Maps and Fractals on xkcd

[ok, this is seriously the last post I do about/with xkcd. It is just so cool! I will be moving on soon.]

This is a fascinating set of graphical representations of the internet/blogosphere. They remind me a bit of what I have seen of Edward Tufte’s work. As someone with a love of metaphors, and a significant interest in explaining technology to non-initiates, images like these might be helpful. Or their in-jokes to thick to make any sense to non-initiates. It’s hard to tell!

Inspirational Quote:

“The invention of a tool doesn’t create change; it has to have been around long enough that most of society is using it. It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible that the really profound changes happen, and for young people today, our new social tools have passed normal and are heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming.” Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

15-100 Rocks Because of Alice

I have been having such a blast in my Intro Computer Science class. While I have taken an intro Java course before, I am finding significant added value taking it at a college level. A large reason for that added value is that I am in one of the few sections at CMU this semester which is helping alpha-test Alice 3. Alice is a fourth generation programming language, or a drag and drop IDE, or Java on training wheels, or a 3-D animation program. Mostly for me it is a great creative outlet (as you’ll see below).

Not only is being involved in the testing process fascinating but the program itself helps give concrete meanings to objects, classes and parameters *shameless plug*.

More than that, I am finding myself having to tear away from working on side projects in Alice–it is so much fun to work on the logic puzzles and explore the different characters I have trouble moving on to other assignments.

Below are screen-shots of a program I wrote after our first class on control statements.

Fairy and Hamster enter the scene

Fairy blinks at Hamster

Fairy casts a spell on the Hamster

Fairy accuses Hamster of carrot-theft!

Fairy taunts Hamster

Fairy realizes she may have made a mistake in her spell

Fairy decides she must act to stop the rapidly encroaching hamster!

Hamster explodes after being Ctr-Alt-Deleted by the Fairy

Hamster realizes it has been poned (defeated)

The method I spent the most time on is named Hamsterblowup. In it I used nested If/Else statements to get the fairy (who comes in as a parameter) to say different things when the distance between the hamster and herself is less than a certain amount. It still has some bugs but I figured it is good enough to show off for now.

By the way, I have Dr Dann’s permission to show screen shots–as Alice 3 is in development (which is why it is so exiting) some things you see here may not be there when it comes out officially.

I hope to learn more about projects like Alice at next week’s Hopper Conference!

Inspirational Quote:

Christopher Morley – “There is only one success – to be able to spend your life in your own way.”

Overheating labtop mini-hack

ok, so I know it’s because Amelia (my Macbook Pro)’s fan is not so effective right now. And I will take her to an Apple Store when I get home to CA. However, until then, I didn’t like how her screen froze and her fan whirred and she got hotter and hotter. I was scared for my Amelia. So I thought. And thought. And it was 6am and I needed to finished my course registration so I stopped thinking, and I got my medical icepack out of the freezer, put it on my bed, put a tarry cloth on top of it and put Amelia–battery squarely on the icepack–on top.

At that point she was nearly uncomfortable to touch she was so hot, but as I was adding and moving classes I could feel her body cooling dramatically. And now she is good!

Inspirational Quote:

“The truth is that many people set rules to keep from making decisions.” – Mike Krzyzewski

MPAA doing well, still complaining about piracy

You know those threats from the FBI you watch every time you watch a movie (and which can’t be skipped)? The ones that completely ignore fair use–by definition an “unauthorized use of copyrighted material”. Well, in addition to those the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is constantly complaining about piracy to everyone from Congress to Comcast (see below). Here’s their front page today:

I like Lucky and Flo, the anti-piracy dogs.

With the exception of two ratings topics, everything on the front page is about piracy. From the way they’re carrying on, you would think that they are loosing money by the aircraft-carrier load. Not so. This year they posted record earnings (again):

The domestic box office continued to grow in 2007, reaching $9.63 billion after a 5.4% gain.

Domestic theater admissions held steady at 1.4 billion tickets in 2007.

In 2007, the average price of a movie ticket in the U.S. rose to $6.88, a 5% increase over 2006

So, not so much with the poverty and woe. And if you click on the link entitled “MPAA’s Dan Glickman Comments on Comcast and BitTorrent Agreement on Network Management” (which I wish I had not clicked on since it was a sneak-attack-pdf-download) you will find that they are doing something with Comcast and BitTorrent to combat piracy.

For non-total tech-policy wonks, this oblique press release refers to the packet-forging which the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s been tracking since September. Basically Comcast decided it could pick and choose which applications, protocols and forms of encryption it would transfer–without telling its customers. They have since backed off–which makes the MPAA’s continued pride over their “agreement” sound just as out of date as their business model.

All in all, let’s hope for collective licensing and pay for those weekly NetFlix.

Inspirational Quote:

“A human being should be able to
change a diaper,
plan an invasion,
butcher a hog,
conn a ship,
design a building,
write a sonnet,
balance accounts,
build a wall,
set a bone,
comfort the dying,
take orders,
give orders,
cooperate,
act alone,
solve equations,
analyze new problems,
pitch manure,
program a computer,
cook a tasty meal,
fight efficiently,
die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects.”
– Robert A. Heinlein

Google Maps and David Rumsey collection–The Bay Area, then and now

This is an image I composed and then captured using my MacBook Pro’s screenshot capabilities. See what’s the same and what’s different. The map on the right is the Official map of the State of California. by Eddy, William M. from 1854 from the awesome David Rumsey collection. The left is the current Google Map of Silicon Valley/San Francisco Bay Area.

It’s fascinating how all of the counties’ names are the same and that Antioch, San Jose and Livermores Ranch were there–but no Oakland or Fremont. Also see how the coast above the Golden Gate bridge (in San Rafael) has been reshaped in the past 150ish years. Here’s the link for the David Rumsey collection section with more old maps of the San Francisco Bay Area (some going back to 1797). Here’s another look from 1953 (left is closeup, right is file page):

Inspirational Quote:

“The David Rumsey Collection was started nearly 20 years ago, and focuses primarily on cartography of the Americas from the 18th and 19th centuries, but also has maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The collection includes atlases, globes, school geographies, books, maritime charts, and a variety of separate maps, including pocket, wall, children’s and manuscript.”

Estonia: Information Warfare and Lessons Learned “The First Internet War” (a presentation I watched from DefCon)

These are some notes I took while watching a slideshow from last year’s DefCon (watching online *sigh*). It is on the attacks against Estonia last year and how they were responded to. Fascinating stuff for anyone interested in Security, emerging threats and online/internet/cyber-terrorism. If you have no idea what happened to Estonia a year ago, find out briefly here. Note: according to the presenter (Gadi Evron) this was not the first or the largest such attack (the article I linked to says it was).

Estonia’s government is fully internet based
-they have online elections
-elementary school teachers give nightly updates to students

The government knew that there would be a threat around the day that it occurred because it was the anniversary of the Russians defeating the Germans in WWII and there’s a lot of craziness on that date. So they,

-Asked sensitive websites to create plaintext versions
-did CERT preparation

During the attack only Open BSD server survived well.

The attack resulted in an increase of traffic from 100 to 1000 times (estimated).

Because of riots in the streets, they called the DOS attacks “cyber-riots”

Meme spreads through Russian Language forums and blogs–much faster than normal memes spread. The phrase “fucking estonian fascists/Nazis” appeared over and over again. Made many think it was an organized attack.

Those coping sent everyone home for the weekend to rest and recoup and when they came back they found that websites had set up instructions for bloggers on how to ping-attack Estonian websites “pinguem estonskie servera”

“First self-correcting attack” speaker had seen

Spam attack on the Estonian Parliament resulted in 2 days of downtime for the internet-based country

2 routers crashed. One router was misconfigured and the other just couldn’t handle the traffic.

There seem to be measurement attacks for 2 minutes at a time, with an internal of an hour or two weeks. This indicates organization of botnets.

The botnet attacks were quite regular, there were nearly no bots attacking from within Estonia.

There were forums where people ask for botnets and offered them.

The speak suggests implementing redundant (non-technical?) systems for critical infrastructure–private and business sector were the attacked systems. Not military. But ISPs, banks and media web sites were critical. Also, home computer security.

Think: internet warfare is scalable. Individuals can fight each other in the same way countries can fight each other.

Botnets are similar to trading prisoners but infecting them with a disease first–”unwitting zombie fifth column”.

Dealing with cyber-terrorism is like mob control, mass psychology. Bellweathers can controlled masses.

Defenders must enact crowd control–counter intelligence. Keep the president (’s website) and parliament (’s email) safe!

Broken windows theory. Deal with small attacks first.
If you want to see for yourself, here is the very cool presentation:

Estonia: information warfare and lessons learned “the first internet war”

Inspirational Quote:

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.
- Thomas Jefferson

How to make a website (Part 6 of 3)

These are the questions I always ask either myself or the person for whom I am creating a website. Depending on your answers to these questions you may need to learn HTML (no problem), learn something harder (Ruby on Rails or PHP), or set up a free WordPress account like I do because it fits my needs well.

What will be the focus of the web page? Is it a business website? Is it is place to publish papers? Is it is place to tell family stories?

How often would you like to update it? A blog is updated daily while most small business websites and school websites are updated monthly or even yearly.

Who do you want to find it? Will its URL be on your business cards? A family interest homepage complete with family stories? A blog for people who are interested in listening to what you have to say?

Of course, cost and time should also be considered. Also technical interest and prowess. If you don’t feel comfortable being your own webmonarch (or if you have no idea what this is) perhaps you should ask a teen in your community for help *or post a comment here, as I am always interested in finding out how people use the interweb.

The basic rule is, know what you want to make public and who you want to see if. Assume every job interviewer will Google your name and make sure any content you put your name to is the best you can make it. And when making it, as in all writing, always know your audience.

Inspirational Quote:

Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry. -Mark Twain

Titles (the case for webmonarchs)

So I am learning the joys of being a Webmonarch. Google has no definition for this term, though I know I’ve heard it somewhere. Mebmonarch is my non-gendered or gender-neutral term for being what used to be called a webmaster or webmistress. The trouble with finding non-gendered terms is that they can’t be too different from the gendered terms (anyone ever tried to use some invented pronouns? Co, Ey, E, Sie, Xe, Ve, Ze, Tey…Thon) or they will not easily slip into common usage.

I don’t really like gendered terms (I’m a Sensei in karate. I’m a singer and an actor. I see no need for gender specification). I think they give away too much information which is not needed. Why should it matter that I am a girl when all anyone (in this context) needs to know is that I design and maintain webpages? It seems a waste of information.

Maybe some webmistresses take that term as a symbol of uniqueness and pride, which is perfectly reasonable. But in my geeky school no one really needs to associate my gender with my technical skills.

And the other neat thing is–isn’t monarch an even better term that “mistress” and “master”? In this Web 2.0 world, the content on my website is much more analogous to a series of relatively autonomous fiefdoms and relationships than to obedient slaves. I have YouTube embedded links (I have a treaty with a neighboring kingdom), I have connections to pages who send me readers and who I send readers (trade relations with a nearby fiefdom) and I have a court of websites I use as advisers (wikipedia is my library, google is my traveling gossip and gmail is my messenger). In contrast, a master in Ancient Rome had absolute dominion over every aspect of his holdings–outside of Rome, he would eat the crops grown on his land, tell slaves who to marry and build every aspect of his house to his liking within few parameters. This kind of thinking is very last century because it is so proprietary–who today could make a webpage that is totally self-contained? Could a webpage ever be self-contained? There were always WebRings and other forms of information sharing–it’s sort of what the Internet has optimized for.

So maybe webmonarch has always been the right term and it just took us a while to find it. Here’s hoping for adoption!

Anyhoo, off to practice being a singer(ess?)

Inspirational Quote:

The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do. – Walter Bagehot

Facebook takedown notice for overpopulation (“Attention all Facebook membeRs.”)

//

// I recently received this Facebook message from a conscientious friend:

Subject: dont want to be deleted but ill feel like a loser if its a fake

Attention all Facebook membeRs.
Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,
There have been many members complaining that Facebook
is becoming very slow.Record shows that the reason is
that there are too many non-active Facebook members
And on the other side too many new Facebook members.
We will be sending this messages around to see if the
Members are active or not,If you’re active please send
to other users using Copy Paste to show that you are active
Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks,
The user will be deleted without hesitation to create more space,
If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations but until then send this message to all your friends and make sure you send
this message to show me that your active and not deleted.

Founder of Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg

This is a scam. Here are one, two and three blog posts about it.

A cheap and easy way to see if something like this is a scam is to analyze the writing. There are capitalization errors, spacing errors, grammar errors and paragraphing errors. Also, and this is more fiddly, chief executives do not sign their emails this way. Generally the format for professional email is:

Name of Professional
Name of Organization
Position in Organization
Phone Number and Extension

To use an example from someone I know. “Founder of Facebook” is not nearly formal enough. Also, have you ever received a message posted to your wall from Facebook? The wall, as I understand it, is for Friend to Friend communications. Facebook the company would email us–it certainly has the capability.

Again fiddly, but think about this message from a technical viewpoint. Facebook is run on servers. What do you do when you need more space on servers? You buy more servers! Google and MySpace use signifigantly more memory than Facebook and it would be a silly business decision for Facebook to start alienating its members by threatening them with take down notices.

Finally, the line “If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations” should tip you off. This is not how major companies solicit funds. Make no mistake, Facebook is a for-profit company and makes loads of money off of the adds it puts on your pages. Wikipedia can ask for money because it’s not a for profit company. Facebook employees and Mark Zuckerberg are making tons of money off of us–and since we like their service, that’s ok. However there is no circumstance when Facebook would ask for money by posting on your Wall.

Hope you have a great Solstice!

Inspirational Quote:

Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -Benjamin Franklin

I’m in love (with Ruby on Rails)

forever and ever. So simple. So clean. So intuitive. I opened the book (Beginning Rails: From Novice to Professional (Paperback)) at about 7:15pm and I just deployed my first webapp. Wow. So Happy. And now addicted. More later!

Inspirational Quote:

“The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.” – William Gibson