April 2006 Archives
Stephen Colbert spoke at the Whtie House Press Corps' annual dinner. This is brilliant political comedy. There's a transcript online and apparently video and a torrent of high quality video too, though I haven't tried watching either.
The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday, that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change, this man's beliefs never will. And as excited as I am to be here with the president, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of Fox News.
Fox News gives you both sides of every story, the President's side and the Vice President's side.
But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on N.S.A. wiretapping or secret prisons in Eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason, they're superdepressing.
And if that's your goal, well, misery accomplished. Over the last five years you people were so good over tax cuts, W.M.D. intelligence, the affect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.
Thanks, Cory!
I've been using the same Nokia 3620 phone for almost two years now - it's been great, but I've been hankering to upgrade to something new.
I keep eyeing the latest models coming from Nokia, like the E61 Smartphone or those hot new N-Series phones. The US carriers never seem to offer the advanced Nokia devices, which makes it difficult to acquire them here.
Now Gizmodo is reporting that Nokia plans to open some US retail stores to bring its high end phones to the US market. Sounds like a good idea to me - I've never been able to figure out why you should have to buy your mobile device from the carrier that you get your service from.
Technorati Tags: mobile-devices, nokia
In his review of the February Community Technology Preview release of Microsoft Windows Vista, Paul Thurrott had some discouraging news of how User Account Protection had been implemented.
Modern operating systems like Linux and Mac OS X operate under a security model where even administrative users don't get full access to certain features unless they provide an in-place logon before performing any task that might harm the system. This type of security model protects users from themselves, and it is something that Microsoft should have added to Windows years and years ago.
Here's the good news. In Windows Vista, Microsoft is indeed moving to this kind of security model. The feature is called User Account Protection (UAP) and, as you might expect, it prevents even administrative users from performing potentially dangerous tasks without first providing security credentials, thus ensuring that the user understands what they're doing before making a critical mistake. It sounds like a good system. But this is Microsoft, we're talking about here. They completely botched UAP.
The bad news, then, is that UAP is a sad, sad joke. It's the most annoying feature that Microsoft has ever added to any software product, and yes, that includes that ridiculous Clippy character from older Office versions. The problem with UAP is that it throws up an unbelievable number of warning dialogs for even the simplest of tasks. That these dialogs pop up repeatedly for the same action would be comical if it weren't so amazingly frustrating. It would be hilarious if it weren't going to affect hundreds of millions of people in a few short months. It is, in fact, almost criminal in its insidiousness.
As if that wasn't bad enough news, yesterday Paul posted a review of the latest build of Vista (builg 5365) and the previous version of account protection appears to have been made even worse.
In build 5365, UAP has changed dramatically. (This is the one major change I noted previously.) However, none of the changes are related to making this feature less annoying. Instead, it's been changed to obviate a potential security vulnerability in the original UAP implementation. Now, UAP consent dialogs open in a new environment called the Secure Desktop, where most of the screen goes black and only the consent dialog is available. This forces the user to deal with the dialog before doing anything else. So not only is UAP annoying, but now you can't even get something else done until you deal with it.
My sources tell me that the security team at Microsoft were able to develop a proof of concept cursor spoof attack that hid the real cursor under a fake one, letting exploit code click the Allow button when the user thought they were clicking Cancel.
All this is not giving me a good feeling about the possibilities of improved security in Vista, whenever it might actually ship.
The folks from the Mobile Technical Committee within the CalConnect Calendaring Consortium want to find out how you would like to use your mobile device (phone, PDA, whatever) for calendaring. Please give 'em a hand when you have a few minutes.
Chris and Dave write:
Benefits to Participants: Direct input from individual users of mobile devices to the vendor community
Background: The Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium’s Mobile Technical Committee is working on a vision for interoperable calendaring on mobile devices.
To better understand what feature sets are currently supported by mobile devices and what users desire, CalConnect invites participation of consumers in a questionnaire on mobile device capabilities. CalConnect’s technical experts will use the questionnaire results to develop an approach to interoperability of calendaring solutions.
The questionnaire is at http://www.calconnect.org/mobileQs_v2.html
Completing the questionnaire will take 5 to 10 minutes.
Important Note: Any personal contact details provided will be kept strictly confidential and will only be used by CalConnect to clarify responses to the questionnaire.
The Technical Committee will compile responses over the next month and have a draft of results available for the CalConnect Roundtable VI meeting on 22-25 May 2006. Following review and feedback, a final summary of the results will be published on the CalConnect web site.
We would appreciate your response no later than 5th May 2006.
Thank you in advance for your participation.
Chris Dudding, Symbian Limited
TC Mobile Chair
chris.dudding@symbian.com
Dave Thewlis, CalConnect
Executive Director
Technorati Tags: Calconnect, Calendaring, mobile-devices
I've been eyeing the Google Maps API for some time, but hadn't had any time to play with it. Having come down this week with some sort of bug that's going around, I've been spending a lot of time laying around with the laptop, so I decided to give it a try.
My first attempt is a satellite image of where Mary Gates Hall (the building my office is in) is on the UW campus.
Everything went very smoothly, using the Google documentation. The only thing I knocked heads with for a bit was trying to set the map type to be a hybrid satellite/street map instead of a plain street map (the street map doesn't show locations on the campus). There's a setMapType method, but apparently the API is sensitive to where in the JavaScript that method is used - it worked when I finally thought to setMapType at the very end of my load function.
I also found Joshua Siler's How to add a Google Map to any web page in less than 10 minutes to be useful, although his starter code didn't work for me (but the starter code generated by Google when I registered for my API key worked just fine).
Technorati Tags: google, mapping, web-services
All sorts of sources are reporting that Steve Berkowitz, former head of ask.com, has been hired to be Senior Vice-President of the Online Business group, which includes include MSN.com, MSNTV and MSN Internet Access programming, advertising sales, business development, and marketing for Live Platforms, MSN and Windows Live.
There have generally been some signs of life in some of the recent activities in the Windows Live/MSN sphere, like MSN Spaces (if not their reaction to the Chinese government), Windows Live Expo, Windows Live Local (their technology demo of a drive through downtown Seattle is a gas), and the progress on opening up the online platform for developers to take advantage of the services.
I'm also really intrigued by Windows Live@edu, Microsoft's service for hosted email and online services for educational institutions - though to date I have not been successful (despite several attempts) at actually getting any contact back from Microsoft about this program.
I think Ray Ozzie is a smart fellow, and I admire his progress to date on trying to re-orient a huge corporation from the sales of desktop and server software to the heavily connected universe we now live in, where much of the software and services exist out in the network cloud somewhere.
While I've never been very impressed by ask.com (or its parent company IAC, who I interacted with some in previous professional life), my guess is that the Berkowitz hire is primarily about Microsoft trying to figure out a way to build a lot of advertising revenue to support these new online ventures. Hopefully they'll leave the technology directions to Ozzie and his colleagues.
All sorts of sources are reporting that Steve Berkowitz, former head of ask.com, has been hired to be Senior Vice-President of the Online Business group, which includes include MSN.com, MSNTV and MSN Internet Access programming, advertising sales, business development, and marketing for Live Platforms, MSN and Windows Live.
There have generally been some signs of life in some of the recent activities in the Windows Live/MSN sphere, like MSN Spaces (if not their reaction to the Chinese government), Windows Live Expo, Windows Live Local (their technology demo of a drive through downtown Seattle is a gas), and the progress on opening up the online platform for developers to take advantage of the services.
I think Ray Ozzie is a smart fellow, and I admire his progress to date on trying to re-orient a huge corporation from the sales of desktop and server software to the heavily connected universe we now live in, where much of the software and services exist out in the network cloud somewhere.
While I've never been very impressed by ask.com (or its parent company IAC, who I interacted with some in previous professional life), my guess is that the Berkowitz hire is primarily about Microsoft trying to figure out a way to build a lot of advertising revenue to support these new online ventures. Hopefully they'll leave the technology directions to Ozzie and his colleagues.
There's a good article online (it will appear in this coming Sunday's New York Times Magazine) about Google's operations in China and the decisions they made on how to deal with the Chinese government's censorship of controversial topics. It shows some of the issues that Internet companies wanting to do business have to deal with, and how Google came up with some creative solutions.
Brin and his team decided that if they were going to be forced to censor the results for a search for "Tiananmen Square," then they would put a disclaimer at the top of the search results on google.cn explaining that information had been removed in accordance with Chinese law. When Chinese users search for forbidden terms, Brin said, "they can notice what's missing, or at least notice the local control." It is precisely the solution you'd expect from a computer scientist: the absence of information is a type of information. (Google displays similar disclaimers in France and Germany, where they strip out links to pro-Nazi Web sites.)
Gizmodo is reporting that Lego will release the software for its next-generation Mindstorms NXT robotics system as open source. It will be really interesting to see the kinds of activity generated by that release!
Technorati Tags: puppy
I've been playing a bit with both Google Calendar and Google Page Creator. The calendar is easy to use - it allows you to set up multiple calendars, display them in a browser, and has both iCalendar export and Atom feeds of events. Public calendar sharing is supported by exposing public URLs for the iCalendar and Atom data feeds. More granular sharing of permissions for editing and creating events or just seeing free/busy schedules can be granted to other Google Calendar user accounts. You can import events in iCalendar or comma-separated formats. There are lots of things that Google Calendar doesn't currently support, most notably recurring events.
The Page Creator at this point is a fairly basic web-forms based system for creating and editing web pages hosted by Google. Nothing too revolutionary here, but easy to use.
One thing that surprised me is that there is no connection that I can find between these services. The first calendar that I created is a calendar for my son's Pony baseball game schedule. I then thought I'd create a web page for his team (the mighty coach-pitch Pinto Cardinals of the North Seattle Baseball Association league), and of course the first thing I wanted to put on that page was the game schedule. I could find no way of accomplishing that, aside from retyping the schedule onto the page. Given the amount that these kinds of schedules change over the season, maintaining the schedule in two places is not an ideal solution.
I hope Google shows some more integration between these services as they move forward with these new offerings.
I spent Sunday afternoon at a jazz guitar clinic conducted by John Stowell, a Portland (Oregon) based guitarist. The clinic was sponsored by the Seattle Jazz Guitar Society (a new group who don't have a web site just yet).
John's a wonderful player and a good teacher, with a real knack for analyzing and talking about how he approaches his playing. After taking some general questions and loosening up the group of about 10 guitarists and me, the lone bassist, with Jobim's "If You Never Come To Me", he spent most of the afternoon working us through the use of various modes of the melodic minor scale.
It's been a number of years since I thought about jazz theory in any depth, so this was an afternoon well spent, as well as a chance to meet some new fellow jazz enthusiasts.
There's a good video podcast of John playing solo on the very cool Portland Jazz Jams podcast site.
My colleague David Morton, who is the Director of Security Solutions here at UW Computing & Communications, is now writing a blog focusing on Cyber Security. David's one of those rare creatures - a digital security expert with a lot of experience, and even more important, a whole lot of common sense.
I know I'll be adding his blog to my list of feeds.
The Edubloggers link feed points out the online conference HigherEdBlogCon, which is now in its third day (it will be going on all during April). The conference is "an online event focused on how new online communications technologies and social tools are changing Higher Education."
So far the schedule has included:
>>Monday, April 3, 2006: Podcasting and Screencasting
>>Tuesday, April 4, 2006: Blogging Examples
>>Wednesday, April 5, 2006: Blogging Studies
Looks like some interesting stuff happening here.
Apple has released a public beta of Boot Camp, allowing the new Intel-based Macs to dual-boot Windows as well as OS X.
But why would you want to?
Mark McNair points this one out from Eweek. Not news to computing support people, but worth pointing out, especially when you couple it with how much time it actually takes to rebuild a Windows machine from scratch (assuming it's not one you can just build from a stock image).
I recently spent an entire day (like eight hours) rebuilding my dad's Windows XP laptop after he got infected from clicking on a link in an email that claimed to have been from McAfee - and he had the original disks. And I still don't think all the right drivers are reinstalled. That's not an effort that scales when you've got thousands of machines in an institution.
- Oren
1. News: Microsoft Says Malware Recovery Becoming Impossible
A MS security official at the InfoSec conference, who admits
the company is seeing over 2,000 attacks per hour, recommends
that big businesses invest in an automated process to wipe
hard drives and reinstall malware-infested operating systems.
http://ct.enews.eweek.com/rd/cts?d=186-3444-2-79-51488-405339-0-0-0-1
Scott Leslie, who writes the generally insightful EdTechPost blog up in BC, wrote a post the other day entitled The only post you'll ever see me write about podcasts, where he derides podcasts in education as a fad of the moment.
What has really annoyed me, though, about podcasts as a phenomenom and as hype, especially in the context of podcasting 'lectures' or other 'knowledge transfers,' is that it replicates what is already not a very good model of how to distribute information/learning - the synchronous spoken lecture.
I dropped Scott a note to let him know about our experiences with course podcasts here at the UW, and Scott wrote back to ask whether we've let the larger community know about our work. That made me realize that I haven't mentioned any of this here in this blog.
We've had a pilot project with some course podcasts going this year, starting with four courses in fall quarter, thirteen courses in winter, and more this spring. There's an early report by my colleague Cara Lane of some research on some of the first quarter participants online in a pdf file at http://catalyst.washington.edu/projects/podcasting_report.pdf. This report is based on a small sample - 41 students out of 148 enrolled in a single course, but it's at least interesting as an early indication of how some students enrolled in a course are making use of the audio recordings of the course.
The bottom line? Students find the audio recordings useful as supplementary material to enrich the course experience. Not exactly revolutionary, but certainly useful. One other finding is that the podcasts do not have a negative impact on course attendance. That's something some faculty have worried about, so it's good to have some data on the question - though to take Scott's point up, perhaps it would be more interesting educationally if this technology enabled more independent learning without attending lectures.
From a larger point of view what's attractive about capturing lectures, along with materials such as presentation slides, lecture notes, and syllabi is that it allows the University to share and publicize the wide array of expertise and knowledge of the faculty beyond the walls of the campus - which stands to be good both for the institution and for the faculty who participate.
While I agree theoretically that lectures are not generally the greatest way of imparting information or the best mode of learning, it's certainly a technique that's stood the test of time and there are many faculty in all disciplines who are very good at lecturing - and attending a really good lecture is a wonderful experience. Having technology to cost-effectively share those experiences isn't transformational, perhaps, but it's certainly worthwhile.
Technorati Tags: learning, podcasting, UW
The cherry trees in the Quad have bloomed, Saturday was Mo's (the coach-pitch Cardinals of the North Seattle Baseball Association) first baseball game of the season, and today we're going to opening day for to see the Seattle Mariners take on the Los Angeles (or is that Anaheim?) Angels.
All this and there's still well over 100 inches of snow at the local ski resorts - we're heading to Whistler for a few days next week (Seattle Public Schools spring break) for some spring skiing.
Is this a great time of year or what?
