Conspiracies: November 2005 Archives

I spent a few hours last night trying to understand the meaning of ISBN. It was a strange and fascinating journey that left me somewhat enlightened although mostly just even more confused. Just further proof, I guess, that life is a little bit messier than it should be.

Most books are currently identified by a 10 digit code known as the Internation Standard Book Number, or ISBN. This 10 digit code actually consists of 9 digits of information and 1 check digit to verify that the number was entered without errors. The 9 digits of information can themselves be broken down into three groups: a region code, a publisher code, and an item code. The length of each part is variable. Some regions and publishers are given larger ranges than others An international standards organization and national agents are responsible for assigning ranges to publishers. The individual publishers can then assign codes within their block to books that they publish. There are rules about what needs a code and how much a book can change before it must get a new code. Sometimes movies are assigned ISBNs under the theory, I suppose, that they are just an alternative presentation of a book.

While the book industry was developing its system, retail marketers had adopted the UPC code to identify products for sale. There are several different forms of UPC code, but the most widely known is the 12 digit UPC A code. Like the ISBN, the UPC code can be broken down into 11 information digits and 1 check digit. The data contains region, manufacturer, and item regions. Sometimes the code is extended with an additional 5 digit code. Are UPC codes unique? Well, not necessarily. Looking through my stack of comic books I can see that the issue number for the series appears in extended code (a code of 12511, for example, would indicate issue 125). However, while some series had different 12 digit codes, some did not.

To facilitate the sale of books in retail outlets like grocery stores or drug stores, mass market paperbacks will also be identified by a UPC code. Converting from a UPC code back into an ISBN really doesn't seem practical. Glancing at one of my mass market paperbacks, it looks like the five digit extended code contains the last half of the ISBN code. A lookup might be used to convert the UPC manufacturer code into the publisher code and reassemble the ISBN, but I've found other books that don't have the extended code.

While the UPC code became popular in the US, another code was being developed internationally. The creator of the UPC code also worked on the EAN, or European Article Number, a 13 digit code that can be used throughout the world. It too works very much like the ISBN and UPC code. In fact, by simply adding a 0 to the start of a 12 digit UPC code, you get a valid 13 digit EAN. EAN codes starting with different numbers identify products from different countries. One particularly interesting country is "Bookland". Bookland is the magical country where all books come from. The Bookland EAN is simply made of the country code "978", the first 9 digits of the book's ISBN, and a new check digit calculated according to the EAN rules. The EAN codes also can have a 5 digit supplement. For books, this often represents the suggested list price. A code of 90000 is a null code, meaning no price is given. However a code of 50699 would led the reader know that the book had a retail price of $6.99 (the initial 5 indicates a currency in dollars). Of course, this scheme breaks down for books over $100 and so something else will no doubt be needed as inflation raises prices over the years.

The 10 digit ISBN code can be a bit restrictive and the numbering system is coming under a bit of pressure. To help solve this, we are currently in the beginning of a transition to 13 digit ISBN codes. The new ISBN codes will actually be EAN codes. Fortunately, the transition should be relatively straightforward. All currently existing 10 digit ISBNs are simply converted into the 13 digit EAN Bookland code. Once the transition is complete--scheduled for 2007--new books may be assigned code in the 979 range and conversion back to 10 digit ISBN codes will no longer be possible.

And this isn't even the end of things. The 13 digit EAN code is starting to reach some of its limitations and there is already talk of extending it into a 14 digit code. At some point, shouldn't someone realize that adding one digit at a time isn't a scalable solution? When will we be ready to just bite the bullet and adopt a full 128 bit GUID to identify products....

I also spent some time reading about bar codes are constructed to represent the UPC/EAN codes in a machine readable format. But that is an entirely different story.

It has become fashionable among the digerati to lament the crushing burdens of life in the information age. For them, a day is simply not complete without sampling the hundreds of RSS feeds that litter their aggregators. It is difficult to be so connected. It is hard to keep the flood of information in check.

IHowever, I have recently been suffering from a malady that is completely opposite. Rather than being overwhelmed by the unstoppable sea if information, I find myself struggling to find something, anything, to hold my attention. My subscriptions page on 43 People collects the latest happenings from my friends and even the occassional distant acquaintance. I obsessively return. Has anything changed? Is there something new? Why hasn't anyone posted? There is, of course, a delay as content works its way through the system of feed readers and aggregators. Perhaps someone has posted something and it just hasn't shown up yet. And so I navigate to my Flickr contact's page, to my friends' blog pages, sometimes I even check my own blog in the desperate and completely irrational hope that I might have posted something and simply forgotten about it. And then I repeat the process again five minutes later.

I can hardly hold myself up as an example. The fierce rate of posts when I resumed blogging earlier this year has fallen off dramatically. And the occassional entries that I do write are a little to nonsensical to be of interest to any sane person. My most interesting posts recently were the series of pictures of the iPod that I had smashed to bits. WHile that might, in some strange analysis, be imagined to represent a commentary of the modern consumerist lifestyle, it is hardly the cutting edge, insightful content that I imagined I this blog would feature.

And so lacking adequate stimulation from the online world I retreat into my own isolated world searching for something to give it meaning, or at the least a moment of carefree amusement. I recently found myself walking through my apartment with my hammer in hand looking for something to receive the brunt of my pent-up frustration. My old hairdryer, which recently ceased functioning, received a treatment similar to the iPod's. Sadly, however, the results were not nearly so interesting and consequently there are no photographs to commemorate it.

The brief respite I have each week is attending Erik's "office hours". This was a truly inspired idea. For a few hours on Wednesday nights I can tear myself away from the lonely contemplation of a life wasted and incomplete, numbing the emptiness of a hollow existence and drowning cares away in the darkness of the night. Although it is likely that after reading this entry my invitation will be permanently revoked....

I think I need to subscribe to another hundred RSS feeds.

Introducing DOS 6.2
Originally uploaded by rgcottrell.

I was shocked to find not one but two brand new copies of the 1993 Sybex DOS 6.2 Instant Reference guide on the shelves in the computer section of the downtown Seattle Borders book store.

I even sent an SMS to the new Mobile Duo price checker application (more details later once Andrej takes us out of "stealth" mode) and verified that this book is in fact still in print and on sale at Amazon as well.

There can't possibly still be a market for this technology, can there?

Maybe it was a good thing that the Seattle Monorail project was voted down.

Apparently, the crash happened the night before and I was just oblivious of the damage as I ate my lunch. I wish my phone had a better camera. These shots don't fully capture the details.

Joe Goldberg has more details about the crash.

I just got a letter from Citibank telling me that my MasterCard was about to expire and that they would not be renewing it. They made up some excuse about how they were really doing it for me because it probably wouldn't be in my best interest to have an open line of credit that I didn't use. I think they must have just gotten tired of sending me two sets of balance transfer checks each and every month for the past few years.

I really don't know how to feel about this. I haven't made a charge on the card for maybe two years. They have tried twice to entice me back by offering a $20 credit (and then removing it a month or two later when I stubbornly refused to spend it). Still this was the first credit card I ever received. I got it just after I turned 18 and watched it change from a 13-digit Visa card, to a 16-digit Visa card, to a MasterCard while the credit line slowly increased from $500 to $15,000. This card is how I survived for the first few months after finishing graduate school but before landing my first dot-com job.

All is not lost, however. The letter did give a phone number that I could call if I decided I wanted to keep the card and they just might, because they are such good people, consider extending my credit. Thanks, but no thanks.

P.S. I tried finding my card to help relive some of the old memories, but I must have shredded it long ago. I did, however, frind my year 2000 bus pass and my original and renewed Amazon NextCard Visa cards.

My day of server hacking yesterday continued well into the night. I did force myself to leave the apartment around three in the afternoon to get something to eat and picked up a Postfix book on the way back. Try as I might, I just couldn't get the server to accept any incoming email. The message would bounce almost immediately with a cryptic line about how the host wasn't on the list of hosts authorized to deliver mail.

I woke up early this morning and headed back to the computer for some desperate last minute hacking before going into work. At one point I decided to try some old school SMTP command line email to try to identify the problem. I telneted into port 25 only to be confused by what I saw. The host name was wrong (it was back to the generic name originally given by the ISP). Suddenly it occurred to me that I was talking to a Qmail server and not the Postfix server I was configuring.

A little more detective work showed that there was an xinetd daemon running that was firing up Qmail to handle email processing. After disabling it and restarting Postfix everything seemed to suddenly work. I was able to create an alias that forwarded mail to another account. I also created an alias that should have fired up a Rails app for processing, but file permissions prevented it from running. I decided that this was close enough, declared success, and left for work happy once again.

I finally got around to doing some server upgrades that I had been putting off for quite a while. So far I have upgraded the database to the new PostgreSQL 8.1 and finally upgraded this blog to Movable Type 3.2. I also threw away the old Ruby installation and started fresh with Ruby 1.8.3 and Rails 0.14.3.

As usual, I don't do enough system administration work to be careful, organized, or systematic. There are just so many options on the database that I think I probably got the permissions a little off somewhere between the backup, upgrade, and restore of the data.

The Movable Type upgrade went a lot smoother than I thought it would, given all of the hacks I had to make to the previous version to work around bugs in the 3.1 version. Six Apart did a great job of making a seemless upgrade process--once I had spent fifteen minutes or so deeply studying the documentation to figure out how to start the process.

You may notice the snazzy new layout the blog is using. I've made a few tweaks to the main layout to rearrange some of the widgets. There's still a little more work to do to bring back my 43 Places widget, and maybe I'll think about adding a Flickr badge as well. Not that any of you would notice since you are reading this through an RSS reader....

Still on my to-do list is a downgrade of Apache to 1.3 for better FastCGI support (or maybe I should be like the cool kids and switch to Lighttpd instead). The worst thing, however, is figuring out how to configure Postfix to process emails and pass them on to Rails for some project ideas I want to work on.

After my eye exam I stopped for a quick lunch at the food court in the Westlake mall. After the revelation that my glasses were probably too strong and faced with what may be several weeks acclimating to new contact lenses, I decided that instead of going back to work I should head down the street to get my driver's license renewed today.

The downtown office of the Department of Licensing is usually much more relaxed than other offices because it doesn't offer any of written or driving tests. Still, it was a little more crowded than the last time I visited. And much more automated. I looked around for the forms I needed to fill out but found none.

I punched the ticket machine to get my place in line and sat down to wait for the thirty minutes or so until I was called. After I was finally called, the process itself went very smoothly. I had my address updated, took the vision test, and waited for my photograph to be taken. The first take of the photo was bad, much worse than even your typical license photo. The examiner asked if I wanted the picture retaken, which of course I did. The second take was much better, although I really can't stand seeing pictures of myself.

My new license was printed out on a little card of paper. I have to wait for the actual version to arrive in the mail in the next few weeks. And with that, my visit to the licensing office was over. I won't have to return for another five years, hopefully ten if I can get the online renewal done next time.

With just a few weeks left before my driver's license expires, I thought it was about time to get my annual eye exam and ever stronger lens prescription. The place that I had been going to for several years had mysteriously closed up shop and vanished. As I walked by where the doctor's office used to be last weekend I was greeted by an empty storefront with empty floors and walls.

So, I reluctantly had to break in a new doctor. I showed up fifteen minutes early for my exam to give plenty of time to complete the new patient paperwork. The questionairre was quite confusing and I had to wander back to the receptionist several times to ask for clarification. It was interesting to note that this doctor insisted on some additional screening, which wouldn't be covered by insurance, and insisted that anyone wanting contact lenses also be fitted for glasses.

Once the paperwork was finished, I was led by the assistant into the back room where she began the initial testing. She seemed confused when one of the machines failed to scan my eye. You must have some cataracts or had eye surgery, she speculated. No, I had to respond, that eye is just really, really bad.

Next I had to play this little game where my eye followed a little dot that zoomed across the screen. When it stopped, up to four additional lights could blink on at different places on the screen. When these lights flashed, I had to quickly tap a counter button with the number of lights I saw. They had to restart this game for me because I was too dense to understand the instructions the first time through.

After taking some scary shots of eyes, I was led into the main examination room. When the doctor finally arrived I had to go over my long and involved history of poor eyesight. It seems that there are some new types of disposable soft contact lenses that could correct my vision, so we decided to give that a try.

I was surprised to hear that the doctor thought that my current glasses prescription was a little too strong. Funny, but I don't think it corrects my sight as much as I would like. Still, it was nice to hear that, for a change, my vision had not gotten substantially worse over the past year.