The weather has mostly been beautiful this week, my schedule has been reasonable (not in that I don't have a lot of work to do, but it's mostly development work I do at my own pace whenever I want, rather than meetings), and I haven't been traveling lately, so I've been on the bike every day this week except for yesterday. I biked into work twice and otherwise have been back to doing my regular daily rides in the park.

My work ride is about 20 miles round-trip, and thanks to the wonderful new bike lane along Kent Avenue, mostly pretty relaxed. I have a short stressful ride from the 59th Street Bridge to my office on 52nd Street, but otherwise, I'm mostly away from traffic or on streets with good bike lanes.

The map here was generated automatically by My Tracks, an Android application which I've installed on my new Motorola Droid. It uses the phone's GPS to automatically chart your route and generate statistics on speed, elevation, and so on. When you finish recording a track you click one button and it sends it to Google Maps and to Google Documents, into a spreadsheet you can use to answer questions like "How many miles did I ride this week?" (53.79 miles). As with most GPS applications it pretty much loses its mind in the cliffs of midtown, but otherwise it's pretty amazingly accurate.

( Droid does )

Anyway, time to get back to work. Lots of other things going on, but I'll tell you about that when I see you.

Tags: bike, tech

I don't hate my iPhone because I don't have one. I have a Treo. The PalmOS is showing its age, and it doesn't synchronize that well with the Mac, so I've been thinking about replacing it, and the iPhones are awfully beautiful. And all the cool kids have one. Maybe I should reconsider, even if it meant leaving Verizon, the only mobile service provider I haven't hated with a passion?

Last month I needed to replace my iPod, so I bought an iPod Touch, which is basically an iPhone minus the phone, but with all other functionality including wi-fi connectivity. It's lovely and I like it very much, but I am very glad it's not my phone. I like plenty of things about it, but I don't need to add to the iPhone gushing. Instead, I now have some solid answers for everyone who says they are shocked I haven't rushed out to buy an iPhone.

( Why I Would Hate an iPhone If I'd Bought One )

There is a new version of the Treo out, but it's only available on Sprint at the moment. When the time comes to replace my current phone, I will most likely buy a Blackberry.

Tags: stupidity, tech

I joined Facebook a few months ago, to keep up with some friends and colleagues who aren't part of the other social networks I belong to, and to keep abreast of social networking in general, which interests me professionally. Each of the networks I belong to has a purpose: LJ is a blogging platform and a way to keep up with friends who blog regularly and to whom I'm close enough to share fairly intimate details of my life; its filtering capabilities allow me to have concentric rings of friends who see different levels of detail. Myspace is strictly for music networking, and works quite well for that purpose despite its horrendous user interface.

Facebook filled a gap: it let me keep abreast of people who don't blog or to whom I am not close enough to want to share detailed blog entries. It's the best way for me to keep up with my many former colleagues, and its telegraphic style makes it possible to actively watch a very long friends list.

Or, it used to. Facebook has gotten increasingly problematic. Even though I have set my preferences to the contrary, my news feed is filling up with so much spam and crap that I miss significant updates (like new photos) by friends from whom I really want to see updates. I turned off email notifications because the vast majority of them were notes not from friends, but from applications my friends had installed. I mostly ignore those requests, but I was becoming increasingly puzzled by the amount of spam I was getting. Had all of my otherwise rational friends suddenly turned into junk-mail-forwarders?

I decided to accept a few requests and see what was going on. I went through eleven screens to read a one-line Christmas card message from one person, tried to return a thrown snowball to someone else (and after ten or twelve screens gave up entirely), and tried to share music through iLike. None of these applications worked properly, and all of them did their best to trick me into spamming everyone in sight. I've documented my interaction with one particularly deceptive application below, but this is pretty much standard behavior for most third-party Facebook applications. It is very difficult to install these applications without spamming your friends; they mislead or tell outright lies in order to get you to do so, and in this case, even ignoring it entirely won't help.

( No fun with FunWall )

So, to my Facebook friends, it's not that I don't appreciate your sending me gifts and cards and attacking me with your werewolf. I'm up for a snowball fight anytime you want to come over (assuming we get some snow). But I won't be accepting any more of these invitations.

Tags: stupidity, tech

Time Warner has announced that it will stop supporting or updating Netscape Navigator. I didn't know it was still being produced.

Back in the dark ages, before "the Internet" and "the Web" were synonymous to most people (before most people had ever heard of either, actually), when Bill Gates was still laughing off the Internet and the founders of Google were probably still in high school, the dominant web browser was NCSA Mosaic, produced by the good folks at uiuc.edu, and available for free.

Then some of those folks left and started their own company, which they renamed Netscape after the University of Illinois objected to their calling it Mosaic. The release of Netscape 1.1 in late 1994 was a milestone; the first time that HTML tables had been properly implemented in a web browser. Among other things, this meant that publishers could put ads next to articles. Suddenly, we who were talking about web publishing had a business model.

I can't find an image of it, but after they changed the name of the company they adopted one of the single ugliest corporate logos ever, a big blue embossed N, that when the browser was loading a page, reversed perspective, sinking into the page and then coming back up, so that it was universally known as the "breathing N."

By 1996 or so Internet Explorer was already edging it out, and I now remember Netscape mainly as a pain in the ass, with its horribly broken Javascript interpreter and non-standard silliness like "server push." Between Netscape's bugginess and IE's deliberate disregard of standards (and its bugginess) the late 90s were not a fun time to build fancy web applications that actually worked for the majority of your users.

But Netscape had a good run, managed to shake up Microsoft when it was nearly all-powerful, and was for a while the biggest news in the industry.

Tags: tech

Especially at this time of year, the word "airport" generally brings to mind long waits, obnoxious staff, pointless routines, and frustration. This is true, apparently, in networking as well as in travel. "Airport" is Apple's brand name for its wireless networking products. Last week, I bought a new wireless router, an "Airport Extreme Base Station," and two "Airport Express" units, small boxes that plug into the wall and let you stream music wirelessly, or connect a computer, or share a printer.

I am a Mac lover. I've been using Macs since the original 128, and now that they're Unix machines, I wouldn't use anything else. But that doesn't mean I'm a fan of Apple, and the past week has been a painful lesson in the value of open standards versus sleek proprietary hardware.

I won't bore you with the details of my wireless setup nightmare, but trying to get these devices working was like trying to instruct Dubya on the finer points of foreign policy. A pointless exercise in frustration, trying to find the nonexistent substance underneath the slick exterior.

Apple's sleek designs are increasingly user-unfriendly. The Airport devices are nearly featureless, with the only status indicator a single unlabeled light. Green means working, and other than that, you need to look in the book to figure out the code. Blinking amber means "unable to connect," according to the book, although in my experience it actually meant "unable and unwilling to connect, either now or at any point in the future, so go away and leave me alone." The reset button doesn't.

The devices were unusually sensitive to interference from cordless phones and other devices. Once a connection was interrupted, it was almost impossible to re-establish without completely reconfiguring the devices from scratch. Configuration can only be done with Apple's software, which is next to impossible to figure out if the standard-setup wizard isn't appropriate for your situation. Apple's support staff is arrogant, yet clueless; at one moment they insist that the device is incapable of doing something that it's already doing, and at the next, give completely contradictory instructions on how to get it to do something else.

I finally got rid of the whole setup, and replaced it with a couple of Linksys devices for half the price. I can't stream music wirelessly, but you know what? I'd rather run a cable; it's less work and less frustration and will work reliably.

I am increasingly skeptical of Apple's hardware skills and more importantly the philosophy behind everything they do; the iPod at least has the virtue of working flawlessly and being vastly superior to any competing device (at least until the battery runs out) but in this case the Linksys equipment is far superior, even if it doesn't look quite as slick. And if it has fewer features, well, at least they all work. I held off buying an iPhone mainly because AT&T's network is so inferior to Verizon's, but I'm not sure I'd buy an iPhone at this point even if it were made for Verizon's network. Maybe I'll wait for the Google phone.

Tags: stupidity, tech

My previous post generated a number of questions about how to maintain multiple email addresses. As I said there, using the same email address everywhere is not only an invitation to immense amounts of spam, it's also a privacy problem, in that it allows cooperating site owners to link your accounts, just as Facebook and its Beacon partners are doing.

In addition to the privacy benefits, using unique email addresses helps counteract phishing attempts: You know that the "Fraud alert on your account" email is garbage if it's not sent to the unique address you use only with your bank. Plus, if someone starts spamming you, or sells your address without your permission, you can just turn off the email address you gave them. (Note that I'm not talking about setting up multiple email accounts -- creating say ten different Hotmail accounts which you then have to remember to check -- but multiple addresses that point to a single account.)

I've been using unique addresses for more than a decade, managed with procmail, a very powerful Unix mail-filtering program that can do almost anything once you learn its arcane syntax. However, unless you're a Unix geek in love with regular expressions like [A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4} (which matches an email address) it probably won't help you. But email has changed a lot in the last decade, and nowadays you can set up multiple email addresses without any technical knowledge at all, for free. Here's an overview of how to do it.

If you have your own domain (meaning your email is something like myname@myname.com, rather than myname@verizon.com or myname@yahoo.com), the company that hosts it probably offers a way for you to create and manage multiple email addresses. This feature is usually called "aliasing." It's not the ability to create multiple mailboxes (almost every major Internet provider offers this, whether or not you have a domain) but the ability to create email addresses that can then be pointed to one or more mailboxes. The idea is that you can have more than one address, but have all the mail to those addresses delivered to a single mailbox. So you can set up "amazon@mydomain.com" and "ebay@mydomain.com" and so on, and have the email delivered into your regular mailbox, but set up filters so that mail with "amazon@mydomain.com" goes into an "Amazon" folder, and so on.

If you don't have your own domain, you still have options. Consider Gmail, and remember the Secret Of the Plus Sign. Gmail's spam filtering is unbelievably good; no matter how much spam you get at your Gmail account, you won't be bothered by it, so you can use it without fear of spam. Gmail also has a pretty powerful filtering system that's easy to use (not as good as procmail, but not bad, especially if you learn how to use Google's search operators.)

And the Secret of the Plus Sign is this: my.name@gmail.com and my.name+anyword@gmail.com are the same address. Both will deliver to my.name@gmail.com, but you can set up filters based on what follows the + sign. (This works on many email systems, not just Gmail; try it with your current email address. If your address is myname@somecompany.com, send email to myname+word@somecompany.com and see if it shows up. If so, you're good to go.)

The bad news is that lots of sites, including Amazon and Facebook, will not accept + signs in email addresses. For those, I use a combination of aliasing and the plus sign. In other words, for amazon, create an alias "amazon@mydomain.com" and point it to "my.name+amazon@gmail.com".

Another option is available free from Yahoo. Yahoo mail has its drawbacks (inferior spam filtering and an ugly mail interface -- if I liked Outlook I would use it) but it does have a feature that's useful for this purpose. Under Options (top right of your Yahoo mail screen), choose "Mail Options," select "Spam," on the left side, and then click the "Set up a disposable address" link. This allows you to select a unique prefix and then allows you to create as many email addresses as you like using that prefix. Mail to those addresses can be delivered to your inbox or to a separate folder. My prefix is "kffile" so that means I could set up "kffile-amazon@yahoo.com" as my email address for Amazon, and have it filtered into an "Amazon" or a "Shopping" folder.

In short, it's good practice not to use the same email address everywhere on the web, and with the wealth of options available, there is no reason to limit yourself to a single email address. For me, using multiple email addresses has not only meant that my inbox is essentially spam-free (fewer than a dozen spams a month), but also that Facebook's privacy-invading system passed me by so completely I had to do some investigative work to find it.

Tags: tech

Thanks to the overwhelming hysteria about Facebook's new "Beacon" program -- the one that sends information about what you buy at certain web sites to your profile -- it has been difficult or impossible to find any facts about how it actually works. So I did a little experimenting this morning.

First, I went to Amazon and bought a CD by the Carter Family, one I'd been meaning to buy for a while. I was already logged into Facebook. Nothing about my purchase showed up on Facebook.

Then I went to epicurious.com, and created a new account, using the same email address I use for Facebook. This is important; I use site-specific email addresses normally, so the email address I use at Amazon is different from the one I use at Facebook. As soon as I finished the account creation process, an Ajax popup came and went very quickly at the bottom of the screen. And when I went to Facebook, I had this in my personal news feed:



Nothing appeared in my public news feed, thanks to the changes Facebook made after the outcry I suppose. I clicked "Remove" and that was the end of that.

So the answer to the question I've been asking for more than a week ("How does Facebook know?") is not magic, it's not cookies, it's just a simple matching of email addresses on your various accounts. And at this point, I have no problem with what they're doing, since they placed a big honking notice at the top of my personal feed telling me what they were going to do, and requiring me to click "Okay" before they did it. Which I did not, so my privacy remains intact.

I gather that the original version of the program would have placed that notice in my public feed and required me to remove it. That is, indeed, unacceptable behavior, and much worse than what I had originally thought htey were doing. But to my mind they've sufficiently addressed the issue, and it's nice to see that public pressure can accomplish something.

In addition, it's a lesson once again that the less you spread around your email address, the better off you'll be. Using site-specific email addresses has saved me a tremendous amount of spam (I know who's sending it, and can turn off or ignore the address) but it also has a privacy benefit as well.

Tags: stupidity, tech

More than a decade ago, I flew home from an Internet conference in San Francisco with the first (pink) edition of Larry Wall's Programming Perl and a printout of the NCSA Mosaic page on how to write CGI scripts. The conference had been sparsely attended (vendors who found out that I and my colleagues worked for a customer that might actually buy some Internet technology flocked around us like sailors on leave) but I'd come back convinced that the web was probably a better place to do product development than the text-based protocols we'd been working with. Over the next few weeks I wrote my first set of CGI scripts, just for the hell of it (it would be several months before anyone at my company took seriously the idea of building a commercial web site) and created The Quote Server. It was a collection of my favorite quotations and an invitation to others to submit theirs. It's gone through several generations of technology, and several hosting servers, but today I closed it to further submissions. It will still serve up quotes, and I'll probably enter some here and there, but it's no longer open for the public to contribute quotes.

In the early days I would get several good quotes a month. Over the last few years, the proportion of good quotes has dropped, with more and more people entering worthless nonsense or moronic aphorisms they'd dreamed up themselves. (Given that rumors of Mark Twain's Internet access are greatly exaggerated, there's simply no chance that anyone quoting themselves is going to say something that interesting.) For the last few months, the amount of raw spam (of the type familiar to anyone with a blog) has risen as well, and it's simply not worth the trouble. I don't think I've used more than a half-dozen submitted quotes in the last six months. It's not that big a deal, but I did enjoy getting funny and interesting submissions from around the world.

Tags: tech

At dinner the other night with shunn, bobhowe and our friends Colin, Bill and Christopher, I mentioned the version of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine #2 built at the Science Museum in London. The story of its construction is told in Doron Swade's The Difference Engine, which discusses the many challenges that probably would have prevented its construction in Babbage's time.

In actuality, tolerances and machining methods were not exactly the problem, contrary to what I said the other night. It was more the difficulty of producing parts that were exactly identical to each other. ("Computer-controlled machinery produced the hundreds of repeat parts, the manufacture of which had so handicapped Babbage," says Swade.)

But beyond that, Babbage's design was unbuildable -- he'd never managed to build it all so was unaware of contradictions and problems in his plans. And once built, there was the entirely different problem of getting it to actually work."Babbage had not had the experience of fault-finding on a complete machine, and had made no provision for easing the setting-up process or dealing with malfunctions," Swade says. In a modern age of programming it's difficult to imagine how in-the-dark Babbage was. "Babbage had made no provision for debugging," Swade continues. "The whole machine is one 'hard-wired' unit," so if it jammed, which it did frequently, finding the problem was a bear.

( Photos below. )

Tags: tech

At this point, it seems fair to ask exactly when the intelligence in "collective intelligence" will begin to manifest itself.

Blogger Nicholas Carr, talking about the badly written and frequently inaccurate Wikipedia in his skeptical article about the community-driven "Web 2.0."

Communal writing, like communal software development, communal music-making, or communal anything else, benefits from expertise and organization. This should not come as a surprise, and it doesn't mean that open-source software, or blogs, or bluegrass jams, can't be wonderful. It just means that some things will never change, no matter what technology you throw at the problem. Ten years ago, it was "way-new journalism" where "everyone is a reporter!" Back then, the question was, "where are the editors?" Now it's "Everyone's an editor!" Riiiiiiiight.

Tags: media, stupidity, tech

I've loved maps since I was a little kid, and there are three fascinating new tools to play with:

• Amazon's A9 Yellow Pages service now lets you walk around the neighborhood. They drove GPS-enabled trucks around Manhattan and other cities taking photographs and stashed them all in a database, so when you search for a listing, you see a photo of (some address nearby) the business, and you can "walk" up and down the block. If you search for the Parkside Lounge in Manhttan (where I am playing on Monday night with Kate and Lou) you will see a picture of an intersection, but if you scroll to your left about six images, you'll see this image of the bar. Mondays are bluegrass night at the Parkside, and always worth checking out.
• Google is also beta-testing Google Maps which, like everything Google, kicks ass. In particular, the maps are draggable. Try it for directions to Sunny's Bar in Red Hook, where I'll be playing on Saturday night, again with Kate and Lou, and you might actually be able to find the place. Sunny's is worth checking out any Friday or Saturday night.
• The New York City map portal features the most detailed maps you'll find anywhere; it not only shows the street location but the actual shape of the building and exactly where it's located. I've been using it frequently since someone posted a note about it to newyorkers a while back. You can overlay locations of subway stations, hospitals, and so on. The only difficulty is that there's no way (that I can find) to bookmark a location.

Tags: nyc, tech
Current Music: "Frozen Love," Buckingham-Nicks

Panix, perhaps New York City's oldest Internet service provider (meaning that I don't think any other company was selling dialup Internet access in NYC in 1991) was largely knocked offline this weekend by a domain-name hijacking. The hijacking meant that mail to panix.com addresses was being redirected to the hijacker's servers, which seem to have bounced them at first, and then stopped accepting mail altogether.

While several of my domains are hosted at Panix, they were not affected by this, so my email was not affected.

Update: Today's New York Times had a good story about this incident.

Tags: nyc, tech

LiveJournal's outage yesterday seems to have been fixed, but not before prompting an avalanche of adolescent snottiness from the Slashdot crowd.

Perhaps the funniest comment was one that could have applied to the gamers and geeks on Slashdot as well: "Today I went outside. My pupils have never been tinier..."

Tags: stupidity, tech
Current Music: "Stuck Inside a Cloud," George Harrison

Those of us who believe that programming has gotten too easy with all these sissy icons and windows (yes, you know who you are) might be pleased at the release of Hercules, an emulator for IBM mainframes. For my first programming class in college, I programmed PL/I on punchcards on an IBM S/360, and who could ever forget buying the special orange cards you used for your JCL statements and using them over and over until the operator at the RJE* room got mad at you when the dog-eared cards jammed the card reader.

* Remote Job Entry, ie, the room where you waited 45 minutes for the greenbar printout informing you of a syntax error on the fourth line of your program.

Tags: tech

Having just finished Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, Confusion, and The System Of the World), I finally picked up James Gleick's biography of Isaac Newton.

( An argument for mandatory teaching of the calculus )

Tags: books, sf, tech
Current Music: Brooklyn Funk Essentials, "Hik It"

Now for sale: a waterproof MP3 player that works via bone conduction. Bone-conducting cell phones are also available. Does anyone else remember the BoneFone? You can get one on eBay if you like.

Tags: stupidity, tech
Current Music: Lyle Lovett, "Flyin' Shoes"

Almost exactly twenty years ago, Apple published a big insert in Newsweek magazine touting the new Macintosh. My Dad bought one early the following year, and I'll never forget the singing disk drive (the 400K floppy drives in the very first Macs were variable-speed) and the games that came with it to teach you how to use the "mouse." And the big clunky keyboard with the distinctive "knocking" sound, and the telephone-cable connector immortalized in Bloom County. It's been a long walk from that cute little beige box to the silvery Unix machines of today.

Tags: tech
Current Music: Green Day , "American Idiot"

In a scare story in today's New York Times, we're told that even high-end software jobs are vulnerable to "migrating abroad":

In the debate over high-technology work migrating abroad, there has been widespread agreement on at least one thing: the jobs requiring higher levels of skill are the least at risk.

However, it seems that Microsoft has "agreed to pay two Indian outsourcing companies, Infosys and Satyam, to provide skilled "software architects" for Microsoft projects."

But those architects are working where? "At Microsoft facilities in the United States." They're Indian citizens who come in on H1-B visas to work for the company. That's offshore? Only if you consider Redmond to be "offshore" of Seattle (which, I imagine, many do, but that's a separate issue).

U.S. software companies have been bringing citizens of other countries here on H1-B visas for years to work on projects, frequently for very high-end work. The number of these visas has dropped: From nearly 200,000 in 2002 and more than 300,000 in 2003, the H1-B cap dropped back to 65,000 in October of last year. (This fact sheet shows data from the Bureau of Citizen and Immigration Services through 2003; and this article discusses the cap. The Wall Street Journal also discussed it in March of this year, but that article is available only to paid subscribers.)

So, there's no news here -- the practice is nothing new -- and the description of this as "offshoring" is questionable. Is it "offshoring" because Microsoft is paying an Indian company to supply the workers? Is it therefore also "offshoring" when a U.S. company hires consultants from Accenture, which risks losing a a big homeland security contract because it's based in Bermuda?

The Times got the story from The Washington Alliance of Technology Workers , a CWA-backed activist group supporting the rights of technology workers. (And good for them, but let's try to keep our facts in line.) Surprisingly, the organization's article on the topic is a little more balanced, pointing out that nothing indicates the consultants replaced U.S. workers, and they are being paid U.S. wages for the work. WashTech's concern seems to be that Microsoft has been aggressively pushing managers to send work offshore, and the contract workers may be part of a larger plan to train high-level architects here, then send them back to India to run projects for Microsoft there. That might be an interesting "offshoring" story, but it's not what the Times wrote.

Tags: media, tech, words

I suspect that in a few years, people will identify Apple's rebuff of Real Networks as the beginning of the end for its dominance in online music. It's sad that Apple still has not learned that closed platforms always lose to open ones, even if the closed platform is better.

Jobs was quoted in today's WSJ saying, in response to Rob Glaser's offer,

The iPod already works with the No. 1 music service in the world, and the iTunes Music Store works with the No. 1 digital-music player in the world. The No. 2s are so far behind already. Why would we want to work with No. 2?

Nice, Steve. Start a fight with one of the only other industry leaders who's been a steadfast opponent of Microsoft's monopoly. That sort of arrogance is exactly what sent Apple into a tailspin two decades ago.

Tags: music, tech