenths of a second, detect that I add too much emphasis to the word "nice". He or she can hear the pitch inflection and observe that I roll my eyes a little and thus deduce that I am employing sarcasm. All of this and more passed through my mind as I encountered an intriguing little site on the web the other day.

I was searching for a list of Manufacturer IDs. These are are the one byte (sometimes three byte) binary numbers that are inserted into Universal Real Time communications for sequencer specific meta events as part of the MIDI protocol. Unfortunately, because I had made the mistake of starting with a search phrase that was too specific, I was having a hard time finding them.

I added to my phrase, and changed it about. It became increasingly deformed, obtuse and long-winded. Still no success. In desperation I added the word "Wikipedia" to the phrase. Sometimes this can bring up a well written and accurate article on the topic in question. I have forgotten exactly what sorry state my mutated search phrase was in by this stage, but somehow I got a page about Wikipedia written by someone on behalf of a site called "Conservapedia". This was a rather rabid rant about Wikipedia. Basically it asserted that Wikipedia was biased. And worst of all it was liberal bias.

Now, for those of us who use the Oxford Dictionary as our primary reference for the English language, such loathing of liberal bias may seem odd. Or at least it would have several years ago. According to that authoritative dictionary the word liberal is an adjective meaning willing to respect and accept behaviour or opinions different from one's own. However in the land of the free and the home of the brave, they do not defer to the Oxford Dictionary. For many of our less well educated cousins across the Pacific, the word liberal is now a noun meaning a godless pervert who wants to take away our guns and murder our unborn children. And when used as an adjective it means pertaining to those attributes that would aid and/or abet the commission of such unspeakable crimes. This is what is euphemistically known as the Conservative definition, bearing in mind that the word Conservative seems to have taken on its' own meaning as well. The folks that created Conservapedia are decidedly neither liberal in the Oxford sense nor the (US) Conservative sense of the word. They are Conservative and they are not Happy! And they are in no mood to accept behaviour or opinions different from their own. They claim to be a Trustworthy Encyclopedia. One that counters the liberal bias so often found in Wikipedia. And did I mention people who might have had a sarcasm bypass? Oh yes, I did, didn't I? (BTW: Whatever happened to Trustworthy Computing?)

My curiosity aroused, I searched their site for meta events. After all, the manufacturer IDs that I was searching for were contained in MIDI meta events. Not that I was expecting to find anything. I was just curious. And the Conservapedia search engine returned results! Not quite the results I was looking for ... I got back several articles about abortion and evolution. A little more investigation revealed that whatever I typed into the Conservapedia search engine has a high probability of returning an article on abortion or evolution. Which is not to say that there are no other entries in Conservapedia. There are several, but most of them are, what they refer to as, concise. Conservapedia have their own definition of concise as they do for so many common English words and phrases. In their own terms concise means an entry that is often limited to one or two sentences, and is non-liberal. For example searching for "Paris Hilton", one of the more popular search phrases on the Internet, brings up this definition:

Paris Hilton (born February 17, 1981), is an American socialite noted for appearing on the reality show, The surreal life as well as other less savory endeavors. Her coverage in regular media and in the tabloids is disproportional to any accomplishments she has had, leading her to be one of those people who is famous for being famous.

Hmm ... It may not be a bad thing if all Internet sources had a similarly pithy entry about Ms Hilton. This is surely one of the most concise entries, I have every seen regarding Paris. Sadly, many children with an Internet connection would have a far more detailed knowledge of her and her activities, and trying to pretend otherwise won't make it so.

But there is no such hint of brevity (conciseness?) when it comes to their favourite topics of evolution and abortion. It seems that Conservapedia contains dozens, possibly hundreds of articles on these two topics. And although I only glanced at two of them, I am going to go out on a limb here, and suggest, without doing any further research, that most of these articles will boldly assert that evolution is only a theory, that is self-contradictory and that there is a large body of <sarcasm>scientific</sarcasm> evidence that proves that it (evolution) is a falsehood, and that furthermore, God created the world and all the creatures a few thousand years ago just as it says in the Old Testament. The articles on abortion will probably conclude that this procedure is immoral and dangerous, exposing the unfortunate and misguided woman to all manner of health risks like cancer, heart disease, mental-illness, ulcers, liver disease and drug-addiction and is furthermore only performed by evil atheistic medical practitioners who are, in all likelihood, liberals.

Although there is lots of material on the Conservapedia about why it is immoral and dangerous for women to seek to "terminate" a pregnancy, there does not seem to be any material explaining how they may have become pregnant. It seems that all work on "human reproduction", is a work in progress. Although there are some concise entries on human anatomy and physiology, there is no mention at all of organs that might be involved in getting a woman into the afore mentioned state. Apparently these pages are still under construction. But someday I am sure they might get around to it. It will probably be the same day that I reformat all the machines on my network and install Microsoft software.

Also online, there are a several detractors to Conservapedia. Not surprisingly, Conservapedia has many articles, of a rather strident nature, on the topic of homosexuality. And this has earned them the ire of the American homosexual community.

Now several people who are smart enough to realise that the earth is a tad older than the six thousand years than the pedagogic creationist dodos claim it is, have also taken a dim view of Conservapedia. Some of them have taken a few sarcastic potshots of their own. For instance, here are a few snide remarks from Eric D. Snider, which from the sound of it, is probably a nom de plume, in which he has a quite hilarious screen shot of Jesus Christ riding a dinosaur! This was captured from an earlier article on Conservapedia! Also a bunch of anti-Conservapedia folks, quite a few of them former Conservapeians themselves, have started their own site here. And Jon Swift is keen to demonstrate that he has opted out of the sarcasm-bypass operation necessary to gain admission to the fraternity of American Conservatives. He may even have had a sarcasm-enhancement procedure. Although truth be known, Jon hardly needs a link from my humble little, poorly maintained site. He rates as well in Google as Conservapedia does, and along with the other detractors has probably done a lot to contribute to Conserviapedia's overall ratings -- although the people going there are not going for the reasons that owners of the site might have hoped they would.

And then while wondering generally about the problem of America. For instance, what has happened to those brave can-do optimistic Yankees, who rebuilt the world from the wreckage of world war two, put a man on the moon and told us it was ok to be liberal in the Oxford sense? It seems that sarcasm is not entirely defunct in the good ol' USA. The folks at the Onion put an entirely different slant on evolution. And in this article, they give us some news about the war in Iraq, which is very similar to content on Fox News, but which comes from an entirely different perspective. Also the guys at Unencyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, haven't forgotten about satire. I guess sarcasm is all they have left now.

All of which led me to look up the word sarcasm on Conservapedia. I found this intriguing definition:

Sarcasm is a sharp and often satirical or ironic attack designed to cause harm, either physical, mental or social, and intended to insult or wound. It is often a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language and is usually directed against an individual. [1]

There is a thin dividing line between sarcasm and irony.

Recently, scientists have located parts of the brain used to comprehend sarcasm [2]. The research demonstrates that some people have difficulty distinguishing between normal speech and sarcasm.[3]

The references 2 and 3 both refer to the same source, a lightweight news item on BBC News, which states that damage to the pre-frontal lobes can impair the ability to comprehend sarcasm. Of course damage to these vital areas impairs ability to comprehend anything, but the little odd-spot article did not have enough paragraphs in it to mention this fact. Nevertheless I was impressed to discover that sarcasm could physically wound one's opponent. It must be that thin dividing line that makes it really, really sharp, and dangerous, like a razor or something? Gosh! Maybe, I should get a licence to practice the lethal martial art of sarcasm? I never realised I could injure, kill, slash and wound people with sarcasm. I always thought that sarcasm was used to mock one's opponent, but then again, I do stick with those crusty old Oxford Dictionary definitions, pedantic old citizen of Her Majesty's Commonwealth that I am.

Come to think of it, I do recall that Monty Python alerted us to the deployment of sarcasm by The Infamous Piranha Brothers . And some of the more caring, sensitive readers might find my comments about Conservapedia a trifle cruel. I would hasten to assure them that I am not entirely so, and beg them to reconsider me, like Dinsdale Piranha, as cruel, but fair.

Although, I must admit, it is important to get a diversity of opinion. And <sarcasm>with competition of this quality, Wikipedia will surely have to lift their game!</sarcasm>. Oh! Did I mention one of the properties of HTML? Browsers are supposed to ignore tags that they do not recognise. This is great! If you you have a non-sarcastic browser the sarcasm tags are invisible! Oh goody!

BTW: I found the manufacturer IDs. Really, all I had to do was search for "manufacturer ID MIDI". Maybe a case of too much knowledge? Here is a summary of them ... and yes, despite the keywords in this blog entry, it is a C include file. I gave up on perl because I have to admit that C is idiomatic for MIDI. To use this code file you would of course include it in your C program, and when a manufacturer ID is encountered in a Real-Time sequencer meta event, the text representation could be returned with the following code:

/* assuming the following pointers */
char *ptr;
char *long_name;

/* when ptr points to the manufacturer ID, use this code */
if ( *ptr ){
        long_name = manufacturer_descr(*ptr);
} else {
        long_name = manufacturer_descr( (unsigned char)ptr[1] * 256 + (unsigned char)ptr[2]);
}

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