Read/Write Internet

Stumbling across the very fun asciimaps made me think about the time before ‘the web’ when there was just the Internet. It made be chuckle about all of the talk lately defining web 2.0 as being all about making the web read/write. The funny thing is that before the great Internet land rush brought about by the browser and HTML, the Internet was an intensely read/write place: email, usenet, telnet, gopher, ftp (all from the command line, please). It wasn’t until the proliferation of brochure-ware, me-too web sites that the ‘write’ part of the equation started to fade.

To me, it seems like the ‘web 2.0’ stuff is really just an natural evolution of when web sites discovered the interactive possibilities that a web site could provide via good old CGI-BIN and others. Probably the biggest difference is that the user interface has gotten a bit more sophisticated with DHTML, CSS and Ajax versus the full-page-refresh-to-do-anything mode of initial web sites.

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Share Your OPML

I am not sure why people are getting excited over share your OPML; this seems like yet another vanity/popularity service that will soon attract spammers and other bottom dwellers much like Google Page Rank did. It is definitely attracting the attention of those who see it as a marketing tool (sorry, I mentioned bottom dwellers already).

I can get excited about someone that truly implements a relevance system for my OPML or RSS reading habits. I define relevance as presenting me with things that I want to read based on what I read, not on someone else’s notion of popularity. I really, really don’t care what is popular, I do care about what is important to me — it’s that simple. And I can’t imagine that I am alone in that feeling. Sadly, only the dearly departed Searchfox has come the closest to implementing this.

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Going Green, Literally

I just became aware of the process called promession through the RSS feed of the excellent worldwidewords.

This is an ecological alternative to cremation or burial. The corpse is frozen in liquid nitrogen and then shattered into powder by ultrasonic vibration before being buried in a biodegradeable box in a shallow grave. Green campaigners believe the technique could ease the crowding in graveyards and the increasingly harmful emissions from cremations.

The inventor, the Swedish biologist Susanne Wiigh-Masak, claims that the process is good for the environment because the powder (which is essentially compost) breaks down in the soil more thoroughly and quickly than by conventional burial. She suggests that relatives plant a tree or bush above the grave as a long-term memorial.

A quick google search indicates that this idea has been around a while, but, like I said, it is the first I have heard of it.

I can imagine that this might have a certain appeal to geeky types (the liquid nitrogen and ultrasonics aspects) and for those who are environmentally conscientious (the composting and tree planting aspects). It might also have some appeal in places like Japan where I have heard that there is little land for conventional burials.

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Shake It Up, iPod

Here is a random thought that I had driving into work the other day: what if Apple were to combine the sudden motion sensor technology that they have in the MacBook with the iPod? Then, on the iPod, if you wanted to ‘shuffle’ songs you could simply shake your iPod in a certain way, an viola!, tunes are shuffled. This could even be used to advance or replay a song.

Obviously this would need to have some sort of a button or some other ‘release’ that would allow this to work. Otherwise, the simple act of walking around or jogging would be forever activating this feature.

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Book: Shaping Things

Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling bills itself as a book about created objects and therefore a book ‘about everything’. My experience with it was that it is a rambling, poorly written treatise that never really comes to any point whatsoever.

Many people who have read this book (or perhaps only heard of it) seem to latch on to the ‘spime’ meme in the book. I didn’t find the idea of spimes that compelling. They are basically like RFID tags on steroids — they ‘know’ what they are, where they’ve been and what they associate with. Sounds like the means to create a huge amount of metadata that doesn’t really matter to anyone in most cases. I think the idea owes a lot to the decade old idea of your refrigerator or toaster being on the Internet (remember how that was going to improve things?)

Sterling goes on and on about how this book is going to help designers. I just don’t see it. It seems to just ramble on and verges on incoherent. One example is Sterling and his wine bottle (a reoccurring theme in the book). Somehow, the fact that a wine bottle has a bar code and a URL printed on it causes Sterling to wax rhapsodic about how the bottle is now an ‘intelligent device’ and ‘interactive’. Right. Precisely what interactions does a bottle of wine initiate? To truly be an active participant in an interaction, it must be capable of action itself.

There are much better books that cover the intended material in a much better fashion. Check out Ambient Findability and Digital Ground for two excellent examples.

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Java Makes You A Better Programmer?

Tim Bray has a brief posting with what is likely to turn out to be an incendiary issue: if you come from a Java background, you will write better librarys (and code) in other languages than if you didn’t have a Java background. I can see this particularly outraging much of the Ruby crowd, who seemingly live to smugly disparage anything that is not Ruby.

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Critical Thinking Is Not Optional

Graham Glass has an excellent anecdote about a lesson he learned in high school regarding critical thinking.

…Once the pleasantries were out of the way, he started the first lecture, which was about the composition of the atmosphere. Everyone started taking copious notes. He told us that Nitrogen was 78% of the air we breath, with Oxygen accounting for 21% and the remainder taken up by Argon, Carbon Dioxide, and other gases.

He then proceeded to explain that Nitrogen had a pink color and a slightly sweet smell. Like good students, we continued to record this valuable information into our study notes. After several more minutes of lecture he stopped, and then exclaimed “are you students morons??!!”. Needless to say, this caught our attention and we instantly brought our heads out of our books.

He continued: “If Nitrogen was pink and formed 78% of the air, the classroom would look pink! Are your brains even turned on right now?!” He proceeded to berate us for being so gullible, and then used the situation to segue into a discussion of the ingredients of science; observation, theory, and rigorous testing.

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The Effect of Standards on IT Business Strategy

As always, a compelling and insightful commentary by IBM’s Irving Wladawsky-Berger (via AlwaysOn); this time discussing the effect that technology standards are having (or will have) on IT Strategy. One of the points that he makes is that standards aren’t just about software leverage; hardware and web services standards are going to allow enterprises to grow and share in ways they couldn’t easily before.

Now, what we have seen is the continuing emergence of standards as we keep going up the stack. In this world of grid computing, what you’re really trying to do is share all kinds of IT resources—computing capacity, storage, files, applications, and so on—all built around the common standards that everybody uses. So you can essentially begin to virtualize the system so that people can access your resource without having to know precisely where that resource is. A very difficult example that must have been used in let’s say supercomputing systems is that you can form a grid out of multiple supercomputers in a location or in a country, and when somebody submits a job they submit it to the grid. And then the systems themselves get their act together, find where they have capacity, and make sure they can access everything, but you’re essentially sharing all the extreme capacity that wasn’t there before.

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Changing Time Made Easy

It’s that time of year when the clocks leap forward by one hour in North America. I find it amazing that so few companies make it easy for consumer goods to deal with this twice yearly event. Why don’t alarm clocks, microwaves, etc just deal with the time change? No, Really.

The irony is that I can go to Target and buy a $12USD digital watch that can automatically adjust to seasonal time changes, but the sorry clock in my $XX,000 car can’t make the same adjustment? Seems odd to me; I can’t believe that more products can’t incorporate that two cent component and a simple way to say what timezone you are in to free consumers from having to manually make these changes.

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Give Me Back My Data

I’ve been thinking about all of the places that ‘allow’ customers to do the data entry tasks for them with little in the way of reward back to the customer. Think about it, you get to key in all the information for your airline reservation, but what do you get in return (ok, maybe a discount, but hear me out)? What I would like to see happen is that more online companies provide value added information in return.

For example, when I make an airline reservation, why can’t the airline shoot me an iCalendar with all of the departure/arrival information that I can drop into my calendar? If I order some merchandise from an online vendor like Apple that requires a signature on arrival, why not provide me (again) with an iCalendar that I can easily add to my calendar so I can make sure someone is available to sign for the delivery? You would think that the delivery companies (UPS/DHL/FedEx) would be all over this as it saves them the time/effort/fuel associated with re-delivery. For that matter, why not give me an Atom/RSS feed that allows me to easily track the package. Once the package is delivered, they can trash the feed URL. Actually, the same would be cool for the airline example as well.

This isn’t such a leap — many banks allow you to get your transaction information in a format (QIF) that you can easily import into Quicken; why not for the more mundane stuff as well?

But the thing that would really make this work, is to craft the value added data so that it would work with mobile devices. That way I don’t need to be tied to a feedreader or calendar that is on my desktop computer, I can be anywhere. This is obviously important for the air travel scenario. Perhaps part of the problem gets solved by having a feed reader that can send SMS messages based on certain feeds changing (like my flight schedule). You can sort of make that work now with Yahoo alerts, but a more integrated solution would be preferable.

One last thought: perhaps an interim method of bridging the data gap is to provide the scheduling information in a microformat like hCalendar and embed it in the confirmation/receipt screen (HTML) that is typically provided by a web site. It could then be mined out with PiggyBank or some other GRDDL-like scraper. Not perfect, but at least avoids the re-keying that is required now.

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Rojo Relevance Not Very Relevant To Me

There has been a lot of discussion about some new features that have been added to Rojo, an online feed reader. One feature getting the most buzz is the ‘new’ relevance feature.

I don’t get it. For one, I have been a Rojo user since the shuttering of the excellent Searchfox, and I have had a ‘by relevance’ option for months. It was never clear exactly how ‘relevance’ was being determined, if at all. In response to a comment that I posted on techcrunch someone pointed me to this write up on readwriteweb that includes the following:

First, the purpose of “relevance” is to do for feed reading what smart search engines (like Google) do for search results — figure out what to put on the front page. Many readers are overwhelmed by the number of new stories coming from their feeds every day. So Rojo Relevance is about sorting those by “relevance” rather than date, to put the good stuff on top.

So basically, as Rojo defines it, relevance is absolutely useless to me and should more accurately be called ‘popularity’. I want it to be relevant to what I am interested in, not the beauty contest/what-everybody-else-is-reading dogpile. That represents value to me.

I’ll say it again: that was the beauty of Searchfox: it paid attention to what I read and ordered my river of news according to that, so that everytime I sat down to read, I was greeted with what I wanted to read first. Searchfox also was smart enough to mark a page of links as read as I advanced pages; this way, if I was interrupted in reading, I could simply hit refresh and get any new postings as well as the unread ones from my previous session. Apparently this is a very difficult concept for Rojo and others to understand and implement.

Can someone please implement a real relevance ranking in a feed reader and not another implementation of digg?

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RFID Tag ‘Virus’ Nonsense

Computerworld is running a article about how some researchers are warning of the perils of RFID viruses. In a word, bullshit. An RFID tag is simply a data source and, typically, very little data at that. If you have a poorly written application that does not do the appropriate data validations you can create a problem for yourself regardless of the source of the data.

This is worth repeating: the issues identified in the article included SQL Injection, buffer overflow(!) and other classic examples of exploits that can be applied to any poorly written application. The fact that an RFID tag was the data source does not make it a specific RFID issue — it’s just data.

So if someone creates a ‘virus’ and puts it on an RFID tag, great. You can write a virus and embed it in a JPEG image or mp3 file. However, unless you have an application that specifically looks for the virus payload and provides an execution environment there is absolutely no way that it can do any harm to your computer system unless it can actually execute the virus code.

One last point about data security. Hopefully, the industry has learned (via rampant indentity theft) that putting personally indentifying information in an RFID tag is a very, very stupid thing to do (and may actually be illegal in some locations). It is likely that the RFID tag would only have some sequential number/identifier that is read and tied back to some other more meaningful definition/data elsewhere. So if a bad guy gets the RFID identifier, they still have to know about the other system, locate it, compromise it and make sense of the data relationship. Could it happen? Sure. But is it as simple as the press makes it out to be, probably not. Bonus points to the implementers smart enough to encrypt the RFID data in the first place.

Here is a rather contrived scenario from the article:

For example, airports are considering using RFID tags to track baggage. But Tanenbaum warned that this application could pose a large problem if an RFID tag is read and delivers a much larger set of data in return. A false tag on a piece of baggage could exploit a buffer overflow to deliver a virus to the RFID middleware. Once the virus code is on the server, it could infect the databases and corrupt subsequent tags or install back doors — small programs that allow for the extrication of data over the Internet, Tanenbaum said.

Right. Or you could have the appropriate data validations in you processing system and not worry about RFID data or data from any other source for that matter.

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Origami, Nothing to See Here

Microsoft has ‘innovated‘ again by introducing the Apple Newton 13 years after Apple originally did. From my previous post you might derive that I was a big fan of the Newton and was a bit surprised by the complaints about the form factor.

Yet here we are in 2006 and MS has produced an even larger, heavier unit that even the largest Apple Newton. Have a look at this MS article that describes how the Newton was the wrong form factor, it should have been smaller like a Palm Pilot or larger, like a tablet:

The Newton hardware could have been developed along a number of lines, making it either larger or smaller. Instead, it was left in that dead zone of being too big and heavy for a pocket and too small to have a large, visible screen.

So which part of the ‘dead zone’ does that leave their new product in?

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Instructables

Instructables is an interesting web site where you can show people things that you made and share how others can make them for themselves. Definately some creative and handy people posting on this site.

We like to think about the physical world as something that is programmable. We like to think of objects or stuff you make as ‘code’. In other words, we are approaching the physical world as something that is describable and replicable.

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Word Of The Day from the OED

I just discovered that you can get the ‘word of the day’ emailed to you by no less than the folks who bring the world the Oxford English Dictionary.

I find the OED a great resource to have around. We have the Compact OED version of it that has 9 pages reduced onto a single page (versus the pricy 20 volume edition). To read the entries you need to use this sort of half crystal ball magnifier that is provided along with the Compact OED. It’s a little funky, but thats part of the fun.

If you are curious as to what went into producing the OED, I highly recommend The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester.

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What Time Is It?

I think that using technology in humorous ways is a noble task, especially when it has the effect of humanizing things. At least thats the way that a posting over at BoingBoing struck me — its about a “watch that displays cheeky ‘approximate time’ messages“.

I was a teen back when LED-based digital watches first became affordable and thus, widely available. I always had to chuckle whenever anyone with one of these watches was asked the time; they would quite earnestly respond “10:42” or “3:28” not “quarter to eleven” or “three thirty” — no siree, they knew exactly what time it was, because that’s what their watch displayed.

Of course the matter of the exact time depended on what source they used to set their watch by and the not insignificant matter of how well the watch actually kept time. Of course you can now buy a watch that synchornizes itself with Naval Observatory time, but I still like to keep ‘human’ time — “half past eight” instead of “8:29” for me.

And for what it’s worth, my timepiece of choice is an analog watch with a manual movement (no batteries).

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