High Earth Orbit » Observation

Stringent requirements on data retention of websites?

Andrew — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 18:12:56 +0000

There is a CNet article: Congress targets social-networking sites, that lays out a current discussion on Congress wanting to push the requirement of websites retaining user data for 1-2 years. This is similar to what is required now for ISPs.

The article mentions that this could be as little as retaining the IP address for each user – which seems absurd, since users will likely be coming from many IP addresses (dynamic IPs, laptops, cafes, etc.), and go so far as storing identity, messages, websites visited, and any info available.

What constitutes a “social networking site”? Would a blog be required to track comments, visits to the blog and link that to the IP address? What happens to blogs that are up and gone in 6 months?

And these suggestions come under the guise of national security, but also protecting minors, and copyrighted material.

These are some very frightening prospects.

‘Think Different’ is so very relative

Andrew — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 04:00:32 +0000

The old mantra of “Think Different” used to mean one thing. However, it now means something very different in certain venues. I’ve noticed this trend growing steadily as I attend conferences, but I don’t think I’ve heard it as pronounced (at a non-apple specific meeting) as it was at this:

By our best estimates, over 90% of the 550 people at RailsConf 2006 are using Apple laptops.

We decided to reward those willing to take a stand against the norm and compute different.

See the Flickr Stream

Latest Travel lessons learned

Andrew — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 19:07:17 +0000

I’m now back in the US after 2 weeks traveling Central/Eastern Europe and along the way I’ve picked up some new cultural/travel/technology lessons learned.

The first one wasn’t immediately noticeable. I’m a big fan of coffee, and I tend to drink it in large quantities. This is already a problem, and one of the few, when I travel Europe: land of the ‘coffee shot’. However, in hostels and some hotels they will serve coffee normally and let you fill up as often as you like.

The coffee often tasted bitter. I attributed this to the bad coffee served in such large quantities at these ‘reasonably priced’ establishments. On the contrary, this is actually a remnant of the rationing of materials during World War II, where chicory root was put in as an available filler for coffee. This lent it a bitter flavor. Over the years of the war, this flavor was acquired, and even now Europeans will add chicory to their coffee to get that familiar taste.

I like my coffee relatively root free.

Note: Japanese tourists were observed to travel in large tour groups, where as Chinese tourists travel in sets of pairs (2 friend, 2 couples, etc.)

Pictures of people are usually more interesting and enjoyable than pictures of monuments and buildings. I am amazed by what appears to be the gigabytes and gigabytes of (the same) bad photographs being created every minute during high-season in tourist areas. It becomes very apparent that the future of computing is search. How else am I going to find that picture of Mozart statue amongst the hundreds (or thousands) of photos I took on a trip (or that exist on my entire hard drive).

Vienna is a much cooler, and memorable city when you spend less time running around to see all the sites (which are mostly Hapsburg estates), and more time in the “Vienna Living Rooms” of coffee shops and cafes. This is true of many, but not all, cities.

Internet access is a real pain to find, and will probably cost a lot. Forget wireless (at least publicly available wireless)

Another interesting aspect of travel is the end of the trip. Whether or not you’re tired and want to relax. Its the hours and hours in lines, through counters, gates, flights, and sitting waiting that really drives the feeling: “I want to be home.”

It may not necessarily be that you want to go home, but finally getting home is a release from the mundaneness of sitting in the airport and passing through customs after customs agents. If only they could put us in hibernation at the end of the trip so we just “showed up” at home, all exuberant and vibrant from the end of our travels.

How many words (or characters) are enough?

Andrew — Wed, 24 May 2006 02:30:14 +0000

Reuters has an article that fewer characters being used in written Chinese than ‘before’ (not sure when before was). For example, you typically need to know 900 characters to read 90% of current publications. People usually gawk at the number of characters they say that Chinese writers/readers must learn, of the 50,000 individual characters that exist.

However, as Slate points out, there are currently almost 1,000,000 (million) English words, 50,000 of which are headwords – or the primary, bold-faced, word. I also had a statistic around somewhere about how many English words make up 90% of a typical daily newspaper, but cannot find it (silly data…)

And Chinese characters are commonly built up of radicals which indicate what the word can mean or deals with. Being an engineer, chinese script feels very “algebraic” to me. I learn what x and 2^y and π mean. However, when you see “angry” and “hungry” do they give you any idea what they mean?

Other interesting facts: there are fewer than 100,000 words in French, and 24,000 different words in the complete works of Shakespeare (1,700 were invented by him). About 80% of the information stored in the world’s computers (such as this text) are also in English. And as Joi Ito quandries: If news is not in English, did it happen?”

Micropayments

Andrew — Tue, 09 May 2006 17:42:21 +0000

Mashable has some thoughts on micropayments, in this case via indieKarma. indieKarma pays you a penny for every hour a visitor spends on your site. Implementation seems weak, as it requires both the viewer and site to have accounts setup and logged in to indieKarma (e.g. won’t work from public workstations)

Mashable states:

Does anyone really think that micropayments are a good idea? Paying one cent for every site I visit feels like a reading tax

I think micropayments are actually a great idea. Except for the web, we already pay a “reading tax” on everything: newspapers, magazines, books. We also pay a watching tax (except for network tv), a listening tax (either via ads, or buy your cd) and so on.

And micropayments shouldn’t apply to just websites. Open-source software is used by individuals and companies who find value in the tool and in some cases make money. Yet in most cases the original developer(s) never see a single $0.01. I can speak for this myself. There have been over 7000 downloads (that I know of via the tracking stats I have) of one of my programs DashSaver. This includes being included in MacWorld UK, and a Japanese Mac magazine, and being very favorably reviewed several times on sites and podcasts. Guess how much money it’s made me? (if you guessed anything other than $0.00, you were wrong – though if you guessed that it did win me a broken Newton Message Pad you’d be correct).

This doesn’t really bother me. I like making software and tools that people find useful. However, I’m a little less inclined, and able, to make great tools/sites/stuff when it comes out of my free-time and I don’t even have the option of making it my ‘day job’.

The only ways someone can monetize, and therefore begin to properly support themselves and produce great content and software is via advertising. Advertising drives up the cost of goods, makes a site fugly, and also can have a driving impact on the content itself (see also Lobbying of governments by corporations).

Anyways, Micropayments seem like a pretty decent idea – just have yet to be implemented well. The only current means of doing payments easily and universally is via PayPal, which takes a good chunk of the change for itself. And indieKarma requires 1 hour of viewing for 1 cent? Personally, I rarely spend more than 10 minutes on a site, and that’s for a good site.

So do what I do, if you like a site/resource, then make sure and give their advertisements a couple of clicks. Leave the windows open for awhile, and even click around and see what the advertiser has to offer. It’s no money out of your pocket, takes a short amount of time, and you’ll pay the site more than programs like indieKarma are offering.

When good data goes bad

Andrew — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 22:12:04 +0000

Michigan has some very odd weather – snow one day, a balmy 70 deg F the next, then more snow. This is in April too, mind you. However, what I didn’t expect, was next Monday’s weather report, a rather frigid -9998 deg F. Also note, that’s the High temperature. When that is the high, I definitely imagine the low is Not Applicable, because at that point you probably don’t care.

But this illuminates the point that you can’t trust data, especially free data. There are some great Web API’s (see Programmable Web for a pretty comprehensive listing), which allow for mashup’s, data sharing, and the ability to pull together great sets of data for all kinds of application. There have been a variety of recent discussion on who is responsible and holds the ultimate key to all this data and what this means to services that prop their business up on the availability, and most importantly, the accuracy of this data.

Imagine I have my house automation system to control the heating system based on the upcoming weather, or send warnings or other responses based on predicted weather patterns. A decent system may catch a complete outlier which is off any known physical chart. However, what if the weather was just off by 10 degrees, or given in the wrong units. When a human is in the loop, they may or may not catch this. But we also don’t base large system responses on just one person saying “oh yeah, it’ll be cold”. However, when automated systems are fed data, we only have our foresight in designing the system to account for data integrity and accuracy and how best to evaluate these.

Perhaps one answer is providing multiple data sources, all of which help correlate, or catch errors in, other data sets. However, we can’t be sure these data sets are truly independent of one another, and aren’t just all mashups of the same data. This has been made very apparent in the rise of navigation systems and incorrect location data of business, streets, exits, etc. There are really only 2 major players in the world for navigational data: NavTeq and TeleAtlas. Therefore, Google, Yahoo!, MSN, MapQuest, Toyota/Lexus Nav systems, et al. are all just variable mashups on these same, limited, data sets (look closely at those credits on the bottom of the maps). Yet users will still “double-check” against various providers to “verify” an answer, even though the answers all came from the sam source. (which ultimately was a couple of workers riding around in cars talking into microphones and laptops, talking about what they see from their car)

So if you hear Michigan actually freezes over next week – then you can feel confident about your data. And just think, the UV index isn’t that bad.

Why I am not compatible with UPS’s tracking system

Andrew — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 13:39:47 +0000

UPS is well known for their excellent package tracking system. Packages are scanned when they move ten feet (or so), so that customers can always track the exact position of their new shiny. You can even map your package travels.

However, like many systems, they aren’t quite as effective as they can be. Recently I ordered a package which was being shipped to an old address. Upon calling UPS to reroute the package I was informed that I must call between 6AM-9AM the morning the package is due to be delivered (four days hence from the placed call) to alert the driver not to deliver the package. I questioned why the operator could not go ahead and note on the package tracking that the address was incorrect and to go ahead and reroute the package now, saving UPS from 4 unnecessary days of travel and shipping.

The operator responsed that “the system does not work that way.” Being a caring customer, I wanted to give my feedback to UPS that this was perhaps not a good solution, and they could be more effective, and have happier customers, by using their tracking system to make notes on packages in transit.

The response: “I will let them know that the system is not compatible with you.”

The modern culture of Producerism

Andrew — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 01:22:39 +0000

Modern pessimists will say we’ve become a society of consumerism . Rising middle-class, dropping prices on basic goods, Wal-mart, large houses, suburbia.

The internet put inexpensive (relatively) publishing tools in the hands of the average public. However, the average public published a

My Homepage!!!!

Under Construction.

and then went about their business stealing from babies, collecting and collating their audio collections, downloading video.

Now, however, we are truly moving into an era of producerism. Take exhibit A, the current products of the recent, much lauded “Evening at the Adler”. Count them, 1 podcast several dozen pictures, and no less than 6 blogs by the panel let alone any number of the participants.

Each trip I take finds me swarmed by people snapping their pictures, taking video shots, and writing their self-published weblogs. People are infatuated with creating and capturing media and sharing it via Flickr, SmugMug, Snapfish, GoogleVideo, iTMS, Podcasts, VidCasts, mash-ups, RSS.

This all makes me very excited. People are sharing ideas, information, their lives and experiences. I can share, ‘mix’, consume, redistribute, and learn.

But what does concern me is people enjoying where they are, and what they have. Don’t live life through your video camera/blog, use it as a medium to share and reflect.

Car Town – what’s important

Andrew — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 13:28:34 +0000

We’re way excited to be getting an IKEA store in the Detroit area (say what you will about IKEA, but it’s inexpensive, functional, and appealing in a modern/Scandinavian fashion sense). And of course, being the Detroit area, they give the following important stats on the Coming Soon! page for the Canton Store:

Acres: 20 (primary parcel)
Square Feet: 311,000
Parking Spaces: 1300

What was also suprising is that in Sweden (where they apparently call it ik-ee-ah), where cars are not that common, the IKEA store looks the exact same. Big Box with a huge parking lot and lots of cars. Of course, I would think carrying your new desk and bedroom set on the train would be somewhat… troublesome.