September 12, 2009

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Security vs. Utility

September 12, 2009 in problems, Technology | 5 comments

Starting a few upgrades back, Firefox started showing this…

firefox_feature

…  when you clicked on that little icon at the left end of the location bar. (What’s the name for that?) Now, with version 3.5.3 (and perhaps earlier versions — the last one I used before this was 3.0.9), it still shows that same pop-down thing, but no longer selects the location text to the right. That’s not a problem, because you can still select all the location text with one click anywhere within that text. I only discovered that feature by experimenting around. Searching the Mozilla site was useless. The feature also violates normal expectations of what happens when you click once (place cursor), twice (select word), or three times (select all) on text, but I don’t mind. A little conditionality doesn’t hurt, and it’s good to be able to select a whole URI easily.

What I don’t get is why it’s worth mentioning that a site “does not supply identity information” and that the site “is not encrypted” when these two conditions prevail for approximatly every site on the Web, including Firefox’s own, which is the case I used above to demonstrate the feature. Yes, I understand why the pop-down is there, but I’d rather return to having a click on the icon select all the text to the right. Is there a way to go back to that?

Meanwhile what “identity information” are they talking about? Mine? Mozilla’s? If I click on “More Information…” a Page Info window opens, telling me next to “Owner” that “This web site does not supply ownership information.” Of whom? Of what? To whom? Not clear.

Hey, I’ll cop to being a second-rate geek (which is true); but it’s a safe bet that if I don’t know what this is about, regular old Web surfers don’t know, either.

So, as long as we’re being unclear, it’s better (at least for me) to go back a few steps toward something that’s both plain and useful. Bury this pop-down’s functionality in the Tools menu or something.

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Good broadcasting sports

September 12, 2009 in Business, Life, radio, Sports | 2 comments

I like sports, and I enjoy sports talk radio. That’s one reason I have five car radio buttons set on stations carrying games or sports talk: four on AM (WRKO/680, WEEI/850, WAMG/890, WZZN/1510) and one on FM (WBZ-FM/98.5). The other is that sports talk is about 50% advertising, so I like to punch around.

But I wasn’t surprised to read ESPN Radio’s Boston affiliate set to sign off, by Chad Finn in the Boston Globe. It begins, “ESPN Radio’s Boston affiliate, WAMG-AM 890, will go off the air Monday after four years plagued by a weak signal and limited local programming.” In fact, “weak” doesn’t cover it. By day WAMG’s 25,000-watt signal covers the Boston metro pretty well. But at night the station drops to 6,000 watts and a pattern that excludes the whole north side of the metro. The map at that last link doesn’t show how much like a headlight that pattern really is.

Yet that’s not the worst of it. WAMG was able to “drop in” to the market from nowhere in 2005, thanks to a change in FCC rules that protected what were once called (literally) “clear channel” stations. Because signals on the AM band bounce off the ionosphere at night, powerful ones can be heard up to thousands of miles away. Since there were then only 106 channels (every 10KHz from 540 to 1600KHz), a handful were granted “clear channel” status, making them the only stations on those channels at night. Thanks to this rule, I could hear KFI/640 from Los Angeles in New Jersey and WBZ/1030 from Boston in Palo Alto. Here’s the whole list of “clears” as they stood when their status still held.

Since long-distance listening had mostly gone away by the late 1970s, the FCC in 1980 reduced protection for the old “clears” to 750 miles from their transmitters. WLS/890 in Chicago was one of those clears. So you might say that WAMG appeared through a new loophole. Problem was, WLS had not gone away. It often still reached Boston quite well at night, pounding WAMG’s already-weak signal.

This last week I was down in the South portion of Cape Cod, where WAMG puts no signal at all. As a result I could hear WLS quite well on a portable radio, along with other Chicago giants.

The Globe story suggests that WAMG will probably go dark. Given the coverage realities, that might not be the worst thing.

A thought. WAMG is licensed to Dedham, not Boston. It might not be the worst thing for Clear Channel (the name of the company that owns WAMG and a zillion other stations) to sell the licesnse to somebody in the Dedham community, who could cut the power back (to save electricity) and just try to serve the local community itself. Provided, of course, that local radio of the AM sort (which has changed little since the 1920s) still makes sense.

[Later...] Following up on 10 October 2009, WAMG has been off the air for several weeks.

Primary needs for political tools

September 12, 2009 in Events, Fun, Future, Ideas, Politics, VRM | 3 comments

For years I’ve been watching my old pal Britt Blaser work to improve the means by which citizens manage their elected politicians, and otherwise improve governance in our democracy.

Now comes Diane Francis, veteran columnist for the National Post in Canada (but yes, she’s an American), summarizing the good that should come from Britt’s latest: iVote4U, and its trial run toward the elections in New York coming up in just a few days. New York’s Digitized Dems Can Take Over City Council Sept. 15, says the headline. In addition to the Drupal sites of the last two links, there is a Facebook app as well.

The idea, sez Britt, is “to give voters a way to manage their politicians as easily as they manage their iTunes”. If you’re a New Yorker who plans to vote next week, give it a whirl. If enough of you do, you might begin to see what we call Government Relationship Management (or GRM) at work.

iVote4U pioneers as a fourth party service.Follow that link for more on what I mean by that; or check out Joe Andrieu’s series on user driven services. If we want government that is truly of, by and for the people, we need tools that give meaning to those prepositions. Especially the first two. Britt has dedicated his life to providing those tools. Give them a try.

You don’t need to be a Democrat, by the way. These tools should work equally well for voters of all political bendings.

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