I seem to recall a president who went to war after misrepresenting that someone was hiding WMDs and incited a big country to invade a smaller one halfway across the globe, needlessly killing several thousand soldiers and just generally being a retarded jerk.

Okay so maybe this isn’t a war but killing education based on misinformation and misrepresentation is bad enough.  LVRJ forgot to take into account that INF is the fastest growing degree at UNLV (over 200% the current school term), that it is the program that covers little things like cybersecurity (preventing hackerman Chang from getting into DoD computers) and HCI (making sure your iPhone has all those touchy-feely gizmos) and realize that LVRJ is suggesting that we should cut one of the few departments that teach for jobs that are still in demand. Nice. All because of not checking facts.

The University readily publishes current, accurate data.  The Provost’s 2009 Joint Evaluation Taskforce (JET) report on the Engineering program for example, reports “…this program is highly multidisciplinary and has a very high enrollment of women and other underrepresented groups. The program only has 2 tenure-track faculty.”  Furthermore, “[W]hile approved by the Board of Regents as an independent school, the program has no support staff and pays for an administrative assistant through course buyouts.”

Write to LVRJ and demand a retraction, correction and proof! People/colleagues, we are about to die a quick and painful death here and we need to fight. In 2010, informatics is a critical program both for the university as well as Las Vegas and the last thing we need is someone with erroneous information deciding our future!

Below is the comment I submitted to LVRJ (though who knows if it will actually get posted) – I ask and urge and plead for anyone who gives a crap that the paper seems to have it out for programs who make a difference to fight back…

LVRJ misreported that Informatics is the most expensive program – that was the case when it first started but is currently inline with other engineering programs.

It was also highly misrepresented and mischaracterized. The 2009 provost report actually recommends HIRING more staff because it is a fast growing field and covers a wide range of cognate areas, in addition to the extremely high ratio of sponsored research contracts and the awards it has received. The program is still small because it is brand new (started in 2005).

It was reported as “most expensive” because the report was based on 2006’s FTE (full-time enrollment) divided by the cost of faculty. Informatics has a low FTE because a high percentage of the students, especially at the graduate level, are non-traditional students who work full-time jobs like myself and cannot attend school full-time. There are only four tenured staff and the enrollment in the program increased 200% in the last year.

On top of the, the earlier LVRJ article that listed the top 20 most expensive programs had an interesting common thread – they were all engineering and computer based programs – and the ones whose fields still have jobs in demand!

To see more accurate reporting, go to the UNLV Provost Joint Evaluation Team (JET) web page and see the 2009 reports. Shame on LVRJ for the bad reporting.

And don’t get me started on why the state is cutting education funding in the first place. Sure the University can use streamlining, but are we setting up the state to lose what edge it has?

Incidentally, for those of you who don’t know:

The mission of the School of Informatics is to provide an academic path for students who are interested in pursuing a career that combines computing and information technology with another academic discipline. The curriculum is inherently interdisciplinary, and recognizes that the human, information, and technology dimensions of problem solving are equal contributors in advanced informatics applications areas. The School of Informatics will produce graduates that become successful and internationally competitive educators, entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders in the global information economy.

Read the rest of my op-ed here…

With the Pwn2Own hacking contest coming up at Vancouver’s CanSecWest security conference later this month, Italian computer security blog OneITSecurity took some time to interview Charlie Miller. Miller, in case you’re not familiar, is a security expert who has won Pwn2Own two years running by hacking Apple’s Safari browser with incredible speed. Safari isn’t the only target — this year, all major browsers and a selection of mobile operating systems will serve as Pwn2Own challenges – but it’s fair to say that Miller knows a thing or two about keeping your browser secure.

Here are the highlights from Miller’s interview:

He thinks Windows 7 will prove more secure than OS X Snow Leopard this year, in part because it doesn’t have Java and Flash enabled by default. Windows’ full ASLR (address space layout randomization) also gives it a security advantage.

When asked what he thought would make the safest OS and browser combo, he opted for Chrome or IE8 on Windows 7, with no Flash installed, although “there probably isn’t enough difference between the browsers to get worked up about.”

For my money, the juiciest quote from the interview was “The main thing is not to install Flash!”

On the mobile side, Miller guessed that the iPhone 3GS would be more easily exploitable than the Motorola Droid, mainly because the iPhone’s been around longer, and has been subjected to more extensive security research.

You can check out Miller’s full answers (in English or Italian!) at OneITSecurity.

Take everything you know about the internet. Now fucking forget it.

The internet is an infant. It’s a pile of crap. I’m tempted to call it defective. The W3C is worse than the UN. We need to make progress. We need to push forward. And in order to do that, we need to experiment and search out possibilities for expanding our horizons. We need to step out of the boxes we’ve sealed around us. There’s a world outside the crazy “best practices” created to overcome horrific shortcomings of CSS. We are not confined to the way things are.

When you start to build something new, think about the what could be, the what may be, and the what will be. Don’t settle, don’t give up, don’t get stuck in a box built by other people’s misguided interaction paradigms. The internet is open and free, and that means there are no rules.

So now Google is in the data storage, ISP, mobile device, hardware, software, and now the energy market.  For all the resources that Google provides that I use and inasmuch as I like how much they make my life easier, this may have been one step too far.  Any thoughts?

[more here on CNET]

Can’t take credit – shot courtesy of FoodPornDaily (rockin’ site I must say)…

But I thought you weren’t supposed to mix apples and oranges.

[posts here, here and here]

To that end, however, I do wonder how I will deal with this little ditty about Outlook taking in social networks. With iStreamPlanet Boss Mio being such a fan of all things Redmond, of course we use Exchange and Outlook so there’s pretty much no doubt that as soon as Outlook 2010 drops, we’ll have it all at our fingertips.

On the one hand that could be great – not having to log into all the networks each time. But I can also see a real danger in it, both from a productivity as well as a privacy standpoint. In the article, Terrence O’Brien writes “The question is whether or not developers will be able to make the marriage seamless and unobtrusive. Let’s just hope we won’t have to train our spam filters to start blocking Facebook updates.” Touché. Guess I’ll have to download the Outlook Social Connect beta and find out for myself. Speaking of LinkedIn – if anyone knows of a GIS job opening in Honolulu, Denver or Des Moines, shoot me an email (no joke).

So I set up a WP instance for her to play around with and it looks like she’s digging it. She’s worried that she’s going to lose some of the benefits of using the Google-based platform but I think that with the stats she has (trust me, she’s way beyond what MatSays will ever do) she doesn’t really need to worry.

The one downer note – the import function works great but it puts Blogger tags as WP categories so you might have to massage the DB by hand a bit. Wonder if they are aware of that little bug.

Scratches on discs happen. After one of our favorite DVDs started to skip after receiving a few too many scratches we started to look for a solution to salvage it. Sure there are DVD scratch removal devices that you can buy, but why waste money when there is a solution to be found right in our own homes? Using toothpaste, a banana, a rag and window cleaner we will show you how to remove scratches from a DVD and with any luck the unplayable will become playable.

What You Need

Equipment:
toothpaste
clean rag
banana
window cleaner

Instructions

1. The first thing you do is apply toothpaste on the scratched surface of the DVD. Next, rub the toothpaste gently into the DVD using the rag. Let this sit for about a minute.

2. Remove the toothpaste from the DVD using the rag. Then take the cut banana and in small circular motions rub the banana into the DVD. After you have applied the banana to the DVD, you will then take the peel and use this to rub the DVD in small circular motions.

3. Clean the DVD using the rag. Make sure to remove all the traces of the banana and peel. Spray window cleaner onto the surface of the DVD and continue cleaning the DVD. If you are lucky, your formerly unplayable DVD has now been salvaged!

Additional Notes: We experimented with using just toothpaste and just the banana, but we received the best results from using the toothpaste first and following it with the banana.

So the real juice behind our success in 9 years is our ability to think outside the box. Honestly I can’t stand that expression but the reason I am not hunting for another metaphor is because everyone understands it. So what am I getting at? Back to the post I was reading.

The gem from the post was “know what the box is.” It sounds simple enough and certainly something we almost take as a given. But do you really?

A week ago my team was contracted to do a job for a prominent division of a Fortune 100 company. The job was to construct an SMF-based Silverlight media player that would, in short, deliver live and/or on-demand Smooth or Windows Media content with a bunch of social tools, a very slimmed down interface with a universal style and the catch is that it needed to use initParams and/or an externalized XML to direct it (with order of operations precedence), blah blah blah on and on. Nothing out of the ordinary except that the portability meant that we needed to reduce the configurable parameters as much as possible, make sure that delivery could occur both inside and outside a firewalled intranet, and that it was CMS supported. Anyway, the designer did the nice, clean XAML, the developer got the app interface done, I finished off the CMS and reporting components. All in 2 days.

And along comes the first gig – only a week from today – and another group in my company asked – so what happens if we’re streaming Smooth over satellite and we drop the link? How do we fail over to, say, an origin-based WM encode? Hmmm, didn’t really think about that one. It’s not that we wouldn’t normally, but historically we’ve always used ASX files or our own mediaFeedXML format to handle failover, but in this case we didn’t even really think about it, because (I guess) we don’t work operations on a regular basis and hence don’t really make those considerations.

My point is that we approached the job thinking we had covered the details but in fact we were missing part of the equation – we didn’t really know the box, inasmuch as we thought we did. And it took a single email from another team to point it out. Problem has since been solved but it makes me wonder, now, if we neglected anything else.

In the blog post author’s (Tom Stewart) words:

How often have you been told to ‘think outside the box’? I don’t know about you but I find that very hard to do. It’s as helpful as saying, ‘now come up with a great idea’. So my approach involves ‘knowing the box’. Identify all the constraints and limits you can.

Same holds true for design. Inspiration and production comes from knowing the box – knowing the customer, knowing the intent, knowing the content, knowing the delivery. Before tackling that really great job or that really great idea that you get your head wrapped around what it is you’re really designing against. Knowing that, and being able to step outside of the proverbial space, will only serve to make the end result better.

[sooner or later, when I'm allowed to and if I remember, I'll post about that player]

I’ll give it to the Quince company – they make nice interfaces. Really nice interfaces. Smooth, sleek and all that. But when it comes to devices, it’s sometimes a hit or miss. Google, on the other hand, well…they’re still playing a lot of catch-up. Google is a great big brother data collection/aggregation company but for all the work put into Android, especially into v2, it’s still just not the same.  Jennifer, a long time Mac-head, battled with me for the better part of 11 years.  If you walk into our home/MadeByGirl offices now, however, it’s nothing but one-bite fruit machines all over the place.  And though I hate some things (ok, code-writing is just an abomination and I STILL can’t get used to the command keys, something about Ctrl and Alt just fit my fingers well). And I suspect that the next few objets d’art that materialize will also be sleek and ringing “ta-da” when turned on.

Take the Kindle.  Now that’s a device with purpose.  Why is it so popular?  Because it has one purpose and one purpose only.  And it does it well.  Hey, if they added on a couple of other features, awesome, but it’s when it becomes overbuilt, that’s when it starts to become pointless.  Just like that, the iPod.  One purpose from inception, super design, awesome and intuitive interface, good UX, sells millions billions.

My G1, on the other hand, I am quickly learning that I wish it were just a freakin’ phone.  My very first Sprint mobile (circa 1993) was a somewhat bricky Samsung with a rocker switch and I loved it.  Hell, I wish I still had it – the roller switch was just so easy to use (compared to this pinhead sized trackball thing).  And for all the touchscreen love, I still miss that the phone was just to make calls.  Yes, I post from my phone, send text and all that other crap, but at some point I just started deleting apps because there really was no point to it.  Which is my point.

The iPad brings in a new level of “I really don’t know what I want to be.”  On the one hand, it’s very limited, but at the same time it’s pretty extreme.  I, like a lot of people, don’t seem to know where it will fit in.  Maybe I just need to use one for a while.  Or not use it as it sits idly on my coffee table, eventually becoming a very expensive coaster with a nice user interface.  Jobs had a lot of failures in the past but maybe we just don’t understand the impetus   crazy, drunken idea   motivation business model behind it quite yet (like Lisa).  Maybe the idea behind “just leave them all over like computerized notepads” really does have something behind it.

So back to Google – are we just plunking that idea on a browser?  As if every time Jennifer tells me to put the freakin laptop away while she’s trying to watch “Millionaire Matchmaker” and share a moment isn’t bad enough, but to have Google in my pocket, on the laptop screen, on my neighborhood gas pump (ok, that hasn’t materialized in my neck of the woods yet), and now on my coffee table too?  Right next to an iPad?  Does this mean that in 5 years, all the books in my custom-made bookshelf will be replaced with digital tablets (that I have to label with a Brother p-Touch – now there’s a device with purpose – one job, one UI, no complications)?

The age of computerization is nice.  It is.  But put the shit   screen   thing down and pick up a book.  A real book with paper and ink.  Enjoy it…it’s the original UI.

This past week, I was listening (as always) to a (fantastic) KNPR program by Sean Carroll on the Mysteries of Time. In it, he was describing two schools of thought on the age old question of why it is that as we get older, time seems to pass quicker. The short of it was this:

One group of researchers says that the speed at which our brain impulses fire and travel slows down as we get older and consequently our impression of time actually slows down. They’ve done several studies, but in a non-empirical study by NPR, several older (over 70 years old) and younger (around 20 years old) were asked to close their eyes and guess when a minute had passed. Interestingly, the younger group was generally spot on – with guesses ranging between 55 and 65 seconds. But the older group was much the opposite – instead their guesses averaged about 90 seconds. Big difference. So researchers say that in the same vein that the brain slows time down, more things happen within that timespan (imaging cars passing and honking each time – since your impression of a minute is longer, you would count more cars passing by within your minute).

The second group says that your brain is like a hard drive…it only has so much capacity for thought. When we’re younger, we tend to fill up that space with details of every first impression – our first birthday, our first date, etc – and that as we get older we get more efficient at filtering, which is short for not bothering to remember (on a side note, guys, remember this – that’s why you can’t remember what your wife said 10 minutes ago but you can remember the first date). Basically our brains cycle memories – we hit a birthday and your brain tells itself “oh, I remember this from before so I don’t need to bother wasting space again,” and so as we are less able to remember details from a short time ago, our impression is that things have sped up.

So of course my thought is – it actually must be a little of both. I certainly know that I can’t remember what Jennifer told me (much to her chagrin) 10 minutes ago, but I can remember stupid Jeopardy trivia that I learned in fifth grade reading the Guiness Book of World Records (which I picked up at the dentists office on Monday and was sadly dismayed – not the same book I grew up with – when did it become so picture book dumbed-down). I tested myself a couple of times to guess the minute but I was pretty close – 63 seconds the first time and 61 the second, so maybe it’s less that one.

But to that I add a third theory – totally not based on science, totally my own humble opinion – but maybe time speeds up because we are afraid. A little secret about me – I actually have only one phobia – getting old. My whole life, I was generally not afraid of very much – I love to fly (planes put me to sleep), heights don’t bother me (will cliff dive on command), and bugs, snakes, creepy critters and the like have no effect on me. But getting old – that’s a whole other story.

So my thought is that I’d bet many people are like me but don’t admit it, at least not openly. And maybe the time that seems to be speeding up is kind of like being in a movie where a couple of police officers are racing the clock to diffuse a bomb and the situation gets more and more frantic (except in the movies, they always make it). The “theory” is that as we get older, we realize we have less and less time, and in our frantic haste to accomplish more (let’s face it – I realize it would be a little pointless to try and finish my PhD when I am 60 so I am rushing to do it now) we get more and more frazzled, we take in less and less of life, and it just seems to hurtle forward faster and faster, like a missile catapulting to doom.

The point is that any one of these is just pretty much sad. I guess the slowing neuron activity is one thing but the idea of being able to remember less not because I don’t have the capacity but because my brain is tricking me into not bothering, or feeling that I have less and less time in my life is pretty distressing. So to that I offer the saving grace…it’s old school and it’s hokey but it’s the truth. Enjoy your life – enjoy every minute of every day and make it count. Remember the things that your loved ones tell you, that you do with your family, the things that make you proud of being alive, and how happy waking up to a sunny day makes you. Be thankful, be appreciative, be sharp and mindful of how you contribute to the world and how your life affects others. Know that at the end of the day you made someone else’s life, not just your own, better. And when you start reaching that speeding bullet point in life, just breathe a little and say – at least I got it all in.

The original

The sequel

Great SOTU speech by the Man last night IMHO.  It was clear, detailed, lucid, and the GOP response was, well, pretty lackluster and inexplicit.  But whatever.  Exactly what O-man said about dropping the partisan issue and changing the way of political thinking…it’ll never happen.  Lobbyists will still continue to bust the hopes of the rest of middle America (amazing, aren’t they American’s too?  Don’t they leave their cushy jobs at night and go back home the same as the rest of us, just with better pay?).

But I digress, here’s the report…

It’s a nightmare that anyone with a Twitter account is vaguely afraid of, but no one before the year 2005 would have ever dreamed of having to worry about: Major Garrett, Fox News’ White House correspondent, accidentally tweeted the wrong link to his 13,059 followers. He intended to send out a shortened link to a transcript of last night’s State of the Union address. Instead, the link that went out was one to a Las Vegas call-girl website. Gawker managed to nab the series of tweets before he took them down:

“To overcome the numbing weight of our politics” and other Obama SOTU excerpts http://bit.ly/d6W Wed 27 Jan 18:22

Horrified, he deleted and explained:

I apologize. Bit.ly turned my original link to SOTU excerpts to a soft-porn link. NOT my intention. http://bit.ly/d6WZBu Wed 27 Jan 19:21

The link just posted works. Any frequent visitor here knows that is not my style. Sorry. Shld have caught it sooner. Wed 27 Jan 19:23

Enraged, he admonished and ordered:

For those suckling snide syrup. I publicly acknowledged an innocent mistake and corrected it. If that’s not good enuf, take a hike. Wed 27 Jan 20:18

As Gawker observes, it’s extremely unlikely that bit.ly would make that kind of error. But why would Washington-based Garrett be looking up a Vegas-based website like that?

If Garrett joins the press corps on Obama’s trip to Vegas later in February, we guess we’ll have an answer.

Maybe he should re-tweet it – might as well ride the wave, eh!

Battery never dies, dependable, can’t compute as fast but really great tactility.  And at least a couple hundos less than whatever Apple comes up with.

Update February 3 – thanks, Mark

and…

Waiting for Jen at UNLV Starbucks after class

Last week, YouTube announced beta HTML 5 video support: once you’ve activated the beta, you’ll see videos using a native browser element rather than the Flash plugin. The new player only works with a recent version of either Safari or Chrome (or Chrome Frame in IE), as the video is encoded with the H.264 codec, which isn’t supported in Firefox. A day after YouTube’s announcement, Vimeo made a similar one. They also now provide preliminary support for the HTML video element with a new HTML player.

Superficially this seems like a victory for the “open” Web, right? A few major sites, representing a significant percentage of online video, begin to move away from a proprietary technology (Flash) and towards an open standard (HTML 5). But when you look a little deeper it turns out to not be so simple. Both YouTube and Vimeo have chosen to provide their HTML video encoded with the H.264 codec, which is patent-encumbered. Apple has a big stake in H.264, so Safari supports it, and Google has paid a licensing fee to include an H.264 decoder in Chrome.

Mozilla Firefox, on the other hand, doesn’t support H.264: it will only play HTML video encoded with the Ogg Theora codec. This is partly for ideological reasons, as the Theora codec is open source and therefore inline with Mozilla’s principles. But there’s more to it than just ideology. In reply to YouTube’s announcement, Mozilla’s VP of Engineering, Mike Shaver, published a blog post explaining why Mozilla is sticking to its guns with Theora. He points to H.264’s licensing fees not only as a justification for Mozilla’s decision not to support the format, but also as a more dire threat: “[...] if H.264 becomes an accepted part of the standardized web, those fees are a barrier to entry for developers of new browsers, those bringing the web to new devices or platforms, and those who would build tools to help content and application development.” Mozilla’s Open Source Evangelist, Christopher Blizzard, also had a lot to say on the topic, likening the situation to what happened years ago with the GIF format (and, to a lesser extent, with MP3).

It’s important to remember that the current level of browser support for web standards comes, in large part, from Firefox’s ability to compete on a level playing field with other browsers, and from the Mozilla team’s dedication to open standards. When big sites like YouTube begin positioning a proprietary format as the de facto standard for HTML video, they significantly impede the ability of free-as-in-speech browsers like Firefox to rival their competitors in functionality, which hurts interoperability and innovation on the Web as a whole. Meanwhile, though Chrome and Safari may be excellent browsers, and while their support for modern standards-based HTML and CSS should be applauded, in this respect their choice of a proprietary video format is more reminiscent of IE, circa the mid-90’s.

The fact that YouTube and Vimeo are trumpeting their new HTML 5 video support as an open standards victory is misleading to say the least. And it does lead to confusion: as pointed out by Christopher Blizzard, more than a few people on Twitter seem to think that Firefox’s lack of support for YouTube’s HTML 5 video should be taken to mean that Firefox doesn’t support HTML 5!

YouTube stated that it was launching the new feature in response to a user survey in which “Support HTML5 open web video with open formats” was the most requested feature. It seems that YouTube might only have been paying attention to the first half of the sentence: HTML 5 video, yes; open formats, eh, not so much.

So what do you think? Is it the job of YouTube and other sites like it to lead the way in providing video in an open format? Or should Chrome and Safari lead the way by supporting those formats first? Or are Mozilla being hopeless idealists?

Archi’s Bistro…spring rolls. Not the best I’ve ever had but still pretty decent.

From a visual perspective, it fills that little void by replacing the static window blahs in my second monitor with a fullscreen slideshow, complete with bios, photos, and a whole lot of social gaming tricks that I have to say are very well thought out and very easy to use. It does all this while the music plays continuously and the photos keep sliding in

And it’s not Flash (no love lost there). And of course you can buy the music (the true Long Tail in action here). Awesome. On a side note, as CC and I were commenting, we had a good laugh about a miserably failed project we did in 2003 with the then-Death Row Records that had a similar premise but way before social media was the buzz, before Ajax and jQuery frameworks existed, but was nonetheless pretty hot conceptually (though definitely not as good looking).

Anyway, for all my IMD414 students – this is the kind of thing you should be striving for and exactly what we’ll be talking about this quarter. Nice timing.

Dragging my ass to work…another day, another dollar.

Eastern off Sunset

Despite people’s expectation of change and movement on the screen, CSS and HTML have few controls that allow you to design interactivity, and those that exist are binary.

A link is either one color or another. A text field is either one size or another. A photo is either transparent or opaque. No in-betweens from one state to the next. No transitions.

This has led to most web pages feeling abrupt, with elements shifting and changing ungracefully.

Yes, we can use DHTML and leverage the jQuery library for transitions, but this requires a lot of code for something that should be very simple.

What we need is a quick and easy way to add simple transitions to the page and in this article you’ll find useful information about CSS transitions and how to use them.

[MatSays: some rambling by the author omitted]

CSS transitions are being introduced right now in CSS Level 3 but have already been added as an extension to Webkit. Right now that means they work only in browsers based on Webkit, including Apple Safari and Google Chrome. [MatSays: so use a "real" browser but don't forget your graceful degradation for MSIE and stuff]

Where CSS Transitions Come From

Transitions have been a part of Webkit for a while and are the basis of a lot of the cool things that the Safari UI can do that other browsers cannot.

But the W3C CSS Workgroup resisted adding transitions to its official specs, some members arguing that transitions are not style properties and would be better handled by a scripting language.

But many designers and developers, myself included, argued that these are in fact styles— only dynamic styles, rather than the traditional static styles that so many of us are used to.

Fortunately, the argument for dynamic styles held the day. Last March, representatives from Apple and Mozilla began adding the CSS Transitions Module to the CSS Level 3 specification, closely modeled on what Apple had already added to Webkit.

[read the complete tutorial here]

If Oracle buys MySQL as part of Sun, database customers will pay the bill.

In April 2009, Oracle announced that it had agreed to acquire Sun. Since Sun had acquired MySQL the previous year, this would mean that Oracle, the market leader for closed source databases, would get to own MySQL, the most popular open source database.

If Oracle acquired MySQL on that basis, it would have as much control over MySQL as money can possibly buy over an open source project. In fact, for most open source projects (such as Linux or Apache) there isn’t any comparable way for a competitor to buy even one tenth as much influence. But MySQL’s success has always depended on the company behind it that develops, sells and promotes it. That company (initially MySQL AB, then Sun) has always owned the important intellectual property rights (IPRs), most notably the trademark, copyright and (so far only for defensive purposes) patents. It has used the IPRs to produce income and has reinvested a large part of those revenues in development, getting not only bigger but also better with time.

If those IPRs fall into the hands of MySQL’s primary competitor, then MySQL immediately ceases to be an alternative to Oracle’s own high-priced products. So far, customers had the choice to use MySQL in new projects instead of Oracle’s products. Some large companies even migrated (switched) from Oracle to MySQL for existing software solutions. And every one could credibly threaten Oracle’s salespeople with using MySQL unless a major discount was granted. If Oracle owns MySQL, it will only laugh when customers try this. Getting rid of this problem is easily worth one billion dollars a year to Oracle, if not more.

If elephants are the Jackson Pollocks of the Animal Kingdom, then orangutans may be the new Ansel Adams of the jungle… or the drunk, trigger-happy sorority girl.

Nonja, an orangutan at the Vienna Zoo, now has her own Facebook page dedicated to the photos she takes herself with a digital camera. Armed with a Samsung ST 1000, all the 33-year-old Nonja has to do is click and whatever her eye sees is automatically uploaded to her Facebook page. Even though she’s nearing senior zoo citizenship, her fan base continues to grow by the day; she’s already hit the 20,000 fan milestone, and the page only launched on Tuesday.

[courtesy of me]

Like this is something new?  I have at least 15 orangutans in one of my classes posting to FB on a regular basis already! 

J/K - have a nice holiday break all!

PS – For INF400 students – the course textbook is posted on the (forthcoming) class page already so in case you want to get it over the break (that means ask mom and dad for an academic present this year).

The jury is still out on why I would need an iPhone app (though I guess it would make it simple for presentations maybe?) but I’m sure I’ll eventually fall into that one (of course, I still have to be convinced to get an iPhone in the first place).

Anyway, I admit that my only issue is that the box could be a bit larger (2GB on the free version) but face it, it’s still a business and it still has employees to pay so they can’t give away the farm. And it probably keeps me from storage too much digital crap that I don’t need.

PS: double bonus if you need a quick web page

For my students and UNLV colleagues: if you had never heard of the DreamSpark program, you should jump on it.  A program launched in 2008 by MSFT (don’t groan) can get you free software.  Yes, free.  Yes, I’ve gotten some of it.  In a blatant (and conducive) attempt to move budding developers and IT staffers to the Redmond dark side, they’re offering Visual Studio (2005 & 2008), Windows Server 2008, Expression Studio and more for free.  So while the university’s alliance program is broken and paltry, you could have just headed straight to the source and gotten legit, keyed copies.

Now the new stuff: just released by MSFT – WebsiteSpark.  Like it’s older brother, the new program is aimed at small companies – no more than 10 employees – and offers:

• 3 Visual Studio licenses
• 1 Expression Studio 2 or 3 license
• 2 Expression Web licenses
• 3 users license for WinServer 2008 and SQLServer 2008
• 4 processor license for self-hosting WinServer 2008 and SQLServer 2008

That’s a buttload of very expensive stuff for nothing.  The caveat is that you must launch a new web app (that’s app boys and girls, not a paltry PHP site) and if you hit it big, you have to exit the program and pay a $100 fee.  That’s peanuts compared to the value.  Or you could go to a bunch of MSFT seminars and collect copies but that takes a lot of time and snoozing through 4 hours of demos.

[via Android and Me]

Everyone’s favorite Android hacker appears to have angered someone at Google. We just received word that Cyanogen has received a cease and desist letter from Google. Details are scarce, but it appears Google is not happy about Cyanogen distributing their closed source Android apps (Market, Talk, Gmail, YouTube, etc). CyanogenMod is easily the most popular custom Android rom with over 30,000 active users.

Relevant bits from the chat log we received:

Hopefully, the two parties will be able to work something out. I’ve been using CyanogenMod on both my Android phones for several months and they are awesome. If you want to show your support for Cyanogen, you can always visit his site and place a donation for all the countless hours he has put into improving the Android platform.

* Seamless curved screen, which eliminates bezel and screen gap issues for increased productivity and decreased frustration (according to Center for Human-Computer Interaction – Shupp et al, presented at Graphics Interface 2006)
* 2880 x 900 double WXGA native resolution
* 200 cd/m² brightness
* 0.02ms Rapid Response
* 10,000:1 contrast ratio
* Wide color gamut with 100% coverage of sRGB and 99.3% coverage of Adobe RGB
* Single link DVI-D and HDMI 1.3 input connectors
* USB 2.0 connectivity for easy use of peripherals
* Front panel controls
* On Screen Display (OSD®) and software-based GUI, which enables advanced display control options

Several sites are reporting that a major attack on Wordpress blogs started yesterday. The latest version of Wordpress, 2.8.4, is not vulnerable to this particular worm, so upgrading now could save you a lot of headaches. The worm creates a new, hidden administrator account on your blog, allowing whoever’s behind this thing to access the guts of your blog, databases and all.

How do you know if your site has been affected? Lorelle on Wordpress offers two possible ways to find out:

There are strange additions to the pretty permalinks, such as
example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/.
The keywords are “eval” and “base64_decode.”

The second clue is that a “back door” was created by a “hidden” Administrator. Check your site users for “Administrator (2)” or a name you do not recognize.

Wordpress has acknowledged the attacks and encouraged users to upgrade their sites. Wordpress.com users aren’t affected, as the whole system has already been updated to 2.8.4. If you’ve already been afflicted by the attack, start on the steps in Wordpress’ FAQ.

I’ve already done the upgrade and it is the same, painless upgrade as usual.  Just be sure (especially if you’re using FireFTP) that you set the transfer options to Automatic Mode (Tools > Options > Downloads/Uploads : top fieldset).

If you’ve ever read David Weinberger’s ”Everything is Miscellaneous” (ISBN10: 0805080430) as well as a host of other books and articles on Wikipedia, it’s almost as if Wikimedia is doing a 180 on its own founding principles.  Since the beginning, the founders strongly defended and imposed the concept that the community itself was the police and at no time should an editor be the final say…this to extent that a founder removed himself as an editor for changing an article without the consent of the community (consent being reached by culminating responses and critique any time an article change was made or requested).

“We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks,” said Michael Snow, a lawyer in Seattle who is the chairman of the Wikimedia board. “There was a time probably when the community was more forgiving of things that were inaccurate or fudged in some fashion — whether simply misunderstood or an author had some ax to grind. There is less tolerance for that sort of problem now.”

Not that I am necessarily opposed to having these types of sanctions, but at the same time, it gets to the core of defeating the point of the community based system.  The community, as I’ve often maintained, can rarely govern itself over a long period of time.  If it could, governments wouldn’t exist.  But by the same token, where does the power and authority end?  Should the Wikimedia board not consider that instead of a single editor, at the very least, possibly three or more editors should have to consent to the alteration first?

Advocates of the system point out that [it] provides an extra layer of insurance to prevent false posts and improve the overall accuracy.  But once again, at whose expense?  Is historical information not fact riddled by the opinion of the observer?  Who is to determine what is accurate?  While editors are, for sure, carefully chosen, aren’t VH1 game show contestants screened as well (ok, bad analogy but you get the idea – substitute radical terrorists in place of game show contestants and it’s a bit more frightening).  There is much at stake in this issue – freedom of speech, importance of historical record, observation and opinion – more than just the fact that Wikipedia could potentially end up more like Encyclopedia Brittanica (a system it sought to avoid) than the incarnation we’ve all grown to love over the last eight years.

How NBC, NFL Will Stream Sunday Night Football

Web surfers will be able to watch only a fraction of NFL games in live streaming video this season, but those few games that the league will run online will offer several interactive features, including the ability to watch any play in slow motion.

The NFL and NBC Universal said today that they’ll offer live streaming video of NBC’s 17-game Sunday Night Football schedule on NBCSports.com and NFL.com.

After using Adobe Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ADBE)’s Flash player to deliver games online last year, NBC is switching to Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT)’s Silverlight platform for its football coverage.

NBC Sports senior vice president of digital media Perkins Miller said the network struck a broad deal with Microsoft to use Silverlight and its Smooth Streaming technology to deliver high-definition streaming video for its major sporting events, including the Olympics and Wimbledon.

Football fans will be able to toy around with several interactive features during the games on NFL.com and NBCSports.com, including four separate camera angles and a video player that offers full DVR functionality. Viewers that access the video streams in the middle of a game will even be able to rewind to plays that occurred before they opened their Web browsers.

One of the biggest additions to the streaming video feed this year is a “scrub bar” that will allow viewers to quickly navigate to the major plays of the game. NBC will integrate a data feed detailing each play into the scroll bar, so a viewer will be able to hover over an area on the scroll bar of the video window, and a marker will detail locations in the video where touchdowns and other major plays occur.

“We’re collecting the data feed that comes out of the stadium. We marry it to the video file. We can take a point in time, and create a visual marker for it on the player,” Miller explained.

NBC will rely on technical teams in several cities to deliver the interactive football games. In addition to teams that will be stationed in trucks near the stadiums at each Sunday night game, NBC staffers at its digital sports operation in Stamford, Conn., will cull video highlights from the game.

Perkins said NBC signed San Francisco-based Vertigo Software Inc. to write the code for a video player that hosts the Silverlight component. The network is also using the Uppercut video switching product from Los Angeles-based Reality Check Studios, and it signed iStreamPlanet Co. to encode video from all of the games.

While the games on NFL.com and NBCSports.com will allow those few viewers without access to a TV on Sunday nights to catch the games, Perkins says NBC expects that most of the traffic will come from football fans that are watching the games on TV.

“People use it as a complement to the broadcast. It enables them to have a control room at their coffee table,” Miller said, adding that he expects it to be popular with fantasy football fans and viewers that want to discuss plays with their friends.

NBC has a sales team dedicated to handling digital sales for the streaming NFL games and other online programming, and the network is also packaging online ads in broader deals with media buyers that buy spots during its TV broadcasts. Miller said NBC expects to generate online ad sales for football that will reach “seven figures.”

“It [online sales] is a fraction of what we’ll do on broadcast in terms of the revenue. We’ll do fairly well on this product,” he added.

Unfortunately for football fans, NBC will be the only NFL broadcaster to distribute games on the Web, as Fox Broadcasting Co. , CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS), and ESPN won’t have the rights required to stream games under their contracts with the league.

The NFL extended its TV and online rights deal this week with NBC, giving the network rights to broadcast Sunday nights on TV and online through 2013. The league already has rights deals with ESPN, CBS, and Fox to broadcast games through 2013, but those contracts don’t include rights to broadcast games online.

The Comments:

davisfreeberg
“Perkins Miller said the network struck a broad deal with Microsoft to use Silverlight and its Smooth Streaming technology to deliver high-definition streaming video for its major sporting events”

Fortunately the gods have prevailed and though I’d been goodie-goodie (meaning resistant to) about rooting my G, I finally decided to after some prompting (and a well made video showing how easy it was to do).  And damn, it works, and yea, it was easy and quick.  Nice work!

Sources:

• Five Great Reasons to Root Your Android Phone on Lifehacker
• Get Root Access in Android with One Click on Lifehacker
• Android Rooting in 1-Click from RyeBrye

For those who don’t know, a micropayment solution describes a system whereby the product being bought is a significantly small amount (something like $2 or less, so basically iTunes music would be one), and is usually coupled by either a pre-pay or a carting/aggregation system. Some day-to-day examples that have succeeded outside of iTunes would be something like pre-paid transit passes in NYC which remove one fee for each use. In the UK, there’s sQuid which is a similar service but can be used for many types of transactions. In Japan, the phones are tied directly to bank accounts for vending machine purchases.

Having worked on a number of e-Commerce back-ends for varying clients, this has always been an issue that perplexed me. On the one hand, consumers all know that at some point, to access content or acquire goods, that a payment needs to be made. On the flip side, content is so easily accessed for free on the Web (whether legally or quasi-legally) that consumers have started to become used to getting it for free. So how do we impose payment systems that allow for micro-purchasing? The example scenario is for, say, news. Several news providers have already started charging for access to news (which in reality is no different than buying a newspaper) and several others are moving in that direction, but is the subscription model working? Or perhaps will we see a pay-per-content-item system emerge?

Either way, the system itself is the culprit. In my somewhat out-of-the-box opinion, there needs to be a new model altogether. Imposing traditional payment schemes simply hasn’t worked for the micro-payment world (though I could argue that RedBox might actually be a close-to-perfect model but its also partly the targeting). Pre-pay, post-pay-aggregation, bank cards, none seem to work really well, and most of the systems that have emerged with promising outlooks later died untimely deaths (as pointed out by one of the Answer respondents).

Anyway here was my response…

I think that we still haven’t tapped the right balance in micropayment solutions that is able to satisfy the needs of the providers and the consumers. There is too little transparency and too little fluidity in the process, and we have (as a development and developer-provider community) dwelled to much on protecting the value of our content and not offering alternatives to letting customers acquire it (mind you, I am a rabid advocate of DRM solutions, so don’t think that I am not in support of content protection, it’s just that we tend to either do it with an iron fist or not at all).

I think customers are more than willing, in the end, to pay for services but the system itself needs an overhaul, likely one we haven’t come up with yet. In the same way that Amazon capitalizes on long-tail marketing, we need to look way outside of how we do things now in order to create environments where the provider and consumer of media services can co-exist. To that end, while there are several successful vendors of such products I don’t think anyone is a leader right now because I think the market will shortly turn itself over.

I do know, from my own experiences, that changes in digital asset management is the starting point for the vendors, but from a standpoint of providing explicitly heuristic access to content, not just providing massive libraries and letting the users hunt for it. A Pandora type experience with a flowing payment process (mixed pay for right to use and pay for use on a very micro level) is something I envision as an evolution. Providers are going to have to work together instead of living in silos of licensed content and use intelligent agents to disperse desired media.

Clarification posted 9 hours later
[reference to responses made later] those are some really great points. I agree that the current state of micro-payments is in waning death mode but argue that a re-thinking of the approach and process (and yes, the interminable fee structures that traditional money systems place on the products) can revolutionize the system. iTunes is a successful venture for every reason stated in several responses, but after raising the price point past the $1 mark, it’s beginning to lose its lustre and it’s debatable if it’s a true micro-payment system anyway (it’s really just a shopping cart for smaller products like the 99¢ store). When I think of micro-payment, I there’s two traditional approaches but they are still both pre-pay or cart-and-pay systems; the evolution I see would be be much more superfluous than that.

Several years ago, a good friend and myself came up with the idea of sending barcode images to cellphones via MMS as a means of ticketing for events, most notably nightclubs with VIP access (and two years later we see Fandango using scanned bar-code “ticket at home” systems that are pretty much the same but not digitized), but the system itself was paid for using micro-transaction on account (in other words, the transaction itself was attributable to the benefiting business, which could then be passed on in hard form to the customer if the business desired).

Like this, what outlandish ideas can you come up with that can revolutionize how payment models work?

But this past week I installed the Google Voice app (and another one just to try out) from the Google team and wow, what a difference. Just the fact that I now have my VMs both audio (without having to call my TMob VM account) and transcripted to text is a true testament of how far things have come (imagine what a God-send the text transcript is sitting in a meeting with your tone off and not wanting to be an ass by dialing out while someone else was speaking). Both apps are easy to use, both have their benefits and drawbacks but as first release software, I suspect they will only get better. Now I see what all the kerfluffle was about when Apple banned Google Voice from the App Store.

[from Switched]

We’re not exactly huge Microsoft boosters around here. Most of us in the Switched offices are devoted Mac users, and there’s at least one professed Linux nerd in house. We regularly joke that it takes just as long in 2009 to open Microsoft Word as it did back in 1992. Operating system preferences aside, we can’t help but feel as though Microsoft is getting a raw deal. The Redmond-based company is regularly painted as the enemy of… well, just about everything. Yet, while the European Union is forcing Microsoft to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows, no one seems to be keeping an eye on 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA. Here are a few ways we think Apple is evil, and getting away with it.

While is why I am extremely proud of the evolution of the CMS that I designed and built for the Wimbledon Live player (see this post).

To understand the complexity behind designing the UX it’s important to understand the nature of the data and the critical effect of the workflow. First, video was being supplied from six sources, some to us using Saviant direct to our servers, some we pulled via FTP, and then of course the live streams (some HD and some SD). Then there were multiple parties…NBC (as the news reporter) needed editorial control over metadata, while iStream’s Managed Webcasting team needed to control the timeline over when items went to publication. My team, RnCS (Research & Creative Services) needed to insure that everything was tested before going live so we needed to throw the whole thing through a staging server before hitting a production server that then fed a cluster of edge servers on Akamai’s network.

So we structured it in several parts. First we put automated bots to determine when new assets had been dropped, specifically seeking out XML files that held the initial metadata, and dropped that into the CMS DB. Once there, the appropriate parties were notified by email (or in my case as PM, by SMS) – to update metadata, insert images, begin video transcoding, etc. Through the entire process, we designed screens to make it as easy as possible to follow the flow of assets, provide enough ability to each staff person so that overlaps in duties existed but that checkpoints assured data integrity throughout.

The grid above, for example shows the visual layout of the thumbnails that would appear in the cover-flow style playlist inside the player. Deep linking was provided so editorial users could create pointers on the MSNBC/NBCSports sites. Drag and drop allowed us to reorder objects to maximize the visibility of prominent players.

Each level of user had various modal windows to insert data. Even imagery was uploaded first to the staging, processed for size and then sent to production.

Because of the nature of edge servers, we also had to purge the cache after any update, so we provided a three-section grouping that allowed us to send the feed XMLs to production and clear the cache in one shot. And to make THAT process even easier, we built it so that it was accessibly by mobile phone so even if I was in transit, I could still update the CMS in a timely fashion.

Finally, the live streams had the ability to be toggled on and off so that the matrix of available feeds, particularly the Smooth HD stream, was optimized and prioritized. To be sure, there was still much room for improvement but given that the whole CMS was built in 6 days and now, five days into Wimbledon, has eased us into a steady, smooth workflow, speaks volumes for making it easy to use, intuitive (for example, the color designations on the player match the ones in the CMS, big text and extensive micro-transaction Ajax created an interactive environment), and overall a good experience.

Starting June 27, it will also feature live feeds including up to five simultaneous live feeds (of course the UK being 8 hours ahead of me means some extremely early morning admin).  The live feeds (and subsequent VOD archives) will feature at least one Smooth Stream, Microsoft’s new adaptive streaming technology that will bring you hi-definition video at 2950k (it looks really sweet).

The 2009 Wimbledon runs through July 5th.