Screenshot: A Weblog

I know that a lot of schools are looking at outsourcing more and more services to save money - both physical services like facilities maintenance and technological services. I liked this student perspective in a recent Yale Daily News on Yale's plan to transition their email to Gmail. Besides enumerating some of the privacy and accessibility concerns that such plans have raised, the article argues for an open process when making such a significant change. It seems, from these students' perspective at least, there are questions they would like to have answered about the services Gmail will provide before a switch is made. I cannot comment on what types of opportunities for information and feedback Yale may have provided. But taking this article at face value, these types of open conversations can be time consuming, but particularly at a college or university I think there is so much value to helping students practice being part of complex decisions where multiple factors are being weighed, that the type of transparency being called for has a strong connection to the educational goals of these institutions.

Posted by Amanda at 8:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am teaching information security this term, so expect more security related content over the next couple of months. First up, if you're wondering how easily traceable you are on the internet, visit Panopticlick. A project from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the site looks at what unique information it can collect about you via your browser - even if you have cookies off. Based on information like your time zone, your screen size, what fonts your browser has access to, and what plug-ins you have, a "fingerprint" is created for you, and the compared against the fingerprints of all of the other users to try the site so far. My browser tested as unique against the 610,703 tested at the site so far. While that doesn't prove that my configuration is 100% unique, and certainly most if not all of that information is easily changeable if you are trying to hide, it does suggest that if sites (whether corporate or government) were interested in tracking visitors and sharing information about what people are doing to build up profiles, it would be quite plausible.

Posted by Amanda at 2:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It is a convenient coincidence that a number of interesting articles about different aspects of gaming and gaming culture have surfaced in time for the last week of my intersession course.

• Develop magazine recounts the stories of the ten biggest flops as games in the past decade - the reasons behind the failures are the most interesting part
• MSNBC reports that the size of certain portions of your brain predicts your ability at playing video games - an odd claim given that "video game" is a very broad category and I don't tend to think that there is a single set of skills that lead to success in all games, which is consistent with some of the details buried later in the article
• In good news for my students, learning how to create computer games can improve other student skills and can be effective in broadening interest in computing
• On the down side, they may find themselves at reduced risk for rickets if they play too much
• One game player muses on how to compute the value of a game based on a combination of cost, enjoyment and time spent playing it - seems to me there might need to be an exponential in there somewhere
• Besides describing a neat Project Natal game, 2 Finger Heroes, that is on the scrap heap, this article alludes to the problem of localization in games, in this case that gestures do not always translate across cultures
• Finally, if you think the life of a game developer seems like fun and games, take a look at this open letter from wives of Rockstar employees protesting their work situation - though be aware this is just one person's presentation of the situation; there is also an interesting implied gender to the developers at Rockstar in the letter

Posted by Amanda at 1:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

There are a lot of interesting angles to the possibility that Google is developing technology to detect billboards and other ads in Google Maps street view images and replace them with their own ads. This news is based on a patent application, so it may not even happen. But it raises the question of whether Google even wants to get into doctoring their images to such a degree. Blurring out a detail or removing an image is one thing, but if users know that what they see may not be reality, will they lose faith in the reliability of the system? Having the imposed ad integrate seamlessly with the image would probably be necessary for it to be effective, but I would personally prefer to be able to identify imposed content.

There actually seem to be a set of patent applications that the articles I have seen are talking about and merging the discussion of - one that automatically finds ads in images and one that manages auctions of advertising space. The image-processing patent (application number 20100004995) is quite long so I've only skimmed it, but I would be very interested if this were pursued on how exactly an advertisement was defined and if there was an intention to include a person in the loop to ensure that only actual advertising space was being treated as such. Near me there are giant "Welcome To Pennsylvania" (or West Virginia...) signs that could look like ads but which convey map information that ought not to be lost. Simply finding large rectangular details won't do it.

This also seems to raise the possibility that billboard advertisers will start acting like spammers, carefully crafting ads that both advertise and yet are missed by Google's algorithm. Google's online actions might end up changing the way our real-world advertising looks.

Posted by Amanda at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This article via Wired about whether geeky decorations turn women away from computer science has me conflicted. The article is definitely provocatively titled, "Star Trek Stops Women From Becoming Computer Scientists", but the underlying study being reported shows that sitting in a room with Star Trek decor correlates with women responding more negatively to a survey of attitudes about computer science, with men not showing the same effect.

As always with this type of study, there are things to poke at - would other strongly themed decors have the same result? What about a non-neutral room with lots of academic science posters and pictures? Or does a decor with any geeky content correlate with negative attitudes? Is the negative impact due to association with the geeky culture and the types of people the women think of as doing those jobs, so the issue is it being Star Trek, which triggers all sorts of stereotypes? Or is there a disinclination to associate so strongly with science that it defines one's whole life including the decor of one's space, and it doesn't matter what the nature of that geeky decor is?

I obviously have ulterior motives for wondering - I inevitably end up decorating my spaces. And I'm a bit of a geek. I might even have a *very* *tiny* Enterprise model in my office that someone gave me, as well as the obligatory Escher calendar, conference posters, etc. Is this subtly hostile to female students, and do the quilts and curtains that I've hung help counteract that? Should I take down the XKCD cartoons I've hung on my lab door? I don't want to - I like that students read them and will tell me "oh, now that I've taken your AI class I actually understand that!". But I can also see how that type of imagery projects the message that you are either in the group and get it, or outside the group and don't. I would be really curious if one gets the same effect with, say, physics or math.

So I'm thinking about it.... It adds to the oddness for me that I am the only female professor in my department, and I'm definitely the one with the strongest inclination towards geeky decor. Probably with the strongest inclination towards decor in general. I would have thought personalizing a space would show an appealing warmth and personality, which one might think would have a positive impact on attracting and retaining underrepresented minorities. But maybe I ought to think about bringing my Hermione wand home...

Posted by Amanda at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Being interested in, and recently done a fair bit of reading about, human subjects research, this article from a couple of months ago about using Amazon's Mechanical Turk for running human subjects experiments caught my eye. It's a pretty neat idea for pulling in volunteers from a variety of demographics, with some obvious concerns - are people who they say they are, and how much effort will they put into the experiment being the major obvious ones. The article gives some nice specific suggestions for avoiding biases, cheaters, testing the correctness of your study, and addressing other issues. If done well, this seems like a clever way to recruit and manage anonymous subjects.

Posted by Amanda at 9:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've noticed that whenever I teach a subject, the news appears to be disproportionately full of stories about that topic (and yes, I do understand that is not the case...). These are some of my favorites I have found recently:

• I linked to the BigDog project several months ago - Boston Dynamics has outdone themselves, pushing their sophisticated walking abilities into a bipedal robot, Petman. The video on this is amazing! [via many places, including C.]
• On the opposite end of the spectrum, iRobot has developed a "morphing blob" robot based on a structure of inflatable air pockets. [via many places, including J.]
• These interconnected warehouse robots are an incredibly cool example of what modern robotics can do right now - these particular ones work together to speed up collection of items within a warehouse in preparation for shipping. Watch out for the cute "Bot Crossing" sign a minute and a half in.
• A nice transition from this semester into the next - researchers at University of Washington have a nice summary of a paper about security and privacy risks with future household robots.
• Finally, who doesn't want to watch kittens on a Roomba again!

Posted by Amanda at 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a robotics application I've never run into before, but it is actually being used in the Netherlands: a gas pumping robot. The video shown makes it look like it works pretty well too, and while it seems slow the article says it speeds things up enough to actually increase their number of sales per pump. I do wonder how much of that is the fact that, to use the pump, you preregister with your credit card number and preferred type of gas (so that you don't interact with the robot at all, you just pull up and sit while the robot does its thing). The RFiD tag alone would eliminate the time I spend fumbling around with my credit card and receipt and getting everything in and out of my wallet. It may be that the advantage of having the robot fill your tank is just enough to get people to take advantage of the RFiD technology.

Posted by Amanda at 8:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The news from earlier in the week that Google is committing to providing users easy and free ways to move their data in and out of Google products addresses one of the concerns I have had about cloud computing. I understand the appeal in terms of expense, and I have had good experiences when I have used Google Docs for collaboration. But often the content being created is stuff that I may want around many years in the future, or also available off-line on a flash drive (we can pretend the entire world is networked, but in just the past two months I can think of three different trips that left me in locations with no convenient network connectivity).

We are even running into this with the course management systems we are looking at - not all of them offer the same degree of data portability. It seems that part of the issue there is a lack of clear "neutral" format to export all courses too, which certainly makes sense given the diversity of the tools available. But there are also systems where you can access old courses in perpetuity on their servers but cannot export the course to your own computer - where in perpetuity I fear means only for the lifetime of your school's contract with the provider. This type of lock-in makes me very nervous.

Posted by Amanda at 8:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We've been talking about various types of scheduling problems in my AI class, so this local article about computer modeling used to schedule sports games caught my eye. It is an interesting constraint problem - not just the number of games, mix of who plays who, and frequency of games, but particular rules based on amount of time needed to set aside for travel and other issues of fairness. It is particularly worthwhile to think about the advantages this system offers when changes occur that make a planned upon schedule no longer acceptable. Often, the human response to that is to try to find the solution that requires the fewest shifts possible, in part because it avoids "messing up" large parts of the already-difficult-to-construct schedule. With this type of software in place, it becomes debatable whether the fix with the fewest changes is optimal compared to the fix that results in a new global optimization. This is probably a place where knowing a bit more about sports would help me.

Posted by Amanda at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I love the Google logo for the day - not just because it looks great, but because it kept me from missing Tetris's 25th birthday. Like, well, everybody I remember losing hours and hours to playing Tetris.

I remember exactly where I first played it - in the summer of 1990 I was at the PA Governor's School for the Sciences on the CMU campus, and Tetris was installed on the computers at the tiny computer cluster just down the hill from our dorm. It was an odd little computer cluster, shoehorned into a storefront space next to a laundromat across from various food vending trucks that never seemed to actually be open that summer. But we would go down there to work and end up playing "just one game" of Tetris that would turn into two, or three, or four - or as we got better that would go on for almost as long as endurance would allow. You got to develop a style - did you play it safe, laying down solid rows and clearing line at a time along the bottom? Or did you strategically form deeper holes that would let you plonk down the perfect piece and clear four rows at once? I think all of us had the experience of the cluster closing before our game had. At the time I was surprised they let us play on the cluster computers, but looking back I remember the many "No playing Netrek on cluster computers signs and remember that that was the era of schools suffering bandwidth issues because of MMORGs and other online games, and a few kids playing Tetris on localized machines on a summer evening was the least of their cluster abuse concerns. As an aside, I had no idea that Netrek was still up and running - nor at the time did I quite grasp what a technological innovation Netrek was. Modern WoW addicts and other online gamers owe a lot to that game.

Somehow after that summer, I ended up with a copy of Tetris on my Mac at home and I played it constantly. Even when I would grow bored, i could always sit down, weeks or a month later, and play a game and fall right back into the pattern. It was the first game that I would play to the point that I would go to sleep and dream the falling shapes and the patterns of rotation needed to play the perfect game. In college, the year I had to upgrade my computer past compatibility with my copy of Tetris was actually upsetting, and I think it is then that I ended up with a copy of Super Tetris 2, which spawned another "dreaming falling blocks" level addiction with the game.

It is the many, many variations of Tetris that keep coming out that convince me I am not the only one to have had that experience. I would be surprised if there was a platform that it was not ported to. You can access a version of it through emacs. You can play it online in a million places. You can play it in an unrealistically huge format. You can watch a Tetris game as recreated in stop motion by people in colored shirts (and how perverse that even in that format I have to grit my teeth at some of the stupid "moves" being made). You can decorate your house with Tetris furniture.

Excuse me now - I am off to put on my Tetris/Escher tshirt and play some Tetris.

Posted by Amanda at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Coding Horror is often fun, and a good read, particularly for aspiring techies who want an inside glimpse of some of the details that would make up your life if you pursue that path. But when I read Jeff's post on spaces versus tabs in code formatting I both cracked up and immediately thought of one of my Data Structures students who has to reformat any piece of code he is given before he starts working with it. With my students deep into their team projects, I wonder if they are running into the conflict that Jeff claims is inevitable:

The only programming project with no disagreement whatsoever on code formatting is the one you work on alone. Wherever there are two programmers working on the same project, there are invariably disagreements about how the code should be formatted. Sometimes serious disagreements. The more programmers you add, the more divisive those disagreements get. And handling those disagreements can be .. tricky.

He goes on to discuss the pitfall of team members taking it upon themselves to "fix" each other's code - not just spacing, but even variable name conventions and the like. It may seem odd that such computationally trivial decisions (I mean, we all know the compiler doesn't care...) could cause so much interpersonal strife on a team. But if you've ever really gotten into programming, the idea that someone else might be messing around with your code, after you get it how you like it..... well, it is probably at least a little agitating. And Jeff cites the classic "The Elements of Programming Style" to illustrate that these style principles actually do matter when it comes to code as a tool for comprehension and communication. Which is particularly key on a team project.

In their book called The Elements of Programming Style, Kernighan and Plauger also identify what we would call discourse rules. Our empirical results put teeth into these rules: It is not merely a matter of aesthetics that programs should be written in a particular style. Rather there is a psychological basis for writing programs in a conventional manner: programmers have strong expectations that other programmers will follow these discourse rules. If the rules are violated, then the utility afforded by the expectations that programmers have built up over time is effectively nullified.

I am now curious to see how my students navigate this problem - if they try to get consistency or not, and if the most obsessive person in the group just wins (I fear I have one group with people who don't care that much and one group with people who do). And it makes me think about the style guidelines I set out for code in my introductory class, and that perhaps sharing some of this research would make it clearer why I have those standards.

Posted by Amanda at 1:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I like the discussion here about an article finding that font choice influences how likely someone is to act on material they are reading. It is pointed out in the comments that the appropriate interpretation is not that Arial is the best font, but that cutesy fonts that get used to add interest or make documents look more "friendly" may actually be reducing the impact of the document. I have seen studies about reading comprehension based on font choice, but this is the first I have seen that talks about how likely a person is to take a particular action based on the font used in the document encouraging them to take that action (here, to go exercise).

Posted by Amanda at 9:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

RouteShout is a new service being piloted in Pittsburgh (but available for purchase to any city) that lets riders text a number posted on a bus stop and get texted back the arrival time of the next buses scheduled to reach that stop. [via Pittsburgh Metblogs] I love how simple and yet useful this idea seems. They don't seem to be trying to solve the entire "where is my bus" question - you can't go to a website and see maps of all the buses, you can't send complex queries about fares or what transfers are needed to get from here to there. But if what you want to know is when the next bus is coming, you get that information quickly and easily using technology that many people already have in their pocket. Even with the ability to check a website on my phone, I think I would prefer using this service because it just seems so streamlined. The DeepLocal company that has developed this service also seems like a pretty interesting group; they appear to have developed a number of these very minimal-function, minimal-interface systems.

Posted by Amanda at 1:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

From earlier this week, a report that Windows is producing a limited version of Windows 7 that will be cheaper and faster for netbooks to run. The big difference being discussed? You can run a maximum of three applications at a time....

The company claims most users wouldn't be affected by the three-app limit. "We ran a study which suggested that the average consumer has open just over two applications [at any time]," Painell claims. "We would expect the limit of three applications wouldn't affect very many people."

However, Microsoft told journalists at last year's Professional Developers Conference that 70% of Windows users have between eight and 15 windows open at any one time. "That's probably talking across all users," Painell says. "That's talking across enterprise and business as well, which is a very different segment."

I would love to see that study, just to know how they measured "applications". I have seen elsewhere mention that antivirus software will not count, but what about other background processes like network monitoring tools? How is this being counted? If I pull up the calculator, does that count against me or is that just part of the OS?

Also, who were these users and what were they doing with their computers while being monitored? I absolutely grant that much of my computer usage falls in the high-usage category and thus Microsoft would be perfectly happy expecting me to use the more powerful (and expensive) version of their OS. But right now, I'm sitting on my sofa with a cup of coffee (okay - half coffee half hot chocolate) reading my email while doing some web surfing (and writing this) and looking over the assignment I wrote yesterday to catch any final typos. That is three applications right there before you count that I have my IM client open and one of my emails I just read had a pdf attached to it.

This is the part where not being an OS expert could be the problem, but I also have a hard time seeing how capping the number of apps leads to a more efficient operating system. Is the idea that the OS would run intolerably slow on a netbook with more than three apps going so users are just being kept from putting themselves in a context that will make the OS look bad? Or are there games that you can play with simplifying your caching algorithms or processor allocation that work if you are capped at three apps but fail when you have the possibility of twelve apps to deal with? Basically - is the cap just a cap, or does the cap enable them to actually change the way that the OS works in order to get efficiency advantages?

Posted by Amanda at 8:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It seems that either Google has been hacked or its security settings have been upgraded to be excessively paranoid. It will be interesting to hear what ended up happening to produce these results....

Posted by Amanda at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's the time of year to get yourself a new calendar - or invest in a perpetual calendar so you never have to worry about it again. If you've got twelve cents and a piece of cardboard, you can build yourself this little desk calendar that shows you the day's date..... so long as you're proficient with binary. I'd actually probably get more screwed up by remembering whether I started numbering the days of the week from zero or one, but (note to self) it would be a fun exercise to convince yourself that this is the minimum number of coins necessary to build such a thing.

Of course, I like the fun of having a new set of pretty pictures to hang on my wall each year, so I'm off to search Amazon for this year's wall calendar. I'm thinking of going with something classic like some Escher prints. Or space photos.... Or kittens....

Posted by Amanda at 5:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am having the students in my introduction to programming class work with the Netflix recommendations data for their final project this term, so it was timely that the New York Times recently did an article reporting on the progress that has been made on the Netflix Prize over the past two years. Nobody has made the 10% jump yet, and while teams have managed over a 9% improvement the improvements are getting incrementally smaller.

The fun part of the article, though, is the details about what it is making it hard to get that last 1%. One's rating for "Napolean Dynamite" is apparently very hard to predict based on one's ratings of other movies. In general, there are a very small pool of movies that make up a large portion of the remaining error rate - based on the analysis of one of the people working on the competition at least. There is a lot of good math being used here, but the article does a nice job of talking about how insights about the psychology of preferences informs the statistics used. For example, given the fact that a viewer may rate a movie and then if asked to re-rate it a month later change their rating by on average by 0.4 (out of 5) stars, some people set their algorithms to discount older ratings as compared to recent ones. I particularly liked the fact that they are trying to figure out when to stop recommending a television series - something I wish that the Amazon recommendation system could figure out.

The people who are working on the competition are the other interesting part - this really is capturing the basement-hacker spirit. People from all around the world, with a wide range of background are working on this problem. It is cool that a number of teams reported having their junior high or high school aged kids helping them with the problems - whether brainstorming ideas or helping with the math. I'm rooting for one of these amateur enthusiasts to make that final breakthrough on the problem. From the little I have played with the data I can confirm that while getting good results would require a great deal of effort, if you are casually interested a little programming background and an evening of free time is enough to at least get a glimpse of the intricacies of the problem. Even the incredibly unsophisticated approach I have my students working with returns results that are more plausible than randomness.

Posted by Amanda at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I think i love this story about researchers developing a system that can generate copies of keys based on photos because it illustrates how, even after centuries, a classic security technique can fall victim to new hacks. [via Make Magazine] The system, called SNEAKEY does not require a good close-up photo of the key, though they point out that you can find many such photos online at Flickr and other sites. Their front-page example photo is a somewhat blurry image of a set of keys laying on top of a book taken from 195 feet away, but they were still able to reproduce the keys.

There are all sorts of possible measures one could take in response to this problem - from the obvious of not posting pictures of your keys online, to keeping them in your pocket or obscured in your hand while you are using them, to building little retractable key sheaths that keeps the key's pattern covered until it is being pushed into a lock. But a better lesson to take out of this is that dual factor security is necessary for strong assurances because these types of new intrusion methods are going to continue to be developed, whether in the physical or digital world.

Posted by Amanda at 9:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Before the election falls entirely out of memory, I wanted to note this interview with Dr. Barbara Simons of the Advisory Board of the Federal Election Assistance Commission about how eVoting went this election cycle. You get a nice summary of the role of the advisory board and the efforts underway to try to ensure reliable voting. Perhaps the most interesting quote was with respect to the composition of the advisory board:

I was appointed by Senator Harry Reid to one of the four seats on the Election Assistance - on the Board of Advisors which are designated for technologists. However, I really am the only technologist on the Board of Advisors so far as I know. There are no other Computer Scientists on that Board and no Statisticians.

What's interesting--what's going to be fascinating about this is that most of the precincts in Minnesota use the ES&S-M100 scanners and so when this recount--this manual recount occurs it's going to be a check on how accurate these scanners are. Now there was a problem in Michigan with these same scanners where some early testing showed some discrepancies between what the scanners reported and what should have been, and so this is really going to be quite fascinating. It's not clear what the outcome is going to be.

Posted by Amanda at 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Are you a dead-tree type of person? Like the idea of Web 2.0 but not all the gadgetry that goes along with it? Or maybe you have a portable device that does better with static pdf documents than dynamic websurfing - say while commuting by public transportation. Then you might like Tabbloid. Give it a set of RSS feeds and the service will create a pdf document for you out of those feeds that you can download or have emailed to you. If you like what you see, you can set Tabbloid to email you an updated pdf of the feeds every hour, day, or week. The service is provided by HP, so the cynical part of my brain thinks this is a ploy to get us to use more printer ink, but it is an interesting little tool, and the formatting is fairly attractive.

Posted by Amanda at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I haven't watched 60 Minutes in years now, but Lifehacker has a link to the story below from last week on controlling computers with thought and I was blown away. I've known there was research going on in this direction, but some of what they show here is amazing. Using just surface-level sensors one device can sense the brain pattern of "recognition", allowing people to type or select words based as they are flashed onto a computer screen. The interface for that is pretty cool - I expected from the description a series of letters shown one at a time but instead there is a huge grid of every letter, number, and symbol you might want and they are highlighted on and off very quickly in quick succession. When they get to what is possible if you actually embed sensors in someone's brain, we start to see monkeys controlling robot arms to feed themselves and people being able to drive mechanical wheelchairs with just their thoughts. It's a very well done story - worth watching!

60 Minutes: Brain Power

The Lifehacker entry about the video speculated that while this is being used now to help people who are paralyzed, this technology would eventually reach a point where this was our standard interface with our computer. Clearly there would need to be significant changes - it seems that right now the ability to move objects with thought is accomplished by attempting to move your own arms and the brain interpreting those signals - the monkey has to have his arms restrained for this to work. It is unclear how this would work if you could move your arms. Is visualizing the motions sufficient or are the actual mental activities that take place when you legitimately attempt to move required? It also seems clear that people will be more willing to consider brain implants when it gives them back a lost ability to communicate and interact with the world than the would be simply to streamline their interactions with their computer.

Posted by Amanda at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I somehow have the feeling the internet is going to be rife with election-related fun today. I won't have time for a good websurf until later because I'm trying to get to the polls to vote before class, but this caught my eye: string red and blue lights up around your house for your election party and use this
python script to scape CNN's election results and indicate how the election is trending to change which lights are on so your lightly reflects the trending of the election. Your house will start out purple and end up.... well, slightly less purple? Looking at the code there is some normalization going on, so it might end up having more of a range to spread over. There's nothing in this code that is specific to the lighting application either, so go ahead and grab it and build your own election tracking toy!

Posted by Amanda at 7:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Two Duke law professors and an expert in the public domain have written a comic, available under a Creative Commons license, about the impact of current copyright culture and its impact on creativity. They are particularly focused on how a trend towards a positive obligation to "clear copyright" and show that use of another's work is fair use is, in reality, stifling fair use as studios refuse to take risks on including fair use content without permission and individuals cannot afford to defend legal cases if their fair use is challenged. There is example after example given of individuals filming reality and having to edit or cut scenes because they cannot get permission to include an icon or a background song that was in fact there at that time. They point out that with the expense of actually creating a film dropping with cheaper equipment and video editing, this is going to become more of a problem as more people will be able to create film without the backing of a major funding source. As one might expect given the Creative Commons licensing, it is clear from the start that they will not be arguing to throw out the ideas of copyright and intellectual property entirely. This is in the end an argument for Creative Commons licensing and giving more flexible control over how content is and is not reused by others to the people who have created it. It's a familiar argument if you have read about this topic much at all, but this is a very nice and fairly entertaining presentation of it.

Posted by Amanda at 9:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have been reading a fair bit about electronic voting machines recently because we are talking about them in one of my classes. While I've waded through some pretty dry accounts of the vulnerabilities of these machines, this report with an associated video showing the ease with which Sequoia voting systems machines can be hacked using a brief exposure the the configuring computer with a USB drive. [via Boing Boing] The video also shows how various types of exploits might look to the voter and could be designed to even work in the face of physical paper-tape confirmations of the voters ballot. The demos of how fast it is to circumvent some of the physical security on these machines is also pretty compelling.

Of course my favotite commentary on electronic voting machines is probably still this.

Posted by Amanda at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I cannot decide what if anything I want to use this for, but this is a very nice little tutorial on writing your own IM bot. [via Lifehacker] It presumes you know how to do the server-side scripting (though they do give a nice sample php script so you can see there really isn't anything IM specific in there) and the tutorial just shows how to IMified service to host a bot for you. Right now IMified is in beta, so you can get an account free, but it looks like they may start charging later so if you think you are interested you might want to sign up now. If you really get into it, there is also more documentation at the IMified site, but I like the short tutorial I linked for giving you the essentials on what it would take to get this set up.

Posted by Amanda at 8:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Oddly, Chrome actually imported all of my bookmarks except the one in my "Daily" folder to my weblog management system (I clear through spam comments and the like each morning). It took me probably ten minutes to figure out how to add a bookmark. There isn't a Bookmark menu anymore. There is a Bookmark folder, but you can't add a bookmark from there. Right clicking on the page, or it's tab, doesn't do it. Right clicking on the URL in the address bar doesn't do it. It turns out there are two ways to do it - either click on the star next to the address bar when you are viewing the page you want to bookmark, or right click on the bookmarks folder you want to add the page to. The learning curve is a bit steeper than I'd like, especially for something as straightforward as adding a bookmark.

If you are entering text in a text box (say while commenting on a weblog), and you don't like the size of it, you can resize it! I'm sure this only works for some ways of setting up text boxes, but the idea that you can have a modestly sized input area with a scroll bar but let the user make it larger (though possibly less aesthetic) if it would be more convenient for them is pretty cool.

I have started noticing that I miss some of my add-ons from Firefox. Download Statusbar and PDF Download are useful for the way I use my course management system with my classes. I miss my Forecastbar. But what is going to drive me back to Firefox is the lack of Mouse Gestures.

Posted by Amanda at 8:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Google Chrome browser came out this afternoon, and after reading the comic book description of its features and innovations I wanted to give it a try. The ideas behind it seemed intriguing, and I'm willing to admit that I'm a bit of a Google fangirl. I used it for the afternoon and evening, performing a variety of tasks including working with my course management software and the college's registration/enrollment system, checking email, and generally websurfing, for work and for pleasure.

Installation, as you would expect, is easy, and, if you are using Firefox at least, if you let it import your bookmarks and settings you'll end up with a configuration that really is ready to go; for example anything in your bookmark toolbar is pulled out similarly in Chrome. It feels like it runs faster than Firefox, but I haven't tested that in any quantitative manner.

Maybe the coolest technological innovation is the use of separate processes for each tab, and for plug-ins. It makes sense that this can help address the problems of memory leakage. The Task Manager is great. You really can check out which tabs and/or plugins are taking up resources, and if you click through the provided link you can get even more fun information about the memory usage of the various processes associated with Chrome. It is (hopefully) a sign of its beta status that you access that additional information through a link labeled "Stats for nerds".

The "New Tab" page that one gets when opening a new tab could turn out to be a cool feature but it clearly will improve as I use it. Just off the bat I like the recently closed tabs list, though it really does seem to mean "recently" in the temporal sense, not "your three most recently closed tabs".

Somebody else had to point out to me that you can search directly from the address bar. That's novel enough to me that I probably could have used Chrome for a week (or a month....) without having figured that out, because I would never have thought to try it. I'm sure it was mentioned in the comic book somewhere but I didn't remember it. You can also use the address bar to search within other sites if you have previously done a search at them using their domain specific tool after having explicitly typed their domain into the address bar - it doesn't work if you got to the site through a search or some other link. I'm finding the interface for that a bit odd, but I've set it up to have address bar searches into Amazon and Wikipedia and I'll see how I like it. Basically, if I type 'a' and then tab, I get an Amazon search; 'w' and a tab gets me a Wikipedia search.

I find the lack of menus at the top of the window sort of distressing, though. It looks like my window is wrong - like there is some type of OS error going on and it hasn't finished filling in the menus in the blank space above the tabs. This doesn't feel like a Windows specific complaint to me either - I don't think I've used any graphical operating system that doesn't have menus for File, Edit, etc. and despite your OS of choice, you probably have a pretty strong association for what to expect in each one. It just seems like an odd choice to depart from such a prevalent model. Redundant access would be okay with me, if you think there are better places for some of those functionalities to be listed. But moving my mouse all the way to the right side of the screen to access the "Save page..." function feels wrong.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the whole Google Gears thing, so I'll have to say more about that later. Practically speaking, I have found two uses for it. First, it is the engine behind the "Create application shortcuts..." option that allows you to create a shortcut directly to a webpage (I think usually you would want this to be some web app you frequently used) which when opened will display that page in a "streamlined" Chrome window without the usual tabs, address bar, etc. I set one up for Google Reader and the interesting thing is if I click on one of the headlines in my feeds, which are set to open in new tabs, it throws the tabs back to my open Chrome window that does have the full tabbing environment. Frustratingly, if I do this using the 'V' shortcut, it no longer marks that item as read in Reader, the way it does if you view using 'V' inside a regular Chrome window. Honestly, that seems broken to me. From what I read the "Create application shortcuts" feature is supposed to work nicely with Gmail.

Google Reader also seems to have a new feature that, if you use it via Chrome, Google Gears allowed them to build a tool to download the needed content to continue browsing your feeds offline. No, that doesn't mean that you can read through to the linked pages, but it does download all of your unread feeds with their summaries, and your starred items. I use my starred items folder to save interesting content to look at later, so that's a pretty neat feature to me.

Overall, it's a web browser. They admit up front it's a bit sparse on features to start because they are focusing on building a strong underlying framework. How successfully they did that is something that I think will come out more in the next few days as people really put it through its paces and tear it apart. Honestly, I think the thing I have liked the most so far is the comic. Scott McCloud has a knack for this sort of instructional comic (he does some great things for Make magazine), and I was surprised at how far into the technical details the comic got. I'd definitely recommend taking the time to actually sit down and read it if you're at all interested in the issues behind software development.

Posted by Amanda at 9:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Another reason to feel sorry for the aardvark - they probably get more spam than any other animal. A study was done showing that patterns in your username, such as the first letter, seem to impact how much spam you get. Actually, their title claiming that aardvarks get more spam than zebras is misleading. The pattern is more complex than that, with L, P, R, and S seeming to lead the pack in terms of spam versus non-spam messages received. Really, it seems like all this is saying is that spammers guess email addresses, and if your address occurs on other domains frequently as well, you're more likely to be spammed. So your nice mnemonic username might be socially appealing but problematic for your junk mail folder.

Posted by Amanda at 11:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In yet another RFID update (it's funny how once you are thinking about something like this you see it everywhere) this is an interesting little video of Adam Savage explaining why Mythbusters won't be debunking any more RFID myths anytime soon. In short, they had an entire show planned around RFID myths - how hackable they are, how easy it is to track someone with them, etc. - and legal counsel for various large financial institutions contacted Discovery and scared them into blocking the show. But it is more fun to hear it in Adam's words so go watch! I'm bummed - I think that would have been a great episode, and it is frustrating to see corporate interests blocking this type of information from getting out. After all, the show has covered myths where they make various explosive materials and they bleep out key ingredients or steps; at the very least, it seems like a negotiation to do something like that could have been reached. It also reminds me on the gag order that was put on the MIT students who were going to speak on how the hacked the Boston subway system at Defcon this year, though that injunction was lifted, albeit too late for the students to speak. In fact, that talk was supposed to be in part about an RFID security weakness as well!

Posted by Amanda at 5:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Related to my post from last week, Scientific American has an article about how RFID tags are popping up in unexpected places and be able to be used to track individuals, including, due to poor security in the devices, by individuals unassociated with the tags. The main application that the article is concerned with is the desire to have border states issue drivers licenses equipped with RFID tags to simplify border crossings. Says the article:

Although such “enhanced” driver’s licenses remain voluntary in the states that offer them, privacy and security experts are concerned that those who sign up for the cards are unaware of the risk: anyone with a readily available reader device—unscrupulous marketers, government agents, stalkers, thieves and just plain snoops—can also access the data on the licenses to remotely track people without their knowledge or consent. What is more, once the tag’s ID number is associated with an individual’s identity—for example, when the person carrying the license makes a credit-card transaction—the radio tag becomes a proxy for that individual.

Posted by Amanda at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While I have played around with sed/awk and perl and shell scripting in the past, in recent years I've spent more time using programming languages than scripting languages. This summer I've been playing around with Python a bit, though I'll probably get more into it once I think of a good problem to solve using it. I thought about picking up Flash, but between it being so closed and it being difficult to just see your code, I decided to pass on that bit of frustration. Somehow I didn't think of Javascript at all, though I do not do much web development so perhaps that is not too surprising. This discussion of the maturity of Javascript and the APIs for it has got me thinking that maybe it ought to move back up the priority list. If the APIs have gotten good enough to smooth over browser differences in a robust manner, that really would make web programming look more inviting. Of course, I return to the problem of needing a project to implement to really give the language a good test, but I think I'll be keeping my eyes open this fall for places where I might get to try out one of these tools.

Posted by Amanda at 12:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

There are a lot of creepy uses for RFiD tags, but these robotic chairs that follow the tag in your library card to follow you around while you browse to provide anywhere seating is pretty cute [via Digg]. Watch the video for the example of using the same technology to easily put together group seating areas. There are tons of other neat applications for this - conference rooms or classrooms or really any large meeting space could benefit from easy chair (and table?) rearrangement. What about walking into an airport and having a tag in your boarding pass allow you to be followed around by personal seating? In any of these applications, scaling up would probably require the seating to be aware of each other to avoid bottlenecks or poor utilization of space. It feels similar to some of the swarm robotics problems you see in a different wrapper.

Posted by Amanda at 2:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am a pack rat when it comes to dead or outdated electronic gadgets. I have a box full of stuff in my storage closet that I figure one day I'll rip apart for parts - or more likely give to students to use for projects. I am not very discriminating, though. I just thrown everything in there and figure I'll sort out someday if it has anything useful in it or not. I think I have a few mice in there, though, so I'm thinking of working through this Hack-a-Day on how to scavenge a mouse for parts. As they suggest, having a couple of these could make a really nice base for a line-follower...

Posted by Amanda at 9:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm a fan of the different cool uses of Google Maps that keep popping up around the internet. ThisNext is a sort of weird shopping guide site that uses a social networking approach to shopping recommendations. It is not clear to me if there is a limitation on what products are covered or particular source that the products recommended are from. A lot of the products seem random. The site sells itself though with the worldwide shopping map that overlays images of and links to products that people are browsing through the site at that time, showing where in the world that person is browsing from. It is fairly addictive to watch. [via Clicked]

Posted by Amanda at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you are a student, like writing code, and are still looking for something interesting to do with your summer, you might want to check out Google Summer of Code 2008. Students are paired with mentoring organizations to participate in various open source development projects. The list of organizations interested in mentoring students has been recently posted, including summaries of the types of projects they may be interested in supporting. The program FAQ answers most of the key questions; student project proposals are due at the end of the month.

Posted by Amanda at 1:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was just notified [Thanks T!] that ESPN wants to sponsor a Collegiate BattleBots Championship and I am semi-seriously wondering if there is any interest among my students because WOW would that be fun. It doesn't look like there have been any competitions since 2005, so they are still investigating whether there is enough interest to actually do this.

It actually makes me wondering if there is some sort of tie in with Doonesbury - this week they are rerunning their awesome series from last January where Alex is off at MIT competing in a robot competition. Go check it out - start back at the beginning of the week.

Since I have no better context for this link: another crazy and possibly dangerous thing I could make is Beer Cheese Cupcakes with Bacon Cheddar Cream Cheese Frosting. I am disturbingly tempted....

Posted by Amanda at 7:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been keeping track of interesting stories about security over the past couple of months for my intersession course, mostly ones that I have found through Slashdot, BoingBoing and/or Digg. As part of the process of selecting which ones will make it into the final week of the course and which ones will not, I thought I would put the whole list here, mostly without comment. If you notice anything that seems particularly interesting (especially if you happen to be in my course!) let me know and it will probably move up my list of things to discuss.

• Last year's Hack of the Year involves a Swedish hacker obtaining passwords for a number of governmental and embassy email accounts using TOR, an open-source tool that obscures web traffic. Think TOR sounds cool? Check out this guide to using TOR to surf anonymously to learn more about how it works.
• Not surprisingly, a study of wireless networks used in retail stores shows that most of them are insecure to some degree, with 25% not even using any encryption at all.
• We have read about hackers taking advantage of default passwords back in the 80s, but it remains a problem and there are a number of lists out there of default passwords for modern hardware.
• This is a slightly older story and the infected drives were pulled off the market, but certain Maxtor 500GB hard drives are being shipped with Trojans on them that send information on them back to sites registered in Beijing. But it seems that hardware being shipped with malware installed is a growing problem with digital photo frames also recently being infected.
• We all got used to the idea of disabling Javascript or Java in our browsers to block malware, but now Flash advertisements have malware embedded in them too.
• Sometimes what you think is a virus is just Microsoft being Microsoft: "During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play "Fur Elise" or "It's a Small, Small World" seemingly at random. This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer's BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance."
• A hole in QuickTime allows SecondLife avatars to be hijacked and made to turn over their Linden cash. Huh - I am about halfway through that novel.... More seriously, though, security within MMORPGs as a subset of software security seems to be a growing topic of interest.
• A McAfee report predicts more cyberattacks against and by governments in the coming years, based on evidence that many countries, including the US, have already started to use cyberattacks. It seems the attacks are mostly for the purpose of espionage. A related article coming out of this reports frames the issue as a coming cyber cold war - interesting in the context of this report that a number of recent blackouts outside the US were due to cyberattacks. And cyber-espionage need not be just against countries; corporate cyber-espionage is also believed to be on the rise.
• There is a lot of argument about how to compare the relative safety or number of holes in operating systems or software. Recently Microsoft reported that the number of holes announced in IE was less than in Firefox, and the Head Security Strategist at Firefox responded that the count did not include holes patched in major service packs and thus not announced, and discusses the security risk this represents for users. A similar argument get made in comparing Mac versus Windows vulnerability stats, with Mac by this report having many more flaws, but there being a question of whether apples are being compared to apples or not...
• This commentary on the balance between security and usability is worth reading. Part of the usability issue here is supporting depreciated filetypes, and whether that support needs to include security patches.
• This long technical article, in PDF format, describes a Chinese black market in malware. I have only skimmed the article so far but it has an interesting classification of the different players in the black market and how they related to each other, as well as a couple of case studies. Somewhat related is this article on the emerging "malware economy".
• If cracking WEP seems daunting (though it probably shouldn't after reading that guide...), maybe you want to practice on the less securely encrypted wireless keyboards.
• Lots of end of the year reports, including that 3.2 billion dollars was lost to phishing attacks and anti-virus protection is less good at detecting malware when looking at responses to new attacks.
• Sometimes sneaky malware-style behavior finds its way into commercial products, such as the feature in Adobe's CS3 that reports back usage data to a server with a sketchy name.
• South Carolina may require forensic investigators to have a PI license and some are concerned since the specialized skill set for forensic investigation currently has little overlap with the training and skill set of licensed PIs. The motivation, of course, being a desire to ensure that evidence to be used in trial is collected using appropriate standards.
• A recent report says that projects to find and repair security holes in open source software are proceeding well - the more interesting part of the article possibly being the large government supported effort to harden open source systems as their use expands. This would appear to be another "hidden" cost of free, open-source software.
• A case originating a couple of years ago and centering around the question of whether unauthorized (but unblocked) whois and DNS lookups constitute hacking has been decided in the positive (more commentary critical of the decision here).
• Worried after all of this that your computer is going to go kablooey any minute now? Keep this nifty Ubuntu LiveCD based technique for restoring your Master Boot Record in your back pocket...

Posted by Amanda at 12:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been saving up news articles about security vulnerabilities for my cyberattacks class, but I'm not quite sure where to fit in a discussion of potential vulnerabilities in Boeing's New 787. On the crazy-cool side, the plane is going to have internet connectivity in the cabin for passengers. On the crazy-stupid side, the passenger's network is connected to the cockpit network. Solutions are being discussed, but they do not seem to include just keeping the two networks physically separate. But software solutions can, and probably will, have holes, and Boeing is treating this as a software-debugging problem. I can't imagine what the justification would be for wanting the networks to be connected. I am a big proponent of the "if it is absolutely vital, keep it unplugged from any network" school of security. Or, frankly, if you can't do it safely, I'll get by without internet access on my plane flight....

Posted by Amanda at 12:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I would not want to buck the weblogging tradition of posting some type of year-end wrap-up, and I was quite lax on the photography and book-reading this year so I thought I would tie up 2007 with a recap of some of the new technologies that I have started using in the past year.

• RSS Feeds: My general websurfing habits had been to open folders of bookmarks into my Firefox tabs and click my way through them, but I finally broke down and tried out reading feeds and it's an experiment I'm sticking with. I started out using Sage, a Firefox extension, but I'm pretty firmly wedded to Google Reader at this point. Sure, Google is harvesting what I read when, but I can keep up on my feeds anyway, including on my cellphone and it's support for tracking new feeds and letting you star old entries for later references is great.
• Eclipse: I had played with it very briefly before, but this year marks the first time I have really used it, and after a surprisingly shallow learning curve I feel like I'm pretty proficient with it. I've only tested out the Java support, and have heard that it is less ideal for C++, but it has all of the expected bells and whistles, I like the debugger, and I'm a fan of using a free tool that my students can continue to use after the end of the semester. I still think you ought to get started with a simple text editor and command-line compilation, but if you are going with an IDE this is a reasonable choice.
• Facebook: I was talked into setting up a profile and, having never gotten on MySpace or Friendster or any of those things, it's been interesting to play with. I'm invested enough that I even have opinions on the recent changes allowing your status to not start with "is" and emailing you messages you receive, and not just notifications (both great!).
• New Toys: My laptop and lab computers all got upgraded, along with shiny new flatscreen monitors. Bonus on the laptop - all of my wireless networking problems went away, at home and in my office. I upgraded my cell phone and along the way learned to text message and access the internet using it. I think 2007 was the tipping point in my always-on accessibility.

This coming year, I've got modest technological innovation goals. I'm going to learn either Python or Jython. I would like to get my old laptop running Linux. And I'll probably jump on a few other bandwagons along the way, just to keep current - so send me your recommendations of what I ought to be playing around with before next December rolls around.

Posted by Amanda at 3:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I was chatting with a friend tonight about the fact that both of us are interested in learning Python, for slightly different reasons. He has noticed some job listings that indicate Python as being a particularly desirable skill, and theorizes that it would be pretty straightforward to pick up if you have a good understanding of Java. That theory is supported by the large number of books and articles written specifically to help the Java programmer learn Python. (See: Python for Java Programmers or Python for Java Programmers) In fact, if you have a background in Java, this Python & Java Side-by-Side Comparison does a nice job of not just laying out the differences, but in doing so describing what Python is. For me what is the most jarring is the lack of types. Which is weird, because I spent many years in grad school programming LISP, but I also spent a fair amount of time surrounded by proponents of strongly-typed languages. Between that and my current immersion in Java world, it makes me feel vaguely itchy to think about writing code without types. What if I try to add an int and a String? The world would end! Or at least it should!

For myself, my interest in Python comes from thinking about my upper level courses. With programming as a prerequisite, I can ask students to write Java programs, but Java can be unwieldy and I have wondered if I would be better off spending a couple of classes teaching Python and then have students write code in that. Or, even better, I could use Jython - an implementation of Python that runs via the JVM and lets programmers use the Java libraries in their Python code. I had never heard of this until my friend pointed it out, but it sounds perfect. Students can use the familiar and vast Java libraries, including nitpicky ones like Swing that take some practice, but avoid the complexity of writing a full-blown Java program. Assuming Jython works the way it sounds like it does - I guess I have a backburner project to work on now....

Posted by Amanda at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Are you interested in Web 2.0? Maybe you are taking a course on the topic soon. Hell, maybe you are teaching a course on the topic soon ;) Whatever it is, last month the new-to-me but old-to-the-internet Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication had a special issue on social network sites. Besides just trying to tackle the problem of defining a "social networking site" - which at least is a more manageable task than defining the mostly meaningless in my mind phrase "Web 2.0" - there is a a somewhat interesting study of who, demographically, does and does not use social networking sites. There is also an interesting article on identifying what in practice causes a reader to react to an email as a flame that connects nicely with a recent article in the New Scientist Blogs summarizing research on why people flame online when they would not behave the same way offline. Good stuff to bookmark and read when some free time comes along....

Posted by Amanda at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

This video of a SIGGRAPH07 demo is amazing - I really wasn't sure when I started watching it if I was understanding what was going on. It is showing a tool that, instead of having you resize an image by cropping or scaling find the least important portions of the image to remove or expand, even if they are not in simple vertical or horizontal bands. It seems be be based on finding low-energy paths through the image, where the definition of energy can be tweaked to get good results for the image in question. But you really need to watch the video to see how cool this is. [via Glark]

Posted by Amanda at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you know me, you may know that I fall pretty far on the information-privacy-over-convenience spectrum and can even be a bit paranoid. You would not be at all surprised that I liked this article on how to de-RFID your credit card. You might be interested that it involves a dremel tool and not a microwave.....

Posted by Amanda at 5:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If I knew any woodworking, I would absolutely make myself one of these beautiful binary marble adding machines. It's a six-bit binary adder, implemented with marbles and wooden toggles that allow for carrying. The page describes in a good bit of detail how it works, but if you just want the high-level overview, scroll to the bottom and watch the video demonstration. It's really pretty amazing.

Posted by Amanda at 7:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I haven't tried this out yet, but Frucall lets you comparison shop by calling them on your cell phone from a store and entering the bar code of what you're thinking of buying. [via Physics Geek] Their system will check in their database of products, providers, and prices and let you know a range of prices, where you can get that item, etc. It's a free service, from what I can see, except for whatever your cell phone provider charges for the call. If you are at your computer, you can also just search their database directly. I tried that much out with a couple of things I had lying around with bar codes on them, and it seemed pretty useful, when it actually had the product listed. It seems to tend towards electronics products, and not so much foodstuffs or random household goods.

Posted by Amanda at 11:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This weblog post has a really fun table contrasting current cyberattack techniques to those in classic cyberpunk stories, particularly Gibson's stories. [via Boing Boing] The comments are also worth reading - it's interesting to think about whether the difference indicate that we haven't come as far as Gibson predicted, or whether they reflect dated presumptions about how technology of the future would work on Gibson's part. The observations about the types of systems being attacked (focusing on the recent denial-of-service attack against Estonia) are particularly interesting, I think:

Cyberpunk stories: Cyber-attack targets were fancy-pants specialized computer installations accessible to few, such as military supercompters in Neuromancer’s backstory or the AI complex in its climax.

Real world: The cyber-attack target was the Estonian internet, which people used for everyday activities, from banking to email to looking at pictures of other people’s cats with funny captions.

Posted by Amanda at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'd love to see additional details on how schools collected their data to conclude that giving students their own laptop does not improve learning. [via Arts & Letters Daily] There are many examples cited of the laptops being a distraction or being used for frivolous or illicit purposes. This isn't at all shocking, and if laptops were otherwise improving learning this could likely be addressed through technological and disciplinary means. I've talked to someone at a small school that gives every student a laptop, and there are routine checks into the content on the laptop (no games or IM clients allowed) and laptop privileges are revoked if unauthorized uses are observed or detected.

However, that takes a broad school commitment to supporting laptops, and resources. And it seems like just the issues of repair and maintenance are a problem in many places - why do all schools seem to forget that part of the computing equation? It also doesn't sound like equivalent resources have been invested in these schools in educating teachers on how to teach with technology. Just because you know how to use a computer doesn't mean that you know how to teach to a room full of high school students with computers. Good schools hire someone, or any entire group of someones, who specializes in helping instructors integrate technology into their educational goals and style. Just purchasing hardware and putting it in the hands of students is not enough to expect improved education.

The thing that immediately jumped to my mind was whether these failures had any implications for the One Laptop per Child project that is building $100 laptops to distribute to children in developing countries. Clearly, education on their use is key, and it is my impression that that is being included in the project - these laptops aren't just being sent in crates. But I also suspect that deploying these laptops in a setting where there is very little computing available will lead to a different attitude about the technology than in a setting where many of the children would have access to a computer (if only in a public lab or library) even if their personal laptop were taken away.

Posted by Amanda at 8:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a Free Software Foundation member's meeting at MIT, and during the lunch break I overheard an interesting conversation. I cluster of five stereotypical geeks (male, bearded, pony-tailed, etc.) were talking. One of thm was regailing his friends ith a story of a clueless woman he had the misfortune of listening to talk about her computer usage. This woman was talking to a friend about typesetting a paper using LaTeX - it was later determined that she worked in some capacity in a physics lab. She described how it was good for equations and the friend asked if it was expensive. The woman thought and said that because they were part of the lab it was free, but that if you just had to buy it it was really expensive. She then thought a little more and noted that she knew someone who had it on their Mac and it was free, but she thought it didn't seem as good and was probably a knockoff. The group laughed and generally concurred that this woman was painfully clueless and generally ought not be allowed computers at all.

Continue reading "Free Software Advocacy" »

Posted by Amanda at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It's been making the rounds quickly, but if you haven't seen the Visual HTML Jokes pool over at flickr, it's worth a browse. Some are just puns, but others actually do a nice job illustrating what the tags do, like the header tag/skyline one. I could see a selection of these actually making for a nice presentation of html tags in a class....

Posted by Amanda at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am the excitedly proud new owner of a iRobot Create, basically a Roomba with the vaccuum parts ripped out and an attachment to let you program it in C or C++. So, first, I've got to go in to my office tomorrow and retrieve my copy of Kernighan & Ritchie. There's also a guide to WinAVR (the robot's development toolset for C/C++ programs) over at SourceForge that seems pretty good. Though - damn - I haven't had to deal with makefiles in forever...

Woooooo! Robots!!!!!!!

Posted by Amanda at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There seems to have been an explosion of carnivals since the last time I browsed the Blog Carnival Index. If you haven't seen a carnival before, it is a group that arranges for people to collect and link to posts on a particular theme on a weekly or monthly basis. It's hard to imagine you won't find something to interest you if you scan through their listings. Just now I lost myself in the latest entries from the Books Carnival, the Carnival of Chocolate, and the Carnival of Game Production. Carnivals seem to come and go, but they're an interesting halfway point between a portal and social bookmarking.

Posted by Amanda at 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've got a bunch of random integrated circuits left over from my intersession course so I think I'm going to try these tips on how to uncap/open various integrated circuits on a few of them [via Make: Blog]. The pictures in that guide aree really interesting just by themselves. Perhaps cooler is the weblog that the post is from μblog: engineering from the trenches, which is just filled up with cool geek content covering most of the spectrum of electrical engineering.

Posted by Amanda at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

As part of putting together a document about the courses I have been teaching, I decided I wanted to be able to share some screen capture video. I've done next to nothing with that sort of software, so I solicited recommendations and two people pointed me in the direction of Camtasia Studio. They have a 30 day demo version which, from the little that I tried, seems to give you access to a fairly complete version. I didn't use the audio or webcam functions, but it looks like it would be really easy to combine annotation from one of those sources over a screen capture video. The screen captures themselves looked really good - mine are only a bit jerky and it looked like I could have tweaked the settings to make them even smoother if I hadn't minded the file sizes growing even more. I've also done very little video editing in the past, but the built in tools, whle probably not as sophisticated as some of the stuff out there, seemed to be fairly robust. I really only scratched the surface with the software because I had a very targeted task I was trying to accomplish, but if you have any reason to want to create a video demo of something on your computer, particularly with commentary, I'd definitely recommend trying this software out.

Posted by Amanda at 5:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm getting down to the wire on a few projects, so here is some random fun to get you through the middle of the week....

I'm a huge Stephenson fan, so I'm excited that the SciFi channel is making a mini-series out of Diamond Age. It isn't my favorite Stephenson book, but I actually like it a lot - more than I think a lot of people do. I really love the idea of the instructional friend book/computer. It reminds me of some of the parts of Ender's Game I liked a lot. They're having Stephenson do the adaptation, so it might actually be good. And then maybe we'll get Snow Crash: The Movie!

More fun from the Make Blog: if you know how to wire up an LED without exploding it, you can do this Embarassingly Easy Case Mod. I have a feeling some of my readers will enjoy the radio-controlled potato gun. Finally, I must make myself this Tetris Tote Bag.

And, I must remember to tell my students about the Butterfly Amicus 3000 - a ping pong playing robot.

Posted by Amanda at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In class tomorrow we are going to talk about 5 variable Karnaugh maps, having just done 2-4 variable Karnaugh maps. I'm partial to the 5-variable versions pictured at that link with the diagonal lines to indicate the top versus bottom of the map. Working through some examples for my lecture notes today, I noticed that they look an awful lot like quilt patterns, like these traditional Nine-patch Blocks. I am now determined to design a quilt based around a five-variable boolean expression - I envision blue fabrics for true, white for false, and maybe yellow for don't cares. I just need to chose a good boolean expression, now. I'm thinking of looking for a good quote with an interesting logical structure that I can translate into an expression and go from there....

Posted by Amanda at 9:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There are tons of articles that have been written about the impact of e-mail, IM, text messaging and the link on communication, but this is the first article that I've read that discusses their impact on the scientific community [via A&L Daily]. Besides claiming that scientists communicate more informally using the internet than when written letters were the most common form of communication - a non-controversial claim - it looks at the historical impact of not having a tangible record of scientsts' communications. Analysis of conversation through letters has often been used to trace the path of ideas and ascertain scientists' original insights and though processes as compared to simply their published final product. It seems possible that this might have implications on patent cases or determination of scholarly credit as well. It's certainly the case that e-mail can be saved, but I think that most people delete messages or don't bother maintaining old archives as they move from account to account as they change jobs. Given that one can't really be sure what communications might be interesting in the future, it argues for more care being taken in electronic archival in general.

Posted by Amanda at 11:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I was looking for fun mini-projects last night over at instructables (I made this Simple Circuit Game today but with a buzzer instead of an LED during lab today - if you're local stop by and play!) and along the way I discovered a ton of instructions for office toy guns, mostly out of K'Nex. The video on the K'Nex Gatling Gun is really awesome. But then again, K'Nex are awesome. At the least, I want to dig mine out and make a K'Nex iPod dock.

Posted by Amanda at 10:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Relating to another colleague's intersession class, I lost a lot of time browsing the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods [via Boing Boing]. The periodic table itself is pretty nice, though I found it distracting that the abbreviations were not the expected abbreviations from the periodic table of elements. What would be great would be if, in addition to getting examples of the visualization methods on mouse-over, clicking took you to a page describing the method in detail. I also find their distinction between data and information visualization interesting - they seem to use a distinction similar to the one I often use in class but stressing to a greater degree the impact information, as compared to data, has on cognition - a distinction I might choose to borrow and stress myself next semester.

Posted by Amanda at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Actual Conversation:
Them: Guess what tomorrow is?
Me: What?
Them: MacWorld keynote!
Me: (sarcastic) wooo
Them: It is wooo! That's when we find out what all the cool new gadgets are.
Me: It's like a cult.
Them: Yeah - tomorrow is when we hear from our leader!
Me: I hope he doesn't tell you all to take multiple wives....

Posted by Amanda at 8:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Building on yesterday's post about the command-line interface, the same sorts of interface concerns play into this discussion of the renewed relevance of the vi input model when using a laptop [via Digg]. The argument is that, without a mouse and with generally poorly placed navigation keys, editing that centers on the home keys and minimizes complicated key combinations is ergonmically desirable. This actually relates nicely to an article I saw linked over at Slashdot about motivations behind the design of vi based on an interview with its creator Bill Joy. The liimiting factors back then were certainly different than those motivating a continued interest in the editor:

It was really hard to do because you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty slow. 9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way slower. So the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think.

Posted by Amanda at 3:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I had a conversation a few weeks ago about frustrations that current OSs, or at least their documentation/presentation, overly obfuscate the ability of users to have a command-line interface as wll as a graphical one, reflecting an invalid, in my opinion, assumption that only hard-core power users would ever want a command-line interface. Over at Lifehacker, there is a really nice analysis of the current incarnation of the command-line embedded in our GUIs. Intuitively, this model of the merging of the two approaches to interaction feels right to me. A trivial example of my own habits is that I always call up the Windows built in calculator by hitting the Windows key, up arrow twice to Run..., and type "calc". It's faster than puttiing an icon shortcut, and I also don't want another icon floating around my toolbar. Especially for the calculator, which is something that I only use occassionally, but when I do use it I want quick access. It would be nice if the GUI defaults made it clearer to the average user that these capabilities are available to them.

Posted by Amanda at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is probably the best electronic hacker project I've seen ever: a computer-controlled push puppet for IM notifications. [via JK] How can you go wrong? You get to build a neat robot thing, attached to a cuddly puppet dog, and it contributes to your IM addiction by letting you know when your friends are around! Scroll down for the video - soooo cute! It's enough to make me switch to Linux....

Posted by Amanda at 2:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

It's too bad I'm not teaching my Cyberattacks class again this January, because the Month of Apple Bugs would be a great resource. I always run that class on Windows PCs because, statistically, there are just more Windows exploits out there right now, but it's important to remember that no operating system is immune from exploits. We should definitely expect that, as Apple continues to grow their market share, OS X exploits will become more common too. What's interesting is the number of exploits that aren't just coming through traditional operating system holes anymore, but are taking advantage of online services that play some of the roles of an operating system, such as the recent Gmail address book vulnerability. None of the cases I've seen seem to require predictions of doom and destruction, but I anticpate that the next difficult push in security education is going to be educating the average user about the sheer breadth of vulnerable points in their average computer usage.

Posted by Amanda at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There are details to nit-pick, such as the fact that the electricity to run the players' PCs seems to be double counted into both the cost of the avatar and the cost of the human player, but this calculation that Second Life avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians is pretty interesting [via Clicked]. It's an interesting ecological assessment of a new entertainment form, and a really interesting comparison of global resource consumption.

Posted by Amanda at 10:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was talking with a colleague on Friday about the legality of backing up a video found online to an internal server as a safeguard for still being able to view the film in a class setting even if the network, or the film's server, goes down when one is planning to use it. While it is not entirely the same situation, the first item on the Copyright Office's list of exemptions from DCMA copying restrictions certainly suggests that doing so is not inconsistent with the Copyright Office's interpretation of fair use:

Audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university’s film or media studies department, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors.

Other entries on the list of note include permission to break protection if the hardware it is on is obsolete, if the protections make the material inaccessible to the visually impaired, or if the purpose of the circumvention is to do security research.

Posted by Amanda at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the past week, some very different do-it-yourself projects have come across the MAKE: Blog:

Building a crystal radio out of household items,

Mak e a resistor man! (sooooo cute!),

make an LED Popsicle stick picture frame,

and a bit late from the holidays, Make a Pecan pie based Icosahdron, aka the pie-cosahedron.

Posted by Amanda at 9:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was chatting with some colleagues about what new holiday gadgets they are coveting, and was surprised that there isn't really a major toy coming out that I'm interested in. And then I saw the new Altair 8800 kit [via Boing Boing]. I have no practical use for this thing, but I think it would be a blast to play with. The "differences/comparison pictures" section of the site is really well done - I recommend it as well as the more obvious technical documentation sections for a picture of how these are actually being built.

Posted by Amanda at 7:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In one of the cutest hacks I've seen in a while, someone uses the Powerbook motion sensor to power a software marionette [via MAKE: Blog]. The applet code is included - it draws on a library for accessing the Sudden Motion Sensor, but there are links provided to a couple of such libraries, if you are interested in trying this hack out for yourself. At the least, go check out the great videos of the marionette in action.

Posted by Amanda at 12:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

I know that good weblogger style would suggest that I shouldn't link to another of ze's videoblogs so soon, but I've been catching up after not web surfing much the past couple of weeks and couldn't resist pointing people towards his tips for hiring a web developer, starting with what their personal appearance says about their development aesthetic. Very funny, in a "I wish it weren't kind of true" way.

Posted by Amanda at 11:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There are some in-jokes that a casual viewer will miss, but I still recommend episode two of zefrank explaining videoblogging. If you're interested in web 2.0 publishing, you'll like his rundown of videoblogging style guidelines, and if you follow videoblogs (or web popularity in general) you'll like his snark about rankings and traffic measurements.

Posted by Amanda at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While taken from real life conversation in an ad agency, I suspect these "overheard" snippets of conversation at advertising agencies will ring true to anyone working with clients on design [via India, Ink]. Sure, much like "stupid user" humor, the humor is a catharsis but the professional has to realize that part of their job is to facilitate conversation with non-experts without demeaning them. On the other hand, how can you not love:

"I like the design but I think it ‘ll look better stripping all graphical elements, it ‘ll look more web 2.0-ish" (Agency, Creative Director to Designer)

“It’s amazing how well you interpreted the brief. This piece is exactly what we wanted, you could not have made it any better, I love it. But I also think it’s too good. This is for a bigger client, a more international one. We’re not like that. See if you can do something shittier that we can use.” (Client, Marketing Manager)

Posted by Amanda at 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In an interesting detour in the question of what "Web 2.0" really means, Nicholas Carr (of "Does IT Matter" fame) takes on Lessig in his weblog post Web 2.0lier than thou and challenges Lessig's claim that Web 2.0 is synonymous with unrestricted sharing of information (and consequently that services with built in restrictions such as YouTube are not Web 2.0). Carr asserts that this is not an accurate portrayal of the current web, and that Lessig's moralistic take on Web 2.0 is idealistic utopianism. All of the sharing just furthers industry and in fact exploits th creative individual by asking them to provide the content from which industry will now profit without any financial benefit to themselves. If anything, Carr claims, Web 2.0 is exploitive.

I know that except for a de.licio.us account I basically avoid contributing content off of my own domain because I don't want to give up that much control. But, really, I don't see the essential difference between Facebook and YouTube as compared to usenet and personal webpages and weblogs and Wikipedia. There's no revolution - the media just wants a new buzz word under which to rerun the same gee whiz stories they've been running for the past decade.

Posted by Amanda at 11:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Computing changes our world - not a new idea - but this registration-required NYTimes essay (you're using BugMeNot, right?) summarizes what some computer scientists think is, and isn't, coming. Predictions? More interdisciplinary impact and more policy issues requiring knowledgable leadership. Data mining in social networks as a promenent theme (I'm guessing the whiteboard scribbles in the photo at the top of the page are illustrating clusters...) It all suggests to me that getting more people educated about the fundamental capabilities of techology and the implications of its use is going to get more important to us over the next decade too.

Posted by Amanda at 7:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The newly popular Warning Signs for Tomorrow are half hilarious and half thought provoking. On the one hand, there are signs I'm tempted to hang on my office door, and on the other hand there are warning signs that, ethically speaking, we ought to have right now. I think, given the point in the semester we're at right now, that Cognitive Hazard is resonating with me the most closely.

Posted by Amanda at 12:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

After the rash of articles about how "young people" don't use e-mail anymore (and, by the way, how in the world does that work??? IM is a nice tool and I use it too, but it can't seriously be an e-mail replacement, can it?) it is now being reporrted that the majority of MySpace visitors and a significant portion of visitors to other social networking sites are over 35 [via Clicked].

First, I spent some time poking around the comScore website trying to figure out exactly how they determine the demograpics they claim to be measuring with their Mdia Metrix but have not found anything. So, I'm maintaining reservations about the reliability of the data, though they are taking a good sized sample.

But if one takes the results as accurate, a couple of other interesting facts fall out. For example, the press release says that MySpace and Friendster are skewing older, but that Facebook attracts a college-aged demographic and Xanga a teen to pre-teen demographic. This is true in one view of the data - of the 18-24 year olds viewing a social networking site, the largest percentage, 34%, are visiting Facebook. But, and this is of particular relevance to all of those students who say that Facebook is a closed setting, 41% of the visitors to Facebook are 35 or older. The niche theory seems flawed. In particular, it seems that younger users are more likly to flock to the newest systems, whereas older users, often with less free time on their hands, will stick with something that is working for them. Hardly a shock - isn't this why so much advertising targets the teen and young adult markets?

Posted by Amanda at 8:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

David Brin laments the lack of simple built-in programming environments on personal comptuters [via Slashdot]. I too remember learning to program on my Apple IIe - if you turned on the computer without a programmed disk in the drive, you fell into BASIC, and I copied many listigs out of magaziines or books and played around with their functionality. Brin is entirely right - this type of built-in, no-fuss programming environment got a lot of us started.

Now, there are still command-line options. My programming students download Java off the Sun website and compile and run from the DOS prompt, and they could use Notepad to write their code, though I think a more supportive editor is desirable. But, Java isn't accessible in the same was BASIC was. And installing and running it this way requires some wrangling with your PATH environment variable - particularly if you have Quicktime installed.

And Brin points out that even if you can fairly quickly get a Java environment (or C++, or.....) going on your computer, these alternatives do not match the advantages of BASIC. I'm not going to head down the path of arguing comparative programming languages, though I think there are other programming languages that can be interesting tools for early exposure (okay, I'll just mention LISP and its functional ilk.....) but will agree that our modern robust languages don't lend themselves to back-of-the-book, type-it-in experimentation.

The whole article is a really good read, but Brin's bottom line point is that without this ease of experimentation, today's children will grow up with the computer being a perevasive tool but no more understanding of how it really works than most of my generation has of the workings of our car (especially compared to the knowledge of our grandparents). Says Brin:

The parallel technology of the '70s generation was IT. Not every boomer soldered an Altair from a kit, or mastered the arcana of DBASE. But enough of them did so that we got the Internet and Web. We got Moore's Law and other marvels. We got a chance to ride another great technological wave.

I thtink Brin is a bit too dismissive of the value of "information consumption devices" when engineering and used properly. But given that there is no technological reason why such devices can't also allow easy access to minimal programming environments, I think he is right to question whether we are advancing ourselves beyond a point that invites the energy and enthusiasm of novices and hobbyists.

Posted by Amanda at 5:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The latest Craigslist kerfluffle described here at Slashdot reminds me of the case from about a year and a half ago of someone posting their chat sessions with a plagiarist soliciting them for an essay. In both cases, you have people assuming that their one-on-one conversations will be kept private and sharing information with a complete stranger that they would not want made public.

Clearly, this is not a nice thing to do. I think it is also unethical - unlike the plagiarism case where the recipient of the advances was able to check that such behavior was prohibited at the student's school, there is no reason to believe that what these people are doing is wrong, even if they are married. Certainly, it is anti-social. The same "experimental results" about rates and types of responses to an on-line solicitation could have been reported while ensuring the respondants identities.

But, it is unbelievably stupid to not assume this will happen every time you share personal information over the internet. One response has been that this type of revelation of personal information is illegal, citing Washington state law. I hope the problem with this objection is obvious - not everyone on the internet is governed by the same laws - they may be in different states or countries. In short, there is no way to stop this without fundamentally changing the structure of the internet.

It's simple - if you wouldn't say it to your mom, your boss, your best friend, your worst enemy, and your next door neighbor, don't say it on the internet to a complete stranger!

Posted by Amanda at 7:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The latest post at India, Ink about using templates in document formatting software made me feel a little guilty, but reminded me why I actually miss LaTeX a little bit. I really don't understand styles and templates in MSWord, which I used to format my most recent couple of papers, and while it is nice to throw together a handout without having to wrestle with LaTeX, I missed its clarity of structure when dealing with sub-sub-sections and captioning figures and including citations (BibTeX, I miss you so....)

The point at that we ought to learn to use our tools is valid. However, I do think a tool like MSWord discourages us from really learning to use it as a document design tool as compared to a document layout tool. All of the things that are made easy or provided with icons have to do with forcing a particular view of a specific piece of text. You can select a paragraph and change its indentation, font or alignment with a single button-click or keyboard shortcut. You can create an entire document in "normal" style, and it looks fine to the eye. But, as India notes, this doesn't scale, and it isn't reusable. It is horrid design.

And yet, while LaTeX puts the design issues front and center, MSWord makes the process more mysterious. Perhaps it can do this, and I have never found the feature, but being able to show the user a marked up version of their text, like the switch between the WYSIWYG and HTML panes in Frontpage, would help, but I've only been able to check my designated style by highlighting the text of interest and seeing what the style menu says it is in. Not good for a quick consistency check across a whole document!

I am picking on MSWord, only because I've been using it for forever, but the criticism holds for the other WYSIWYG text editors I've used as well. They may allow good document design, but they don't make it easy. I suspect that India is working with way more high-powered tools than these, but I think her point stands that we don't worry about the design of our text documents the way we ought to, particularly when there is so much potential for them to change presentation format, and the consumer grade tools ought to address this.

Posted by Amanda at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

It's almost become a cliche to say that we have so much information now that our biggest challenge is finding the relevant pieces, not making sense of them. And this is a fairly representative article cheerleading for the new technologies that will help with data search, focusing on data mining and the construction of a federated solution that can normalize across very different data sources with different base formats. But this is also a representative article in the misleading way that it blithely says what technologies will allow us to do, with no discussion of where we are now on these projects, what the hard problems remaining are, and realistically assessing how far away these solutions really are. As just a sampling of claims:

"By automatically classifying, summarizing, and discovering the "who," "what," "where" and "when" of each document, publishers, government organizations, and enterprises can do more than ever before -- on a massive scale."

"Visualizations allow users to quickly sift through and locate information and patterns in hierarchical, relational, tabular, or time-based data sets;"

"This new generation of solutions will need to go deeper than keyword search -- it will require a deep understanding of language, to lend structure to unstructured data for use in downstream analysis and assessment."

and the closing statement :"The world's data is at your fingertips - where it should be."

There is a single acknowledgment of fallability when it is mentioned that people can look at the output of an information extraction system to give feedback to improve the accuracy. But overall, this article reads as if all of these promises are a year or two away. Particularly when it comes to all of the claims about systems being able to handle widely diverse data sources in widely different structural formats, including free-form text, this is just flat wrong. On top of that, the ethical barriers to developing and deploying such solutions aren't mentioned at all.

All of the technologies mentioned do come out of the problems researchers want to solve, but the business community is not going to get the universal tools that are described here any time soon.

Posted by Amanda at 7:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had a sense of deja vu watching tonight's episode of Mythbusters (Episode 59: Crimes and Myth-Demeanors 2) where they test the claims that various high tech security systems are intrusion proof - including fingerprint scanners! As I mentioned in my entry earlier this month, my Cyberattacks intersession course tried this same thing, though only with the small computer access scanner, not the major door access scanner Mythbusters featured. They, too, were able to beat the scanners, using more sophisticated techniques, but also being able to use a more plausible method of fingerprint capture. Whereas I like to think that my class and I were testing the myth that these things are vulnerable to spoofs using household materials.

The entire episode is actually worth catching in reruns (which the Discovery channel seem to run constantly) - they came up with some ludicrously simple methods for testing thermal and sonar sensors as well. It's really fairly damning.

Posted by Amanda at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Of course, having decided to try browsing via RSS feeds a few days ago (and, btw, I am loving the convenience of seeing which of the pages I read regularly has new content), Slashdot has to link to a whitepaper describing the security risks in subscribing to RSS and Atom feeds. They're what you would expect - the standard potential for the site owner to insert malicious code in the feed, along with concerns that, because of the ability to put third-party feeds in what might be an otherwise trusted site, feeds allow insertion of exploits into new realms. The advice seems to be to only subscribe to feeds at trustworthy sites, be careful about subscribing to feeds that include third-party content such as comments if they aren't filtered for malicious code, and set your browser preferences to disallow embedded code from running amok on your computer.

I've actually been catching up on my security reading the past week, and it reminded me that I never posted a link here to my write-up of our end-of-the-course project in my Cyberattacks class this past January, where we spoofed an APC and a Microsoft fingerprint scanner using modeling clay, wax, and other household materials. I managed to capture some video of the spoofs working, which is linked on the page, but I also tried to give a fairly detailed description of what did and didn't work.

Posted by Amanda at 5:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The ACM"s public policy weblog has a nice discussion of Congress's need for scientific and technical advice, prompted by a hearing on Tuesday on the topic. As in most other domains, the need for advice comes not from a lack of information, but rather from information overload, and specifically highly technical information overload:

Congress does not face an information shortage. Each day hundreds of documents are dumped on Congress, many of them dealing with technical issues. One witness said that staffers now receive about 200 e-mails daily from advocacy groups. Numerous groups provide scientific advice to Congress including think tanks, professional societies (such as ACM), the National Academies, governmental agencies, and even Congress’ own research service. None of the witnesses argued Congress needed more scientific and technical advice. They argued it needed independent advice that was more closely aligned with Congress’ needs, and that this need couldn’t be fulfilled by the various outside groups.

Particularly interesting was the analysis of how the lack of interest in reconstituting the old Office of Technology Assessment would impact the effectiveness of organizations such as the ACM providing technical advice. There was a definite note of frustration in the article, though I wonder if anyone is really surprised by the observation that under the current system scientific recommendations often take a back seat to political recommendations. Not having a codified method for collecting such input is probably indicative of a lowered interest in such input, but it doesn't follow that a centralized clearinghouse for technical advice will guarantee that it is listened to.

At its heart, this seems like an education issue to me - so long as it is socially acceptable for even "well-educated" people to say that math and science are "hard" and beyond their grasp or interest, our government representatives are unlikely to have the inclination or abilities to evaluate even well-presented technical arguments.

Posted by Amanda at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

An interesting pair of articles about the privacy implications of Web 2.0 applications came through on Slashdot and Digg respectively last week. The first linked the Louisiana State University in Shreveport's Career Services reprint of an article about the impact of social network sites on getting hired. It mentions that even people who think they are being careful by restricting access to their on-line content might find it accessed by a potential employer, citing a specific case in which a state agency obtained access to restricted Facebook pages due to provision of the Patriot Act. It also reiterates the necessary point that these sites need to be treated as public, not private spaces. Interestingly, the article also suggests that it is ethically questionable for an employer to look at these sites for background on a potential employee. I think that it is a mistake for an employer to take standard goofiness too sereiously, but I think that it is totally natural for them to Google applicant names or look in other public sites. That is, at least, content that an applicant has power over, as compared to employers asking colleagues who previously knew the applicant for feedback, which definitely happens.

The second article talks about steps you can take to clean up your on-line presence, particularly prior to a job search. Soberingly, its first recommendation is to Google yourself, but suggests that if there is something unflattering that appears about you, there is little you can do about it.

Posted by Amanda at 12:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I ran through my planned trial week with Opera, and I've decided to go back to Firefox. I definitely think that Opera has fewer memory leaks, which is a plus, and I really like the session manager. However, it never felt right - there were differences switching from IE to Firefox, but Firefox was never irritating. Opera never seemed intuitive about when it opened things in the same window as compared to in a new tab, as compared to some strange sub-window to a tab. I had trouble getting it to put and keep my bookmarks in the order I wanted. I couldn't right-click on a bookmark or tab to change its properties or open it in a new tab or window. All together, it didn't work for the way that I wanted to use it.

So, I set up a Firefox extension to enable a session manager for it, which will also enable me to close Firefox on a regular basis even if I haven't finished with all of my tabs. I'm almost tempted to try out the Firefox 2.0 beta, but I think I've had enough browser fun for the month.

Posted by Amanda at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I have a basic familiarity with Photoshop, and use it for the little photo editing that I do, but I know there are lots of capabilities to the software that I am not utilizing, so this description of using Photoshop filters to sharpen focus on a photo element was really useful, though I haven't found a photo with which to try it yet. I like how the article uses terminology like "depth of field", but doesn't assume that I know exactly what that is or how to use it in my photography. It's really a lesson in how to take good photographs, but explains how you can use Photoshop to tweak settings instead of having to get everything perfect at the moment you take the picture. I'll definitely be trying some of this out. [via Digg]

Posted by Amanda at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After hearing some positive feedback, I've decided to try out the Opera browser for the next week. I've been using Firefox, and I loooooove tabbed browsing, but it leaks memory like a sieve, at least for me. Opera, at first glance, seems to have many of the same nice features, plus it has a built-in setting that you can close your browser and have it reopen to the same set of tabs - it is possible there is a plug-in for Firefox that does this, but I haven't seen it yet. Opera is acting a little sluggish for me, but Iit's possible that's just my wireless connection being cranky tonight.

Expect to hear back from me next week about my thoughts after a week of use. I will say that I really like how easy all of the browsers make it to transfer your bookmarks back and forth between them - way nicer than the bad old days....

Posted by Amanda at 6:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This Slate dissection of the new Apple ad campaign says pretty much what I was starting to think about the ads. They're funny and I enjoy them, but over the past few times I have seen them, I've started to feel sorry for the PC guy. I want him to point out, in the ad about having fun, that he's going to play the latest shiny new computer games that aren't yet out on the Mac. Or that at least when the cable modem guy shows up to turn on his internet, he'll know how to get the IP address on a PC.

I mean, I'm actually partial to the Apple side of the argument, and have seen many examples recently of the same task going smoother on a Mac than a PC. But I think that some portion of the "wow, it's all so easy all of a sudden" factor people have when the move to a Mac is that they are moving to a new computer.

Damn it Apple - Macs are good geek computers too! You can build databases and write code on them! Give the geek guy some love!

Posted by Amanda at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a great story of social engineering, wherein USB drives are "dropped" around a bank and employees pick them up and plug them into bank computers [via Slashdot]. This was done as part of a security audit, and what is particuarly interesting is that the employees knew a security audit was being done and knew that social engineering attacks were going to be attempted. The results:

Of the 20 USB drives we planted, 15 were found by employees, and all had been plugged into company computers. The data we obtained helped us to compromise additional systems, and the best part of the whole scheme was its convenience. We never broke a sweat. Everything that needed to happen did, and in a way it was completely transparent to the users, the network, and credit union management.

This is reminiscent of a similar social engineering test I read about maybe a year ago, where free CDs were given out on the street. The lure of free stuff is hard to combat. And, thinking about it, if I found a USB drive left in my classroom, I very well might put it in my computer to see if I could identify who it belonged to. It's the old tension between perfect security requiring people to eliminate their instincts for trust and helpfulness.

I wonder what would happen if you tried the experiment with something dropped around a place that might be biologically contaminated - pieces of candy, say. How many people would take it and eat it?

Posted by Amanda at 3:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a well-written discussion of the privacy concerns with Web 2.0, including a nice dissection of how the most reasonable business model for the growing number of social networking style sites is their use as data mining sources for a company's other operations [via Clicked]. For example,

Flickr is perhaps one of the most interesting ones. Search for 'cat', and Flickr will record the most popular photo clicked. By associating the colour and picture data within photos with keywords used to search, Yahoo is slowly building a database of human identification. It has often said that the differentiator between Yahoo and Google, going forward, is that Yahoo wants the web processed by humans and Google wants it done by robots. Google uses algorithms to generate anything to do with its business. Yahoo, with its acquisition of Flickr and Delicious and whatever else is on the horizon, wants people - and social networks - to define how it does business.

I like this example a lot as an illustration of the motivations of business for supporting Web 2.0 activities, but it is a bit removed from the problem of personal privacy violations. What scares me the most is the accessiblity and marketing of these tools to increasingly younger and less savvy audiences who may not consider that what they put out there on the internet will be there forever, and that not everyone viewing your information is your friend.

It is tempting to be part of a community - particularly one that it seems so easy to get into and that puts so few real demands on one. But the online communities being built seem predicated on sharing about oneself in a biographical manner - where are you from? What do you do? Show me a picture. Tell me what you like to listen to, or watch, or do. This is, I think, somewhat unlike some of the earlier on-line communities built around BBSs or MUDs or so on, which allowed and really supported a wide range of personal revealment.

I'm interested to see where this plays out in the next five years.

Posted by Amanda at 5:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Animator vs. Animation is a very good flash animation reminiscent of the Bugs Bunny vs. Animator cartoons, but in a digital world [via Clicked]. I'm most impressed by how much is going on in the video - I watched it a couple of times to try to get everything that is going on, and even then by the end it gets pretty chaotic.

Posted by Amanda at 3:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There are a number of websites that do interesting "before and after" demonstrations of photo retouching, but this one from a professional photographer is particularly interesting because it doesn't just cover fashion photos and comes from the perspective of somebody who actually does this for a living.

Posted by Amanda at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you have ever enjoyed anything I have linked to, you will go listen to the song Code Monkey (just click on the "Code Monkey" link under the blurb). It is birlliant and true and funny and I am geeking out to this song in my office, to the dismay of the student who just came by to ask a question.

I actually aquired a code monkey of my own last summer (he is purple and plush and from Seattle, as many good code monkeys are), and perhaps I'll finally bring him in to the office with me tomorrow.

Posted by Amanda at 2:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A number of people pointed out the Key Katcher at ThinkGeek to me yesterday. I"d love to get my hands on one of these to try it out, but it seems very simple. I wondered how long it would take the average user to generate 130,000 keystrokes - how easy or frequent does rerieval need to be if you're hoping to catch a password?

Of course, the product description doesn't mention that as a use, focusing on putting it on your own machine to identify if an unauthorized user accessed it, or for sys admins to use to see what exactly triggered a problem.

Posted by Amanda at 8:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been meaning to look into how the image search engine Pixsy actually works, as it's been getting a lot of attention. I poked around on their site and couldn't find any explanation of their methods, but from trying out some searches, it doesn't appear that they are doing any actual image processing, just doing text processing for text and tags in proiximity to images they are indexing.

This theory is supported by my discovery that the top 5 out of 12 image results on the query term "ufo" are pictures of quilts. Which absolutely cracks me up in how right, and yet wrong, they are.

Interestingly, the first 500 images returned in Google's image search contain many weird things, but no craft-project pictures. I am undecided about whether this makes me like Google search more or less.

Posted by Amanda at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I originally intended just to point out this interesting post about the success of "ugly" design, arguing that unattractive sites such as del.icio.us are successful because the lack of design communicates to the user a lack of marketing or corporate influence.

But then I found a response to the conversation that I liked even more: disambiguity's separating of information/interaction design from visual design. And, having just talked to one of my classes about the distinction between logical versus physical tags and why one might use one over the other, I liked seeing the point made that a site with good information and interaction design but poor visual design can succeed (and the ugly design examples given in the first link would fall in that catagory) whereas good visual design without good information and interaction design will fail. Of course, the ideal is to have both, but what this conversation is really about is the fact that it is rare to have both, and so there is a clear prefernce for which to focus on, if you will only do one.

Also worth reading is the contrast of the old and redesigned Craig's List at the bottom of the disambiguity article.

Posted by Amanda at 2:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The ACM technology policy weblog has a nice summary of and response to H.R. 4127 regarding stronger data security requirements for businesses. The highlights include requiring data security plans and notification if security is breached.

But be sure to scan down for their discussion of the exemption from notification if the compromised data is encrypted, and why this is a dangerous loophole.

It reminds me of a recent experience talking about security principles to a general audience - one of the hardest concepts to get them to accept was the idea that redundant or layered security is necessary, and single potential points of failure must be avoided. There is definitely a perception that there should be some tool or technique for ensuring security. Here, data encryption seems to be the magic bullet.

Posted by Amanda at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A recent article discusses the goal of building AI that anticipates user desires, opening with the following teaser:

MANY viewers were probably impressed when a character on Star Trek asked a computer for a cup of tea and it was produced immediately. Not Kristian Hammond. "I wondered why he had to ask," says Hammond, co-director of America's Northwestern University intelligent information computer lab. "A truly intelligent machine would anticipate that its operator wanted tea."

If you read the rest of the article, you see that their actual project is a bit more sensible in scope, looking at how AI can refine information search and extraction based on contextual knowledge about a user - either historical or current. It's particularly interesting that there seems to be interest in having the tool search out information about the user as well to inform the refinement process. But after the introduction to the article, I couldn't help but think of the following quote from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy about the Nutrimatic drink dispenser:

When the 'Drink' button is pressed it makes an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's brain to see what is likely to be well received. However, no-one knows quite why it does this because it then invariably delivers a cupful of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

Posted by Amanda at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Like Google Earth, but with fewer roads so far (though, you can check up on the locations of Spirit and Opportunity): Google Mars! Check out both an elevation-shaded and an actual image at an impressive range of zooms. At this point only covers a limited chunk of the western hemisphere. They hope to tie it into the Google Earth client in the future to allow fly-throughs and such.

Posted by Amanda at 1:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am in awe of this LEGO Technic Difference Engine, a scaled down but fully functional version of Babbage's Difference Engine built entirely out of LEGO. Besides being an amazing feat of LEGO engineering, the web page itself has a great description of the Difference Engine and how it computes. Absolutely wonderful!

Posted by Amanda at 6:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have been using the personalized on-line radio service Pandora for the past few weeks and enjoying it, but only heard about Last.fm while reading this wonderful weblog post contrasting the recommendation algorithms behind the two systems. The post as a whole is a great read, but I particularly like its discussion of how context is relevant to selecting the superior technology. I would love to see a study that actually considered whether a collaborative filter or an attribute analysis approach was more effective in the context of music. Anecdotally, I'm going to try Last.fm out for a week or two and see what seems to work better for me. Krause found that for him, Last.fm was better, but suggested that Pandora holds more promise for incorporating some of the advantages of Last.fm and continuing to improve.

Of course, Krause makes the key point early in his post: "better algorithms are nice, but better data is nicer". For music recommendations, the system that heppens to know more about the music you happen to like will probably be the best system for you.

Posted by Amanda at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I haven't read up about how this works yet, but theMr. Angry and Dr. Smile optical illusion (scroll down) is really freaky. I ought to read the article - it might be interesting for one of my spring classes.

Posted by Amanda at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I know I've read about this in the past, and yet I always forget: the EFF reports on color laser printers putting tracking info in your printouts. So, yes, if you print something on a color laser printer, it is possible there is an embedded code which would allow the printout to be tracked back to the printer that produced it. The EFF page has some nice information about finding and decodinig the yellow dots used for these markings, as well as a list of printers that do and do not print these tracking dots. They are continuing to update their list, so if a printer you use isn't listed, don't forget to check back later. I'll be checking whether the one at my office is on the list on Monday.

Posted by Amanda at 9:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A very cute video mixing images of one of my earliest Apple toys with advertising of my newest Apple toy. Keep your eyes out for the brief appearance of a wristband late in the video!

Edited to add: Another fun iPod add spoof: Real life iPod guy in Apple Store

More editing: The original link to the ipod nano commercial spoof is broken due to overwhelmed bandwidth, but you can also find the video at ifilm.com.

Posted by Amanda at 3:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you're in the greater Pittsburgh area, make your way to South Hills Village Mall Saturday morning for the grand opening of the region's newest computer shot: the Apple Store - South Hills Village! They'll open at 10:00 AM and the first 1000 people get a free Apple T-shirt! Maybe they'll even have some nanos in stock....

Posted by Amanda at 9:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In another example of being late to the game, I started playing around with iTunes over the summer, and finally started rating some songs to improve my use of iTunes Party Shuffle. Just in time, Slashdot points to this neat statistical analysis of using rated Party Shuffle versus random Party Shuffle. Besides doing a nice experiment to measure the bias that rated shuffle has towards each star level, there's also a nice mathematical justification for why you may hear fewer 5-stars than 3-stars and even the occasional repeated song.

I was surprised that unrated songs, on rated shuffle, only come up about 4% of the time versus 1-star songs, which come up about 12% of the time. That is, if you don't like something, you're better off not rating it at all than giving it a low rating. I'm not sure that's entirely intuitive - I had been thinking of three stars as neutral towards a song, and it seems that iTunes assumes that if you rate a song, you at least like it a little. So, iTunes ratings stars do not translate to Amazon ratings stars.

Posted by Amanda at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mark your calendars and warm up the cable modem, the ACM Turing Award Lecture will be webcast live from 6:00 - 7:30 PM EDT. The 2004 recipients of the award, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, will be speaking on Assessing the Internet: Lessons Learned, Strategies for Evolution, and Future Possibilities. I know it's just what I'll be looking for after an all-day faculty meeting and less than 48 hours until my first class of the semester!

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yes, it's been slashdotted, but Google Moon is still cool (be sure to zoom in all the way). However, the Google toy that you must play with is Google Earth. You have to download their tool and it's only working on PCs so far, but it's even more amazing than their description suggests. You can get driving directions overlayed on a satellite map, and then watch a zoom-through simulation of the route. There's not just pan, zoom, and rotate, but also tilt capabilities. Within the US, but not all other countries, it will label the roads on the image, point out areas of interest, or even indicate all restaurants and hotels in the area, with mouseover giving you the address, phone number, and a link to do a Google Search on the establishment. It's just unreal.

Playing with it the other night, I managed to find something that is puzzling me though. There appears to be an absolutely immense structure, strongly resembling a solar panel, in Kenya, and I can't figure out what it is. To find it, either go to Nairobi, Kenya and, at an eye altitude of about 20 miles, pan to the east, or go directly to 1 degree 14' 40.60" S, 37 degrees 01' 04.06" E. What is that thing?!?!

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Late last week Google was sent a letter from a representative of the Association of American University Presses regarding concerns with Google's Print for Libraries program, laying out a number of unanswered questions and suggesting that unlike the Print for Publishers program, in this case Google is crossing over the "fair use" line. It's a rational presentation of the concerns of these publishers, and I'm keeping my eyes open for the response from Google.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

These types of articles are usually fun, but I liked this discussion of hacking competitions at Def Con. It was interesting that the winning teams for the capture-the-flag competition were academic teams.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Why couldn't I have seen this earlier?!?! It was just a day ago that I was talking about the differences between ranking functions in different search engines and shuffling two different windows around on the screen to illustrate how (honestly, I swear) Google and Yahoo differed in their results on different queries. And then this morning I find out about YaGooHoo!gle. [via Bitch. Ph.D.] Educational fun for the whole family! As entertaining to say as it is to use! Double the searching power of your standard search engine!

Why yes, I did have an extra cup of coffee this morning. Why do you ask?

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

*Sigh* I had been sitting on this link to the Christie's auction of the Origins of Cyberspace collection for a week, not getting around to posting it, but I guess it's old news now. The collection is amazing, and I actually hope that a group will be able to purchase the whole thing to keep it together (and presumably display it). If not, one starts asking how much they would pay for a copy of the original notes from Godel's lecture "On undecidable propositions of formal mathematical systems". Estimated at $2000! Or pick up a 1920's IBM manual for only $1200! A first edition of the Newell, Shaw & Simon paper on chess playing programs at $1500! First edition Turing on "Computing machinery and intelligence"? $3000. Or go whole hog on the $10,000 first edition of Shannon's master's thesis. Old books are one of my weaknesses, and the thought of actually owning some of these things makes me drool. Mmmmmmm ... von Neumann.....

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over at American Scientist, Naming Names is a great article about the rate at which we are using up our various namespaces - online, and in the physical world. Just clicking through to look at the figures is informative (there are some very nice ones). I enjoyed the analysis of how full a namespace has to get before it becomes too difficult to find a unique name.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week, Google announced that they would be partnering with U. Michigan, Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, and the New York Public Library to make their entire collections searchable through a Google interface. Public-domain works will be available in their entirety and works still under copyright will have snippets returned along with information on where the works can be obtained. Google has set up their own Google Print page describing the project. They claim that they already have a Beta version working, but it's clearly very Beta - if you type in the name of a Shakespeare play, you get a study guide for the play that was scanned in, and not the full text of the actual play, even though there are many sites out there that make the plays available. And "Shakespeare King Lear" doesn't trigger a book result, while "King Lear" alone does.

I think this is a really awesome project and can't wait to see if it actually works out, but I think that they'll need much of the six years they project their scanning to take in order for it to really take off.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I realized this afternoon I needed to read up on RFID technology. The RFID Journal's FAQ is a good starting place, though privacy concerns didn't make the list. In fact, if you check the RFID Journal's Security topic section, you'll see that it only talks about using RFID to secure your merchandise (or children) and to prevent terrorism. No talk of securing the RFID signal against undesired snooping. And if that doesn't bother you, how about the fact that Walmart is going to require its suppliers to RFID tag all of their pallets by January 1, 2005. This Time article from last year is just one source for that fact - you can find many more with a Google search - but I liked this one for a tangential reason: the explanation that the RFID developers pursued the technology because they were having trouble getting their robot to recognize objects and decided they liked the solution of just making every object in the world have an RFID tag so it could tell their robot what it is. That's one way to redefine your problem, I guess, and it certainly falls on the "soft AI" side of the line.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm surprised that I've recently found reading e-mail to be more of a hassle than it used to be, and not just because of the spam factor. The Tyranny of E-mail has some good thoughts on why that might be. [via #!/usr/bin/girl]

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I somehow didn't know that IBM Redbooks are available free on-line at their website. I spent many hours yesterday browsing their fabulous TCP/IP Tutorial and Technical Overview. Coming in at 21 chapters and over 900 pages, it's wonderfully thorough and yet very easy to read -- possibly even worth the $49.99 it would normally cost.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

< rhetorical question> Why is it that PowerPoint defaults to creating objects with such a horrid green as the default fill color? Is it so that we can all tell if a presenter is lazy and didn't make their own color choices? Or to force us all to play with their stupid color selection tool? Because nobody actually wants to use that shade of green, for anything. <\rhetorical question>

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The toxic substances in computers don't just require careful recycling of old PCs, but the dust that accumulates on computers contains potentially dangerous elements from fire retardants (PBDE's). Says the article:

The researchers claim that the PBDE threat is greatest in North America, where women were found to have the highest levels of the chemicals present in their breast milk, and that PBDE levels are doubling in the U.S population every two to five years. The flame retardants are found not only in computers, but also in other commonly used electronics devices, including televisions and radios.

Posted by Amanda at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If the previous pairing doesn't do it for you, try this one -- computer science and hockey, joined in the task of using computer vision to track, process, and transmit the content of visual events, distilling it down to the relevant pieces. Says the primary researcher:

"This could have many different applications, including most situations that require a human to monitor video taken by a remote camera, such as security cameras," Boyd says. "But it could also be used to deliver a live sports event to your cell phone. Instead of video, which requires a lot of bandwidth, you would get a moving schematic or diagram of the action with, say, Sharks or flaming C's representing the players."

Posted by Amanda at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The rare times I end up doing graphic design, I can lose hours looking at different fonts trying to find just the right one. So I was instantly in love with Identifont, a website that helps you identify a font of which you have a printed sample but not the same by asking questions about various character features. You can also use it get information about fonts for which you do know the name. I had fun just answering the questions based on what I like in a font and seeing what they suggested for me. The sign of a great site - entertaining and useful! [via PCJM]

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just found This Is Broken, a weblog of broken interfaces and commercial products maintained by a customer experience expert. Interesting and entertaining, if you're into usability.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the latest instance of spam getting out of control, I offer this excerpt from a message we just got from our system administrator regarding viruses being carried in password-protected Zip files:

Many universities are currently blocking all Zip attachments. We are not doing that yet, but if we have infections as a result of this virus, we may need to do so.

Posted by Amanda at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have found the best free plug-in for the PC since Dave's Quick Search Deskbar: the Powerpoint add-in, TexPoint. If you've ever typeset a formula in LaTeX and imported an image of it into Powerpoint as a TIFF, or spent hours cursing at the Microsoft equation editor while preparing slides for a paper you've already formated to death, you'll love this. Install this tool, and you can type LaTeX source right into your Powerpoint slides and convert it to the corresponding display form. I've only played with it a little, but I'm in love. [Many thanks to J for pointing this out and test running its usefulness!]

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Isn't spam fun? Today's gem involved an e-mail which made it past my filter and had the subject line "stolen", message body "you are a bad writer", and an attached file. The trusting soul thinks "This sounds like an angry person who thinks I stole someone's writing. Perhaps the attachment is a copy of what I "stole", and I'd sure be curious if someone is out there copying what I've written." Fortunately, I'm not that trusting of a soul, and Norton was kind enough to tell me that the attachment was a virus. I liked it better when destructive e-mails came in more predictable packages.

Posted by Amanda at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

How fun: Phone Fibbing Is the Most Common Method for Untruths. In this study of how communication media effects lying, researchers found "phone fibbing is even more likely than when people use e-mail, instant messaging or even speak face-to-face." I doubt anyone is surprised that one lies less in face to face conversation, but it's interesting that they found people lie least in e-mail, with face-to-face and IM'ing tying in the middle. They also say that e-mail lies "tended more often to be planned". The researchers suggest this is because e-mail isn't interactive, so one doesn't have flexibilty to adjust the lie to one's listener, nor is one as likely to be prompted into spontaneous lies. They also point out what seems like a large factor to me: having a permanent record, as compared to the ephemeral quality of the other conversational media.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier this week I received what has to be the nastiest spam I've seen yet. It came from (ostensibly) "Do_Not_Reply@paypal.com" and the message "regret[ed] to inform you that your account is about to be expired in the next five business days. To avoid suspension of your account you have to reactivate it by providing us with your personal information." In order to update your information, you are asked to run the executable attached to the e-mail. Without having been so stupid as to actually run the attached code, one can only assume that at best it is a virus, and more likely it's a clever attempt at identity theft.

In the past couple of days, PayPal has added a link on their front page addressing these spams. Besides reminding people that they'll never ask you to submit information through e-mail, they provide an address (spoof@paypal.com) to which they ask people to forward such spams. They claim that they will be pursuing these spams, and given the potential the company has to actually pursue some serious legal charges against those responsible, I wish them luck.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Electronic Gaming got a bunch of pre-teens together, made them play classic 70's and 80's video games, and shared what they had to say about the games with us. They were really big fans of Pong:

John: [...] By the way, is this supposed to be tennis or Ping-Pong?

Becky: Ping-Pong.

Gordon: It doesn't even go over the net. It goes through it. I don't even think that thing in the middle is a net.

Tim: My line is so beating the heck out of your stupid line. Fear my pink line. You have no chance. I am the undisputed lord of virtual tennis. [Misses ball] Whoops.

Posted by Amanda at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

The recreation of Milgram's "6-degrees of separation" study on the internet which I linked to a ways back has now been completed, and the results are consistent though not identical to the snail-mail results. Messages were still able to find their way though in about six steps (the researchers attribute the huge drop-out rate to disinclination rather than inability to find a suitable person to forward to). Despite the small percentage of messages that got through, the absolute number was many times larger than in Milgram's study (384 vs. 13 successful messages), and they were able to investigate his theory that successful message passing relied on social hubs - and disprove that theory! Successful message passing also used more professional than familial ties.

In the Milgram study, all successful chains went through one person -- a well-connected tailor. The Columbia study did not show this funnel effect, however, said Strogatz. It showed, rather, "that there are a lot of roads to Rome," he said.

The new research also shows that the key to good social searches is weaker friends, or more distant acquaintances, said Strogatz. This makes sense -- closer friends are less useful in this case because people who know each other well tend to have the same friends, he said.

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This slightly old article from Wired News discusses the successes of spammers, explaining why it probably won't go away anytime soon. I particularly loved the list of the types of people who ordered penis-enlargement pills off the internet:

Among the people who responded in July to Amazing's spam, which bore the subject line, "Make your penis HUGE," was the manager of a $6 billion mutual fund, who ordered two bottles of Pinacle to be shipped to his Park Avenue office in New York City. A restaurateur in Boulder, Colorado, requested four bottles. The president of a California firm that sells airplane parts and is active in the local Rotary Club gave out his American Express card number to pay for six bottles, or $300 worth, of Pinacle. The coach of an elementary school lacrosse club in Pennsylvania ordered four bottles of the pills.

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I've always suspected that the quantity of spam I receive was in part my fault - that if I had stayed off the internet, not ordered things off the web, and generally kept a lower profile, I wouldn't be such a slave to the accuracy of my spam filter. After waking up this morning to 150 and growing spam messages, all of which were forwarded from my Cornell account -- which I have never sent e-mail from or cited as my e-mail on any but official Cornell forms -- I finally believe that there's nothing you can do to avoid getting spam-bombed. On the positive side, my filter caught all by about 25 of those messages, and once I corrected it on those few (I'm running a version of the Bayesian based SpamOracle for Solaris which generally does a nice job) it's caught all of the 50 additional messages which have come in so far today. Now if I could only figure out how to fix wildcard matching in my .procmailrc :(

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I have been hearing good things about SpamOracle from a friend, and I think it's cool that it uses a Baysian classification algorithm to learn what is spam given your particular e-mail patterns. Even more cool is that it's compatable with unix-based e-mail and procmail, which I already have set up. This may be my next computer maintanance project.

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On the one hand, I disapprove of Windows configurations which try to conflate the content on my desktop with internet content. I don't want my web favorites listed in the titlebar of all my windows. I would prefer to doubleclick my icons to open them. Blurring those boundaries is a bad thing. On the other hand, I've quickly fallen in love with Dave's Quick Search Deskbar, which puts a search textbox on your Windows taskbar and automatically pulls up a browser window with the results of your search. It defaults to Google search, but has many nifty tags and is open for adding your own functionality as well. It's unobtrusive (so long as you don't mind giving up the taskbar real estate) and actually makes it easier to use my computer. [via the highly recommended Mackenab.com]

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A fun usability article from the IBM developerWorks site: "Everything I need to know about usability, I learned at the arcade".

By necessity, repetitive tasks are streamlined in games. This isn't always true for productivity software; with the latter, it's anyone's guess as to whether a particular common task will be convenient at all. Game designers try to avoid designs that will result in players complaining of pain after a couple hours of play; designers of productivity software don't seem to consider this at all.

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A timely web resource for me, I just found the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service National Image Library. A couple of sample searches show that it does pretty well on animal and plant names, but poorly on locations. The images are all in the public domain, though, and the images that are included are usually quite good. Since I'm spending the weekend playing with my new copy of Photoshop 7, I'll probably be dipping in here for images to play with. [via BookPeople]

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I hadn't realized how much different search engines borrowed results from each other, but this Search Engine Relationship Chart (in PDF) shows that most of the ones you've heard of, and some you haven't, are using or supplying results to each other. Apparently, Yahoo uses Google's results, and almost everyone uses results from Overture, which requires sites to pay to be listed. [via BookPeople]

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