Screenshot: A Weblog

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.

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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 |