Undirected Ramblings

Multi-Touch Interaction Research [Permalink]

Wed Feb 15 16:47:02 EST 2006
Category [Technology]

This has got to be one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. Not only have they come up with a great new technology, they've found a bunch of interesting ways to use it (which they show off in the demo video). The part with the photographs had me drooling.

Instant Messaging Gets Serious [Permalink]

Wed Jan 18 12:17:11 EST 2006
Category [Technology]

I spent some time last week testing out a Jabber server at work, and then implemented it this weekend on my own server. Every once in a while I've searched around for a good server, and this time I was immensely pleased to find what seems to be a high quality, open source implementation in Java. The server is Wildfire, which is also a commercial product from Jive Software.

Setting up the server was almost trivial, and consisted of simply running the software on my server, editing a few configuration settings in the easy to use web interface, and following clear instructions for adding my own SSL key with the standard Java keytool. The hardest part was writing an init script, which I think would have been provided, had I used the binary package rather than building from source. The server supports secure messaging via TLS, for both client to server (C2S) and server to server (S2S) connections. The S2S support also means that friends on other Jabber servers, such as jabber.org, can add me to their buddy lists and communicate with me, even though our accounts are managed by other servers. This is one key feature of the Jabber protocol that I think will help it usurp the proprietary protocols and usher in a new era of open communications. A fringe benefit is that my Jabber ID is now the same as my email address.

Once I had a server running at work, I decided that it would be neat to have our build robot output status messages to a persistent developer chat room. The room was easy to setup from the Wildfire administration interface, so my only challenge was to write the software to connect to the Jabber server, enter the chat room, output a message, and leave. As it happens, Jive Software has another product, called Smack, that provides a great interface (again, open source) to the Jabber protocol in Java. A quick download and about 30 lines of code later, I had a running program that, when invoked from the command line, would output its arguments to our developer chat room. This is some good stuff, and the Jive Software folks deserve some serious praise for making this software available as open source.

It just keeps getting better

With my new Jabber server now setup and running smoothly, imagine the joy with which I read yesterday's announcement that Google Talk will now support open federation! While Google is not the first large provider of Jabber service, they do have the clout, name recognition, and finances to really push Jabber ahead in the world. Their support of open federation means that I can tell all my friends to sign up for Google Talk, and they'll be able to talk to me via my account on my own server. Hopefully this will bring a hasty end to the days of having to sign up for 5 different IM accounts just to talk to different friends, and having to use silly insecure protocols that send your messages over the network in the clear, easily intercepted by anyone who can plug in a network cable in the path of their transmission. I am very happy with Google right now.

Sony Hacks Consumers' Computers [Permalink]

Mon Nov 14 13:45:19 EST 2005
Category [Technology]

In the midst of the recent hubbub about Sony/BMG installing a rootkit on consumers' computers to attempt to restrict copying, the Times is running an article explaining the situation and describing the music industry's concern that "casual piracy" is the biggest threat to their revenue. While the idea of the erosion of the media conglomerates' bottom line really tugs at my heartstrings, I wish the news media would take a more creative approach to reporting on the subject. The music industry seems to get away with declaiming the failure of its business model as the fault of its customers. Nobody bothers to point out, however, that the industry has stubbornly resisted the adoption of any new technologies that would make it easier for consumers to consume its products. Should it really be surprised that its bottom line is in jeopardy? The success of services like iTunes and products like the iPod must surely suggest that there are still ways of making money on musical recordings, even if the disposition of the market has changed. I, for one, am sick of the music industry trying to restrict my ability to use things that I purchase—enlisting the help of the government to do so, no less—for the sake of preserving its obsolete way of making money. Media executives, stop clinging to the idea that you can control what everybody does. The world has changed. It's time to change your tune.

Wonderful World of Wiki [Permalink]

Wed Oct 05 01:21:56 EDT 2005
Category [Technology]

I've been thinking for a while that a wiki would be a good way to organize information and make it available to developers at work. Not too long ago, I started looking into wiki engines, but my efforts were sidetracked by more concrete work. My new boss, however, came in absolutely gung-ho about getting a wiki up, so we installed MoinMoin and announced it to the development group. In only about a week or two, there has been a huge flow of information into the wiki. As I had suspected, there was a lot of information that needed sharing, with no good place for it to go. Now, developers can add information anytime, and we can grow our information store as we accumulate more information.

The wiki works quite well for this purpose, as people can create stubs for information, then others can fill in where they have expertise or interest. The wiki has become the canonical store for things like status listings, project schedules, and useful documentation. This is in sharp contrast to our old, almost completely useless information store, that required a strange hierarchy of documents and stored everything as attachments, creating a huge maze of forgotten, stale, and inaccessible content, rarely used by anyone. The wiki is definitely a great addition to our development group, well worth the tiny amount of time it took to get it up and running.

Ning [Permalink]

Wed Oct 05 01:11:59 EDT 2005
Category [Technology]

Taking a quick look at Technorati a few minutes ago, I found the most-searched-for item to be Ning. "Ning is a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for building and using social applications. Social apps are web applications that enable anyone to match, transact, and communicate with other people." It seems that they allow regular people (well, semi-regular...developmentally inclined regular people) to build applications based on the ones they already offer. The big difference between this and just another hosting company appears to be that they allow you to view the source of the applications running on their site, and clone them to build your own site based on an existing site. I could see this going in a couple of directions: a profusion of crappy, poorly implemented sites that had interesting ideas behind them, or a breeding ground for innovative ideas to be realized by putting the power of the web into more people's hands.

Hopefully, it will tend toward the latter, realizing a goal I've had for a long time (to develop a technology to help ordinary people harness the wonders of the Internet). I haven't had time yet to really look at what's behind Ning's site. Maybe I'll revisit this later.

Google Fun [Permalink]

Wed Aug 24 11:23:19 EDT 2005
Category [Technology]

Google, being the most rockin' technology company I can think of, has just released a new IM service called Google Talk. It's based on the Jabber protocol, which I've been using for a while now, and which means that I can continue using my reguilar IM client. To sign up for Google Talk, you need a Gmail account, which you typically need an invitation to get. Someone on Slashdot pointed out, however, that now you can sign up without an invite, by having Google send you an SMS message. Neat stuff.

In Search of a HTML Link Strategy [Permalink]

Tue Aug 23 20:26:03 EDT 2005
Category [Technology]

I'd like to come up with a set of guidelines to govern the selection of words or groups of words for hyperlinks. For example, if I'm writing some HTML text that has a sentence like, "Harry Foobar wrote an article about migration patterns of jackals in the Journal of African Jackals," which words do I use for the hyperlink to the article? One might decide to always hyperlink verbs or nouns, but the strategy might also depend on the context. What if I have a link to a biographical page about Harry Foobar, a link to his article, and a link to the journal its in? I'd probably want to put the links on "Harry Foobar," "article," and "Journal of African Jackals." There must be a good common strategy one could use so as to remain consistent and most clearly suggest the type of thing to which the links are pointing.

I think my general strategy to date has mostly been to put hyperlinks on nouns, as the nouns often correspond to the things I'm linking to. A new twist that has recently been tickling my brain, however, is the fact that the content of links affects the way things are ranked in Google. For instance, if Google indexes this page, the word "ranked" in the last sentence will be associated with the article it points to, bumping it up in the search results for the word "ranked." But is "ranked" a good description of that article? Maybe it would have been better to put the link on "the way things are ranked." A counterargument for this approach might be that it's a bad idea to try to artificially inflate search results, but a counter-counterargument for that might be that using a reasonable description of the linked-to page, or words for which that page should reasonably turn up in a list of search results, contributes to suggesting to the reader what the target of the link might be. An interesting side-effect would come about if the text of the page was changed in order to improve the link text.

Anyway, I haven't figured it all out yet. I'll post more if I come up with an overarching grand unified theory of linking.

All Your Password Are Belong to Us [Permalink]

Tue Aug 23 19:35:35 EDT 2005
Category [Technology]

This new online database of MD5 hashes makes it ridiculously easy to perform dictionary attacks on MD5 hashes. I'm not quite sure what the implications on, say, password security are, as a good software implementation will "salt" passwords before hashing them. So, if your application stores hashed passwords, make sure they're salted!