Four short links: 13 Apr 2009

Worms, sorting, languages, and infrastructure:

1. Twitter XSS Attacks (Lynne Pope) -- several incarnations of a worm spread quickly across Twitter this weekend. Twitter profiles are generated by themes, whose parameters users can change. The user-supplied value for the colour was used directly in the CSS color field without filtering, which the original worm strain used to end the CSS and begin Javascript to put the worm into the profile of any Twitter user who viewed the infected profile. Infected users were made to tweet about the worm, with links that would infect anyone who viewed. The worm spread quickly through RTing one of the worm's messages, which claimed to link to instructions on fighting the worm. Later variants use background-color and background parameters. Initial variations downloaded Javascript from mikeyylolz.uuuq.com, since closed down by its hosting company. Later variants download the code from stalkdaily.com, the site that the initial variation spammed about. I wonder whether the 17-year old author of the variants will be able to pay his inevitable legal bills through Google click dollars? (also interesting: Sophos and bdonews)
2. Visualising Sorting -- some beautiful and informative illustrations of how sorting algorithms work. (via @ajtowns)
3. Art and Code: Obscure or Beautiful? -- In the presentation called “50 in 50″ you can see Guy Steele rap about APL and later in the video about spelling keywords backwards. The song about God wrote in Lisp code is also a part of the presentation. Among the languages mentioned are APL, Cobol, AP/I, Scheme, IPL-V, AED, Madcap, Piet, SNOBOL, ADA, Algol60, Intercal, Logo, Perligata, Shakespeare, Lucid, Occam, HQ9+, MUMBLE, Rake, Perl and of course Lisp. It kicks in at about 3m20s and is rather a post-modern presentation. (via
4. Experiences Deploying Large-Scale Infrastructure in Amazon EC2 -- As an aside, I've been very impressed with the reliability of EC2. Like many other people, I didn't know what to expect, but I've been pleasantly surprised. Very rarely does an EC2 instance fail. In fact I haven't yet seen a total failure, only some instances that were marked as 'deteriorated'. When this happens, you usually get a heads-up via email, and you have a few days to migrate your instance, or launch a similar one and terminate the defective one. (via Simon Willison)

Tweenbots: Cute Beats Smart

If you wanted to build a robot that could go from one end of Washington Square Park to the other without your help how would you do it? How expensive in time and money would it be? Would you build or buy a navigation system? Construct a sensing system to detect obstacles? Or would you decide to take a different tact and use cute as your primary tool?

ITP student Kacie Kinzer created a 10-inch smiling robot called a Tweenbot that can only go straight. For each journey Kacie would give the robot a destination and clearly label it. Given the obstacles in its way and lack of navigation or steering systems the expectation was that the robot would not make it. However the robot's avoidance of the uncanny valley and clearly written goal helped it out. Humans would redirect the Tweenbot so it successfully reached its destination. Below is a map of one Tweenbot journey:

Mission 1: Get from the Northwest to the Southwest Corner of Washington Square Park / time: 42 minutes / number of people who intervened: 29

As Kacie describes on the site:

Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, "You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”

So why do people help out the tweenbot? Personally I would not be able to resist assisting the anthropomorphized little robot. The smile signals its innocent intentions and the Tweenbot's label makes it clear how to help. It's something for designers and technologists to remember; sometimes cute and clever can get the job done much cheaper and in less time than smart and expensive.

There are more Tweenbots coming so if you happen to see any friendly robots around your town lend a hand. Here are some of the prototypes that are currently in development.

via Hacker News

Four quick posts: 11 April 2009

[I love Nat's "Four short links" format and am ripping it off to try to get myself blogging again. Instead of links, these are four blog posts I've been meaning to write but haven't.]

1. It turns out Facebook is not completely useless if you're married! And no, I'm not talking about the world's most overvalued Scrabble platform, and I don't mean "I'm in an open relationship." Instead, I was shocked this week to find that Facebook is better than Flickr for sharing private photos. I've considered myself a member of the Flickr generation for some time now, but when posting pictures of my daughter, I set them to "Friends and Family" only. My Flickr contacts seem to get pictures mostly via RSS, and since no RSS message is posted for private photos, they never see my shots. Facebook, though, by making their Newsfeed a site-only feature, brings people to their site every day, which in turn lets them see my private postings. I posted a picture on Flickr and wound up with zero favorites and one comment (as it turns out, from a Flickr employee who happens to be a contact); I later posted the same picture on Facebook and got 8 favorites and 11 comments. Flickreenos: you should put a message in RSS feeds that says, "Marc just posted a private photo -- click here to see it." Or, you know, add a Scrabble app.


2. Is there any doubt the iPhone has totally won the mobile platform war? I don't really get why Palm is even bothering to launch the Pre. "It's the App Store, stupid." It took the original Palm OS about 12 years to reach 50,000 applications developed for Palm OS; in under a year, the iPhone OS already has 25,000 applications available. The App Store promises to fulfill many developers' dream -- to work alone and strike it rich. Palm is competing by trying to match the UI, and that won't work. The Android team made a smart move recently by working on a home automation platform; changing the playing field is probably their best bet.


3. Related: the App Store has an inscrutable, time-consuming, whim-dependent approval process. The App Store newsgroup postings are full of angry claims that this is a bug, but I bet it's a feature. If you can't get an app approved until it's working perfectly, and you have to wait a week or two -- or more -- between approval rounds, you're much more likely to put a lot more effort in up front to get it right. That raises the quality level across the App Store. Palm is talking about lowering the bar for development of apps, and I bet that will fill their platform with crap-ass, low quality one-offs, and people will learn to distrust apps as being valuable; instead they'll just be widgets.


4. Nearly all of the things that have gotten me excited online over the past year involve making media faster and easier to consume over the air (OTA): Boxee, Roku, Kindle for iPhone, even sad-sack Hulu. A lot fewer Amazon boxes are showing up at my house, even though I'm buying plenty of media from them through Kindle and Roku. OTA-media FTW! Now we just need a DRM revolution so I can actually own this stuff instead of getting a lame-ass license.

Becoming Location Aware: Where 2.0 Early Registration Ending 4/13

Despite the downturn the geolocation space is still active. This year's Where 2.0 conference will be highlighting the companies, technologies and people that make the industry go. Where 2.0 is happening in San Jose at the Fairmount Hotel from 5/19-21(the first day is workshops; the next two are all mainstage talks). Early registration ends this Tuesday, 4/13. You can get an extra 25% off for being a Radar reader with this code: whr09rdr.

The schedule for the show is almost full. The hottest topic this year is location-aware apps, services and data. It's been almost a full-year since the iPhone enabled third-party apps to use our location; we're going to hear from startups, researchers and the platform providers.

Two of our keynoters will dive into what can and should be done with location data. MIT Professor Sandy Pentland, the fellow responsible for coining the term Reality Mining and author of Honest Signals, will discuss his research on mining company communication patterns and his location data ownership initiatives. Microsoft Researcher Eric Horvitz has been gathering location data from volunteers for over 5 years. Using this data he has created virtual assistants, life stream recorders and other forward looking applications for our historical location data.

Many of the location-aware startups are operating in the mobile space. Mobile social networks are facing an increasingly crowded market -- one that was just entered by Google's Latitude and still waiting entries from both Facebook and Nokia. We'll hear from the founders of Foursquare and Brightkite as well as Pelago (Radar post) how they are going to grow in this market.

Your location data is going to become increasingly valuable. Startup Sense Networks will discuss their business of of extracting insights from large amounts of location data. I am sure Nokia's Michael Halbherr will touch on the wealth of data they have from acquisitions like NAVTEQ and Plazes and how they will be supplemented through Nokia's devices. Perry Evans will discuss the nascent ad market for location-based services.

Even though the iPhone has made finding a user's popular that doesn't mean it's become easy or even possible on other devices. There will be two developer workshops dedicated to the topic -- one for finding users on the web and another for native mobile applications.

The day after Where 2.0 ends there will be the third edition of WhereCamp where the conversation will continue.

AT&T; Fiber cuts remind us: Location is a Basket too!

The fiber cuts affecting much of the San Francisco Bay Area this week are similar to the outages in the Middle East last year (radar post), although far more limited in scope and impact.   What I said last year still holds true and is repeated below: 

From an operations perspective these kinds of outages are nothing new, and underscore why having "many eggs in few baskets" is such a problem. I believe we will see similar incidents when we have the first multi-datacenter failures where multiple providers lose significant parts of their infrastructure in a single geographic area.

Remember: Don't put all your eggs in one basket... and Location is a basket too!

To really understand the issue, I recommend Neal Stephenson's incredible (and lengthy) Wired article from 1996 entitled "Mother Earth Mother Board":

[...] It sometimes seems as though every force of nature, every flaw in the human character, and every biological organism on the planet is engaged in a competition to see which can sever the most cables. The Museum of Submarine Telegraphy in Porthcurno, England, has a display of wrecked cables bracketed to a slab of wood. Each is labeled with its cause of failure, some of which sound dramatic, some cryptic, some both: trawler maul, spewed core, intermittent disconnection, strained core, teredo worms, crab's nest, perished core, fish bite, even "spliced by Italians." The teredo worm is like a science fiction creature, a bivalve with a rasp-edged shell that it uses like a buzz saw to cut through wood - or through submarine cables. Cable companies learned the hard way, early on, that it likes to eat gutta-percha, and subsequent cables received a helical wrapping of copper tape to stop it.

[...] There is also the obvious threat of sabotage by a hostile government, but, surprisingly, this almost never happens. When cypherpunk Doug Barnes was researching his Caribbean project, he spent some time looking into this, because it was exactly the kind of threat he was worried about in the case of a data haven. Somewhat to his own surprise and relief, he concluded that it simply wasn't going to happen. "Cutting a submarine cable," Barnes says, "is like starting a nuclear war. It's easy to do, the results are devastating, and as soon as one country does it, all of the others will retaliate."

As the capacity of optical fibers climbs, so does the economic damage caused when the cable is severed. FLAG makes its money by selling capacity to long-distance carriers, who turn around and resell it to end users at rates that are increasingly determined by what the market will bear. If FLAG gets chopped, no calls get through. The carriers' phone calls get routed to FLAG's competitors (other cables or satellites), and FLAG loses the revenue represented by those calls until the cable is repaired. The amount of revenue it loses is a function of how many calls the cable is physically capable of carrying, how close to capacity the cable is running, and what prices the market will bear for calls on the broken cable segment. In other words, a break between Dubai and Bombay might cost FLAG more in revenue loss than a break between Korea and Japan if calls between Dubai and Bombay cost more.

The rule of thumb for calculating revenue loss works like this: for every penny per minute that the long distance market will bear on a particular route, the loss of revenue, should FLAG be severed on that route, is about $3,000 a minute. So if calls on that route are a dime a minute, the damage is $30,000 a minute, and if calls are a dollar a minute, the damage is almost a third of a million dollars for every minute the cable is down. Upcoming advances in fiber bandwidth may push this figure, for some cables, past the million-dollar-a-minute mark. [Link]

(Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mundane_joy/2301368102/)

Where 2.0 Preview - Pelago's Jeff Holden on Creating Stories Out of Your Life

Tools like Twitter and Facebook have let people share in near real-time what they are doing. Now with a new generation of location-aware mobile devices, you can tell your friends or the entire world where you're doing it. Jeff Holden's company, Pelago, is one of many trying to come up with a killer application that blends location, images, text, and social networking to create a new kind of group awareness. Before starting Pelago, Jeff had a long career as the Senior Vice President of Consumer Websites for Amazon and before that, the Director of Supply Chain Optimization Systems. He'll be speaking at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 Conference on "Footstreams: Clickstreams for the Physical World."

James Turner: Pelago's first product is Whrrl. Can you start by describing what Whrrl is and what the experience to date has been?

Jeff Holden: Yeah. Sure. So Whrrl actually, there's a little complexity there because we just launched Whrrl V. 2.0, which is the prize we're focused on. And Whrrl V. 2.0 is a real-time storytelling product for people's daily lives.

JT: When you say storytelling, I've seen a lot of people talk about storytelling with these new social network things. What concretely does that mean to you?

JH: The most important aspect of what we mean by that is the organization of the content as the story unit. So the unit of content inside Whrrl is the story. And a story for us is something that has a beginning and an end. It can have multiple people involved in the story who can all share and contribute to a single story together. It has a location associated with it. And then people basically inject into those containers, those story containers, photos and text. As they're doing that, that's actually being shared out to any number of friends that they choose. And those friends can then jump in and actually comment on the story which then becomes part of the story as well. And so that's what we mean by it is we're focused on this -- I think some people use that term generically. We're using it very specifically to refer to the core unit of content in Whrrl.

JT: From a practical standpoint, apart from people who are chronic Twitterers and would just use it every moment of their life, what would you see a typical story being?

JH: What we're seeing right now is a lot of the families are using the product to share stories. And, in fact, just this morning Alison Sweeney, she's the host of the Biggest Loser and she was on Days of Our Lives for years. She's a really famous soap opera actress. She just started using Whrrl today. And she visited the set of Days of Our Lives with her family. And so it's actually entitled, "Family Visits Days." And we feature that story because it's such a cool -- and she did it publically. And it's a really cute story about her kids and the visit with the cast of Days of Our Lives. So we're seeing a lot of that kind of thing. We're seeing people at a more general level are viewing kind of very, very funny things like Melissa Pierce, who's a really very successful video blogger and just general blogger; she's done a number of very, very funny stories. She did one called "Lonely Bear" about this gummy bear lost in the world. And through a sequence of photos and text updates, she told the story of Lonely Bear and kind of left it dangling and was going to have a follow-up segment. And is actually going to be collaborating with people to build the next story.

So people are using it in different ways. And it's really kind of unleashing a lot of creativity.

(continue reading)

Four short links: 9 Apr 2009

Scifi, audiences, transparency, and the peril of public life. No links tomorrow, as I'll be preparing for our village fete:

1. The Fantastic That Denies It's Fantastic: Science Fiction Talk at the Royal Institution -- Matt Jones's fascinating notes from this talk by two academics make thought-provoking reading. “SF is a response to the cultural shock of discovering our marginal place in an alien universe” ... “an attempt put the stamp of humanity back on the universe”
2. Visualize Your Audience (Rowan Simpson) -- If you don’t think it’s a big deal for your site to be broken or off line while you make changes … think of all of the people who happen to be visiting at that point and imagine what it would feel like to have them all in the room with you while you flick the switch. No matter how small the number it would probably feel like a lot of people. And, you might be motivated to get the site back up more quickly if they were all standing behind you impatiently looking over your shoulder.
3. Attribution and Affiliation on All Things Digital (Waxy) -- this reminds me how rare it is to see someone about an Internet blowup where someone has actually talked to the parties involved.
4. We Live in Public (Caterina Fake) -- Caterina watched "We Live in Public" by Ondi Timoner and concurs with Jason Calacanis's musings about the Internet's ability to promote the worst behaviour: This kind of sociopathic behavior -- treating people like things -- is one of the most horrifying aspects of online interactions, and something that its very nature promotes.

Four short links: 8 Apr 2009

Bias, RFCs, virus batteries, and a glimpse at life beyond record labels (the last item features profanity, beware):

1. Bias We Can Believe In (Mind Hacks) -- Vaughn asks the tricky question about the current enthusiasm for Behavioural Economics in government: where are the sceptical voices? As he points out, It's perhaps no accident that almost all the articles cite a 2001 study that found that simply making the US's 401(k) retirement savings scheme opt-out instead of opt-in vastly increased participation simply because it's a hassle to change and employees perceive the 'default' as investment advice. But it's probably true to say that this example has been so widely repeated but it's one of the minority of behavioural economics studies that have looked at the relation between the existence of a cognitive bias and real-world economic data from the population. And it's notable that behavioural economists who specialise in making this link, a field they call behavioural macroeconomics, seem absent from the Obama inner circle.
2. How The Internet Got Its Rules (NYTimes) -- about the first RFCs, which became IETF. The early R.F.C.’s ranged from grand visions to mundane details, although the latter quickly became the most common. Less important than the content of those first documents was that they were available free of charge and anyone could write one. Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.” Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard. (via Glynn Moody)
3. Viruses Could Power Devices (Science News) -- Ions and electrons can move through smaller particles more quickly. But fabricating nano-sized particles of iron phosphate is a difficult and expensive process, the researchers say. So Belcher’s team let the virus do the work. By manipulating a gene of the M13 virus to make the viruses coat themselves in iron phosphate, the researchers created very small iron phosphate particles. (via BoingBoing)
4. Amanda Palmer's Label-Dropping Game -- interesting email from Amanda Palmer to her fans about trying to get dropped from her label. i had to EXPLAIN to the so-called "head of digital media" of roadrunner australia WHAT TWITTER WAS. and his brush-off that "it hasn’t caught on here yet" was ABSURD because the next day i twittered that i was doing an impromptu gathering in a public park and 12 hours later, 150 underage fans - who couldn’t attend the show - showed up to get their records signed. no manager knew! i didn’t even warn or tell her! no agents! no security! no venue! we were in a fucking public park! life is becoming awesome. and then the times they are a-changing fucking dramatically, when pong-twittering with trent reznor means way more to your fan-base/business than whether or not the record is in fucking stores (and in my case, it ain’t in fucking stores).

PhoneGap, the Mobile Platform Democratizer

Phonegap is an opensource development framework for mobile platforms. It allows developers to build native apps in HTML and JavaScript. Currently PhoneGap works for the iPhone and Android, but Blackberry and other OSs are on the way. You can get PhoneGap from Github or Google Code.

There are eighteen iPhone apps listed on the PhoneGap site. Though the apps are created with web technologies PhoneGap provides access to the phone's client APIs and run in Objective-C. I tested both Roadtrippr and the fun Blok-Buster Lite. As promised the apps are able to use my phone's location, accelerometer and multi-touch controls. Though the functionality was there both apps seemed a bit flat. This could have been related to their design, but I suspect that it is a PhoneGap issue.

Nitobi, the Vancouver-based company behind Phonegap, intends to make money via future services. Developers will be able to upload their HTML and JavaScript and get back a URL for a tested, compiled app for each platform. Nitobi won the People's Choice award last week at the Web 2.0 Expo SF during our Launchpad event where they launched a desktop emulator for their supported patforms. Both Techcrunch and ReadWriteWeb covered the event.

PhoneGap still has a ways to go before it is the one framework to rule them all. Their Roadmap is below and they would be thrilled if any of you wanted to assist them. In the feature-platform matrix below green means done, yellow means in-progress and red means not currently possible (they'll have to update the redblock in the Copy/Paste column of the iPhone for when 3.0 comes out).

Though the Palm Pre isn't listed it is definitely on Nitobi's mind, but don't expect them to support regular mobiles or even earlier smart phones. Only the latest generation of smartphones will be targeted.

There's a gold-rush happening right now in mobile marketplaces. However not everyone is able to participate and not all platforms are receiving equal attention. PhoneGap has the potential to be a great democratizer. It lowers the bar for developers to create powerful applications out of very familiar web technologies. It also enables sites to support versions of their apps for mobile platforms other than the iPhone. If you don't have an iPhone (or even if you do) you should be cheering this project along.

You ain't gonna need what?

One of the defining characteristics of the Rails movement has been its willingness to throw out the rules by which software developers and consultants have typically worked. Those rules typically produce big, overblown projects laden with features that no one ever uses--but which sounded good during the project specification phase. Build the simplest thing that could possibly work, and add features from there; say "You ain't gonna need it" when partway into the project, stakeholders come along with strange requirements based on what they think they might want.

(continue reading)

It's Really Just a Series of Tubes

Molly Wright Steenson hit the Ignite jackpot at Etech this year with her explanation of the steam powered network of pneumatic tubes of the 1800s. If you're someone that, like me, has a somewhat obsessive relationship with Internet Infrastructure, you must watch this talk.

Four short links: 7 Apr 2009

Maps, meaning, makers, and orphaned works:

1. Lens Tools and Fisheye Map Browsing -- a summary of magnification in maps through history, culminating in use of the fisheye/lens as a way to explore layers and data in thematic maps. (via Titine's delicious stream)
2. Socially Relevant Computing -- frustrated by the meaningless examples and work in computer science classes, Mike Buckley started sending students into the real world and building projects for handicapped people, firefighters, children, etc. Read their SIGCSE paper (PDF) for more. (via Andy Oram)
3. Maker Faire Africa -- I wish I could go!
4. Google Book Search Lawsuit Settlement Analysis -- finally a simple statement of why many folks aren't happy with the Google Book Search lawsuit settlement: Thanks to the magic of the class action mechanism, the settlement will confer on Google a kind of legal immunity that cannot be obtained at any price through a purely private negotiation. It confers on Google immunity not only against suits brought by the actual members of the organizations that sued Google, but also against suits brought by anyone who doesn’t explicitly opt out. That means that Google will be free to mine the vast body of orphan works without fear of liability. Any competitor that wants to get the same legal immunity Google is getting will have to take the same steps Google did: start scanning books without the publishers’ and authors’ permission, get sued by authors and publishers as a class, and then negotiate a settlement. The problem is that they’ll have no guarantee that the authors and publishers will play along. (via Glynn Moody)

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