McLachlan's Rarities/Let us again praise great software

Today's celebrity software toast goes out to cdparanoia... cdparanoia, are you out there? I love you, man...

My wife's got this beautiful and weird Sarah McLachlan CD—Rarities, B-Sides and Other Stuff... it's a handful of oddities, including, of all things, dance remixes of some of her better-known stuff.

I suppose it might make some of you folk question my taste (always assuming I haven't given you enough to do so already), but I really like this disk. Some of it's mid-nineties dance/techno, and no, that's not normally my thing... but put McLachlan's melodies and voice over the sometimes endlessly busy club-friendly backings, and there's this marvellous alchemy that happens. And that's not all that's going on here, either; the version of Shelter on this disk as one example is strangely, beautifully spare—bits of solo violin, here and there—and there's a handful of odd covers—including a nicely spooky cover of XTC's 'Dear God'. All ver' cool.

But the disk, alas, is ailing. Pressed going on eight years ago now, and scuffed more than a little (yes, we keep our CDs in a box with our collection of bits of broken glass—is that a bad thing?), most CD players throw up their hands in exasperation with it now. Which made me very sad.

Enter cdparanoia. The lovely and talented Linux 'ware is very, very, very smart about talking to CD drives at a particularly intimate level—and utterly obsessive about retrying bits that go wonky again and again and again and then doing its best to figure out from what it gets on multiple passes to what was originally on the disk.

The result: set it loose on a track that you just cannot, on any known player, get to come out right, and it pulls that track out into a file (albeit very, very slowly for badly damaged stuff—the 'Into the fire' remix took just under two hours for a six minute track), play the file back on your player of choice, and that file sounds as pristine as the day the disk was pressed.

Truly a beautiful thing.

On his hostility to fascist software

So I needed a serial port monitor for some protocol work I was doing. Hadda be win32, figured I'd just go out, grab some shareware.

Didn't shop around much. Figure I'm not going to be using it long; anything will do. Downloaded the first package that looked reasonably competently done.

Then, in the course of installing it, I discovered that it came bundled with an additional install... for a 'family key logger'.

Yep. In other words, the kind of spyware worried parents might install to monitor their progeny's computer use.

I deleted it. All of it. The serial port monitor, the installer, the .zip it all came in. Then I hunted down the registry keys, and made them die.

I happen to be a parent. I happen to have a family. And I really object to this sort of thing. I really get annoyed that, more and more, that the kind of stuff you find a certain sort of mind attaching to the word 'family' is, well, kinda psycho.

Yep. The 'Family values' folk (ie. paranoid gay-hating sex-shop-vandalizin', desperate-pregnant-teenager-harassin' jerks). And now a 'family key logger' (ie. Mommy and Daddy's favourite spyware)... yeesh.

If and when I've got any reason to worry about my kids' internet use (they're a bit young yet, though the older one has been typing since she was two, so I guess it might not be much longer), I rather expect I'm going to talk to them about it... Can't imagine a lot of situations where installing a key logger is going to be worth the utterly brutal invasion of privacy it constitutes... I mean, sure, maybe if I've got a reason to imagine they've been brainwashed by an evil internet cult, and have become sleeper agents for world domination, and the only way I'm gonna catch them is by covertly monitoring their keystrokes...

No. Even then, I figure, I'll probably talk to them about it: 'So. This Doctor Evil... Does he make you feel good about yourself?... What's the attraction? Is it the futuristic costumes?...'

Freaks. I want no truck with fascist software... Granted, there's probably some hypocrisy in this, as a guy who's contributed to enough crypto stuff that somebody pretty scary, somewhere, is probably using it for nefarious purposes... But still, it's the principle of the thing. I don't actually know that. And I know anyone who makes a keystroke logger is making it for mostly pretty scary people.

Hot Jovians

On Nature this morning, and widely re-reported across the wires: two research groups have managed to use the Spitzer directly to detect infrared from hot Jovians orbiting other stars. See Light from alien planets confirmed, reporting on results from Deming et al at the Goddard, and from Charbonneau et al at the Harvard-Smithsonian.

The technique: look for the rise and fall in the total IR coming from the system, due to the planet's orbit taking it alternately in front of and behind the primary. Then subtract the constant starlight. What's left is what's coming from the planet.

It only works (as yet) for hot Jovians—big gas giants close to their primary—but it's still a good trick. And the article goes on to report that the same essential technique can be used for smaller, terrestrial worlds in larger orbits—given dedicated instruments that can take the time to collect data over the longer orbital period.

Reading this stuff, I'm always struck by the way electromagnetic radiation ties our universe together. Just think: the infrared from those bodies, it's been raining down on the top of our atmosphere for untold aeons, just waiting to be detected. And the odd photon (not many, it's true, given the fact that these bodies are none too hot, and given the way long wavelengths and our atmosphere interact) from a distant, Earthlike world has probably bumped into the top of your very head, now and then.

A proud citizen of Sodom and Gomorrah

Intriguing little bit in The Guardian today on, of all things, the relationship between soil chemistry and religion:

My untested hypothesis is as follows. The peculiarities of the Abrahamic religions - their astonishing success in colonising the world and their dangerous notion of progress (inherited by secular society) - result from a marriage between the universal God of the nomads and the conditions which permitted cities to develop. The dominant beliefs of the past 2,000 years are the result of an ancient migration from soils such as xerepts and xeralfs to soils such as fluvents and rendolls.

—George Monbiot, God and the Good Earth, in The Guardian

The essay focuses, of course, on a sort of syncretism—a fusion of urban and rural, pastoral and industrial (and, yes, xerept and fluvent)... but I note with interest the observation that the crazy ole' buggers in whose crania these various cultural viruses were first developed were all fire and brimstone haters of the city...

No surprise there. Not for this proud heathen urbanite.