Category Archives: Web Site Stuff

Botnets … the unknown reality

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I find it hard to believe that many people are not aware of botnets,
and what they are doing.  Of course, I’m so deep in technology and
the Internet that my “common sense” is now severely distorted. 
For those people who have not heard about botnets, this Washington Post botnet article is a great place to start.  It’s an eye opener.

When you read this article, just realize that this is about the botnets
that have been discovered and are known.  There are more out there
that are unknown, and the sizes of some of these botnets is staggering.  Read here, here, or here, about the FBI arrest of a many running a 400,000+ node botnet!  Oh yeah … and he was 20 years old.

Tagging++ … where the web is heading?

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I have to admit that I really love RSS. Not necessarily
“blogging”, but the concepts of RSS itself. It is an amazingly
simple idea, and yet it can be used for extremely powerful
solution. The whole world of blogging, and news aggregators, is
built on the foundation of RSS.

Of course, then came “pinging”. When a RSS feed is updated with
new posts or data, it can “ping” a service to notify others that it has
been updated. This provides a way to subscribe to the updates of
huge numbers of RSS feeds and blogs. So if I can then get all of
these updates, how do I make sense of them? Enter “tagging” …

Tagging is an ingenious idea … it embraces the concepts of
“microformats” where additional metadata can be embedded into content
like RSS feeds and blogs. In the most simple cases, tagging
allows for a post to be “categorized” using simple keywords …
anything. So now if I subscribe to the updates of large numbers
of posts, I can scan each post for “tags” and create new outbound feeds
(which is what Technorati does) or do my own sorting and filtering based on tags.

Tonight I was reading about Edgeio in a post by Tom Raftery.
This is a whole new step in tagging … and it’s really getting me
thinking. This is where the tags can now designate a post in a
blog for a specific purpose! This is not just about categorizing
… but now hinting at what the content is … and allowing for
specialized engines – like Edgeio – to consume the posts to create new
aggregated solutions. In the case of Edgeio, the new tags are for
“listings” … posts about things that you want to have listed on the
Edgeio web site.

What I really like about this, is it that it represents the latest
turns in the whole microformat/tagging process. Now, I can simple
posts something in my blog, and provide some custom tags that will tell
various engines out in the Internet what my intentions are with that
post. Already I’m using tags to allow people to simply subscribe
to tag feeds … RSS feeds of posts along a particular topical
category. But now I’m able to tag a post to indicate to some
engine that this is a post that I want it to consume and take action
on! This is an impressive capability.

I can start to think of other directions that this could take. For example, Flickr
– the popular photo sharing web site – could now begin to support tags
that would indicate a post contains photos that are to be included into
Flickr. So instead of uploading my images … I simply blog about
my photos, including the images in my posts. Flickr could detect
these images based on tags that I include and automatically consume
them. This is where whole new types of tags and actions can begin
to take place … and create some interesting new directions with the
web. This introduces yet another “neural” aspect to the
applications emerging on the Internet.

wikiCalc … and interesting example

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I downloaded wikiCalc
today and began to play with it.  It reminds a lot of Radio Userland
…
wikiCalc is an application that installs on your desktop and then uses
a browser for the UI.  It appears to be using AJAX for a lot of
the interaction, and has an interesting publishing architecture.

I really like to see more and more applications like this.  I
believe that they represent an interesting intersection of client and
server … leveraging the power of the desktop, while allowing for
remote access.  I simply point my browser at a “server” – running
on my local machine, or a remote machine – and I am presented with a
flexible UI that contains rich AJAX functionality.

I like it!

Google? Privacy? Yeah … sure …

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Since the beginning of Google, I have always been reluctant to allow
cookies from their site. I’ve also been reluctant to heavily use
many of their other services. Part of this has been my
understanding of their overall architecture, and knowing that they
could choose to store a whole lot of information about me. Is
this just paranoia? No … it is because of my understanding of
the inevitable. I fully understand and accept that I’m just
delaying the inevitable … and so it’s just my little game with the
giant Google.

So what am I talking about? It’s the fact that computers are
getting to be so pervasive, and their ability to gather information
about us, and create profiles, exceeds our own abilities to distinguish
our own behaviors. We all have certain predictable behaviors,
many of which we are aware of. We also all have behaviors that we
are not aware of … that
become predictable to others who gather enough information about
us. Computer systems are able to gather large amounts of
information, and mine that information for patterns that we are not
even aware of.

I often use the simple example of grocery stores and their “discount”
or “members” cards. Yeah … just sign up, allow the grocery
store to gather information about everything that you have ever bought,
and they’ll give you a little discount. C’mon … what could it
hurt? Honestly, I’m not sure how it could hurt … but I have
thought through the amazing amount of behavioral data that they could
gather from you. The potential for them to then prey upon your
undistinguished behaviors and reactions grows quickly. They know
what day you buy what. They know what aisle and shelf it was on
when you bought it. They know the color of the packaging when you
bought it. They know the messages printed on the packaging when
you bought. They know the weather, the time of day, and the phase
of the moon. Your grocery store knows much more about your buying
patterns that you would ever think of.

And Google? Uh huh … they know your on-line behaviors. Big time. According to this article FAQ: When Google is not your friend
they have been recording everything that they can. Of course they
have been … storage is cheap, and only getting cheaper. They
know every search you have done, and when you did it, and what Google
Ads that you might have clicked on from the results. So
what? Yeah … I’m not immediately sure of the impact on my life,
however it is interesting to think about what Google can start to know
about you, and who you are, by all of this data. When are you
on-line. When do you search for what. What kinds of Google
Ads attract your attention. Where do you search from. To me
… this is pretty amazing. When you begin to think about mining
this huge volume of data it seems to me that some interesting patterns
have to emerge. Google can begin to know a lot about you, your
interests and undistinguished behaviors. Google … knows who you
really are. Google … knows your true identity.

Oh yeah … you use Gmail? Google Groups? Google
News? Google Alerts? Google Maps? Holy cow … they
have a whole lot on you! 🙂

What is so funny to me is when people are all up in arms about the
“government” and what “they” can find out about you. The article
above really touches on an ironic twist. The government can find
out all about you … as soon as they get it from Google. You
see, you have been giving your privacy away to Google and don’t
complain a bit. How could a company with a motto: Do no evil!
do anything wrong with all of this information they are gathering about
you? Well, I guess that we’ll see. It’s all inevitable … if it
isn’t Google … it’ll end up being yet another company. The
pervasiveness of the Internet, computers, cameras, sensors, and all
things technological is merely the solidifying of the next
substrate. The technologic substrate is forming all around us. The singularity is coming … and Google is just an example of the evidence.

January 2006 CTO Breakfast

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There was a large group this morning at the CTO Breakfast arranged by
Phil Windley
. It was fun to see people from Novell (even some ex-Novell
employees) and even a friend of mine from SCO. This was probably
one of the largest groups of people that we have had at one of these
breakfasts. A good sign of interest!

Phil kicked off the conversation with a reference to a proposal in North Dakota
to float cell phone “towers” over the state using weather
balloons. I brought up a conversation from the 2005 Gilder Telecosm Conference this year where Klein Gilhousen, Co-founder; Senior Vice President, Technology,
of Qualcomm talked about the
Katrina disaster in New Orleans which left lots of people with cell phones
… with no way to call out due to the towers being down. He
talked about hanging cell towers from helicopters, and also
implementing peer-to-peer mesh networking in cell phone handsets. Cool … I just found that can hear the Klein Gilhousen Telecosm 2005 audio.

I then brought up the Pop!Tech podcast “Mind and Body” podcast from ITConversations about the coming man machine interfaces. The story of Jesse Sullivan
is an amazing thing to listen to. It details how far we have
progressed in using computer systems to monitor nerve activity for the
operation of artificial limbs. The doctor presenting talked about how
they can now move nerves from the upper arm, and split and “regrow”
them into muscle in the side of the chest. These nerves can then
be monitored … and the computer tranlates the signals into control
signals for the artificial limbs. Watch the videos in the link
above
and you’ll see how amazing the research is. The coolest part of
the conversation was when they discovered that the sensory nerves were also growing! So they can even add artificial senses to the artificial limbs!

We then got off talking about DVDs, and the growth of storage.
When I mentioned that I had seen the 320GB SATA drives at Costco for ~$179.00, Eric Smith brought up the ~$700 Buffalo Technology TeraStation
storage server that he bought. Ok … that is a cool. I
turn-key terabyte storage server for under $1000! Ok … and
where will we be in 5-10 years? When will a turn-key petabyte
storage server fall below $1000?

Bruce Grant then moved into a conversation about psuedo-AI. He is
implementing a version of the “application substrate” ideas that we
developed when we were both at SCO. The core concept is to create
a set of portable component services that can be replicated, migrated,
and connected in various ways to provide composite services. He
is now looking for ways to create emergent services … or simple ways
for the average person to define some sort of high-level goal, and have
the services create paths of connectivity automatically to create
solutions. He’s working on some very cool stuff …

The topic of “thin-client vs. thick-client” came up when someone asked
if we are about to see the turn back to “thick clients”, or to “thin
clients”. This got me thinking, and I suggested that what we are
actually watching is the natural progression of our perception
of a “thick client” until the substrate that it exists on evolves more
capacity. At this point we perceive the client as “thin”.
e.g. when we didn’t have much processing power, a browser would be
thought of as “fat” … now that we have so much processing power, AJAX
is referred to as a “thin” client. When processing and memory
evolves forward further, virtualization will continue to evolve where
running multiple entire instances of operating systems will be thought
of as “thin”! My three year old son is going to be laughing 10-15
years from now when we talk about the platform limitations that we are
experiencing now. What we perceive as a fat client today, will be seen as a background task 10 years from now.

One of the guys from Novell brought up No Machine
… a VNC-like solution for remote desktop computing. Another
person brought up what Microsoft has been working on with their UI technologies, and also the AJAX Dojo
project … all various directions that UI, remote UI, and AJAX are continuing to make distributed netowrked computing occur.

From mobile devices we got talking about child ren using them, the
user interfaces, and the way that children quickly adapt to new
experiences. We got onto the conversation about children and
computers, and that children often are more interested in the games on
DVDs then the movie content itself! They seem to be wanting the
constant interaction and challenge. I joked that eventually
children are going to want more and more
interactive media that ultimately they will realize that the most
amazing, realistic interactive media is life itself! They will realize
that
going out the front door of their house will immerse them in the
richest multimedia experience possible! Phil Burns brought up a
book called Natural Born Cyborgs where he said that this is one of the core topics of the book.

Hamachi was brought up as a
solution for encrypted peer-to-peer communications. This looks
pretty cool and appears to be yet another growing start-up on the
Internet. I always question a solution like this when it’s not
Open Source code … what am I really installing on my machine?

There are a lot more topics that were discussed … as usual too much
to write about. I have to admit that I like to see the continuing
tech culture growing here in Utah. There are more and more events
where you can find people who are in tune with what is going on in the
world and the Internet.

Phil Windley
… thanks for creating this breakfast!

Problems with style in blog posts

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I got this blog post in my aggregator (Radio) a while back and have
been meaning to post about it.  It mirrors a problem that I have
been experiencing as I have been hacking on Radio to add some new
capabilities.  This is a post from Phil Windley’s blog … and it
shows where some of the use of CSS, Classes, and Styles breakdown.

As you can see below, when I viewed the post in my aggregator it appeared like this:

Geek Dinner Tonight.

I’ll be speaking on microformats at the <a class=”hcal”
href=”javascript:showpopbox(‘blogtools:0.9-a7369493d8a334254d358837dd47669d’,
0, 20)”
id=”link_blogtools:0.9-a7369493d8a334254d358837dd47669d”>geek dinner
tonight. See you there.

What the heck?  I’m guessing that the tags and attributes are
being exposed due to some sort of issue in rendering the post, without
having something from the base web page?  I ran into something
like this when I was working to embed pictures and photos in my
posts.  I wanted to hack a simple “image inserter” button into
Radio … and when I added some really cool Javascript it worked
wonderful … until you got my post in your aggregator.

I’m working on tweaking my code so that it will work fine without the
base page … but it was taking long enough that I delayed the
project.  I’ll work on it more in the future.  It was
interesting to see that other people have the same issues with their
posts.

The weird part?  When I included Phil’s post in my post … it turned out like below!  It’s appears to be ok …

Geek Dinner Tonight.

I’ll be speaking on microformats at the geek dinner tonight. See you there.

[Phil Windley’s Technometria]

Utah Geek Dinner



November 30, 2005 @ 18:00


– 20:00

Los Hermanos, Lindon, Utah
Come and learn about microformats and meet interesting techies from around Utah.

Download to Calendar‘)
// –>

Progress with Asterisk

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Funny how small the world is.  I’ve been coming up to speed on the Open Source Asterisk
PBX solution.  One of the first things that you have to purchase
are the cards for the PC that connect to phone lines.  For my test
solution, I want to have two phone lines connected into the PBX to do
some basic call handling/call routing/voice mail/e-mail notification.

In reading up on this, the technical terms for what I want are FXO line cards.  These are cards that act like a modem or phone and can “answer” calls.  (NOTE: the other type of cards are FXS cards which allow you to connect a telephone to the PBX and the FXS card will “ring” the phone and provide dial-tone.)  There are several solutions out there … from cheap to quite pricey!  I found a Digium 4-line card that can have FXO or FXS modules attached to it.  For what I am doing right now … it’s too much money.

There is also a lot of talk about the Intel chipset modems that can work.  Many Asterisk web sites refer to these as the X100P or X100P-clone
cards.  These are single-line cards that are actually “modems”
with voice capabilities.  In looking into this, I saw mentions of
the $65 card … and that’s more what I was looking for.  The best
part is that I found the link to DigitNetworks and they are selling the X100P cards
for $39.99.  Even better … they are on sale this month for
$25.95!  I just picked up two of these and ought to have them in
the next day or so.

So with these two PCI cards, I’ll be able to install them into my Linux
box, and then install and configure Asterisk to use them.  This
ought to allow me to have the two lines answered – for two different
companies – and walk the caller through a series of prompts to transfer
them to the correct extension, or voice mail box.  I’ll blog more
about it as I make progress.

So why is it funny how small the world is?  It turns out that
DigitNetworks is just up the road from here in West Jordan, Utah!

The evolution of RSS

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It is very cool to see how RSS is being used for a wider range of
solutions than just blogging.  In experimenting with my iPod, I
have been studying the RSS enhancements that Apple has started to use,
and this article talks about a bunch of the enhancements that Microsoft
is experimenting with.

Where I have been thinking a lot lately is on new ways to use
RSS.  Since there are now so many news aggregator applications
that can consume RSS, it’s about time to think of new ways to create
feeds that are customized to the requestor.  And these would not
necessarily be the time-ordered “news” feeds … but maybe new forms of
reference material on demand.  What about educational content
being delivered on demand via RSS?  You simply subscribe to a
“feed” that begins to release content to you – posts or enclosures – on
a regular basis.  Your aggregator consumes the feed and presents
you with the content is more of a “chapter-order”.  At some point,
maybe there is even an extension that tells your aggregator that a feed
is now “dead” … or “finished”.

I’m thinking about how I might experiment with these Microsoft
extensions … in addition to some of the things I’m doing with my
iPod.  In the field of “identity management” I begin to think
about how I might want to give someone the ability to “subscribe” to
“me”.  I could easily do this via SSL, and then add
authentication.  People who I want to share with could then
subscribe to updates to my identity attributes.  Things like
sharing my GPS location could easily be done this way.  It’s fun
to see this whole area of technology get more and more mature.

Microsoft making RSS a two-way street.
Microsoft is creating extensions for the RSS syndication format to make
it multidirectional, a move that could allow RSS to be used to
synchronize information such as contacts and calendar entries across
different applications. [Computerworld News]

Converting DVDs and Videos for the Video iPod

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I have to admit that it has been harder than I thought to find a free
solution for converting DVDs and various other digital movies into the
right format for the iPod … on Windows.  Yes, yes … I know …
if I was using a Mac then it would just be there.  But I’m not …
yet.  (NOTE:  I’m seriously interested in buying a iBook,
PowerBook, MacBook at some point soon … and I will.)  For now,
my primary laptop is running Windows, with Linux in Virtual PC. 
My Tablet PC is also running Windows.  So I want a Windows
solution.  There are a number of commercial application that look
good … but I wanted to see what I could find for free.

I bought an iPod Video a while back, and have been doing most of my
experimenting and research on the audio side of things.  I moved
from the music and smart playlists into podcasts.  I’ve learned a
lot, and see some very interesting ways that this platform can be
leveraged into new businesses and business models.  So what about
video?

I’ve had a long experience with video and video editing … starting
with 3/4″ tape decks in the late 70’s … and all the way up to my
current digital video editing set-up.  I wanted to know how to
easily take a DVD, or existing digital video content, and get it
converted to MPEG4 format and moved into my iPod.  Here’s what I
found that seems to work:

  1. For doing the conversion of content I’m pleased with Videora and their Videora iPod Converter.  Based on the Open Source FFmpeg
    project, this is a clean – and free! – application.  It installed,
    and was easy to figure out and use.  Once you install it, you can
    do “One Click” conversions, or create a queue of conversions and just
    allow your machine to run all night.  Videora has an insteresting
    add-on that I might look at which is their automatic downloading tool –
    Videora.  So that is the solution for converting video to the proper format.
  2. For grabbing video from a DVD, I found the Open Source DVDx
    project at SourceForge.  I’m going to test this tonight, however
    the claim is that it will rip a DVD to various digital video formats
    … which I can then feed into my Videora iPod Converter.  It
    appears to work easy enough, and there are other people using this tool
    for this same purpose.

So I’m about to jump into really using my Video iPod and seeing what
might be interesting to take on the road.  In my initial test, I’m
impressed by the size and video image … I’ll have to watch a few
videos to really see if I like it or not.  In either case, I now
have two key tools to be able to get content into the right formats for
the iPod!

Phil Windley’s CTO Breakfast

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This morning was the November/December CTO Breakfast that Phil Windley
put
together. The breakfast started with a question about hiring good
talent. One of the employees from Canyon Bridge
said they have been looking to hire some good engineers, and have been
finding that few can answer some very simple questions. The
example that they gave was about reversing the order of a linked list.

There was a lot of talk about how to alter the hiring process, and also what types of questions people ask: What do you do outside of work? What Open Source projects do you work on?
There was also a lot of talk about how to gather names. Examples
were leverage your existing employees to get the names of “known good”
co-workers. The problem with this approach is that you can
quickly run out of references.

The conversation went on for a long time before it finally went over to the CP80
issue. CP80 is the “Clean Port 80” initiative to create laws
which forbid certain types of content to be delivered over port 80 …
the standard port used by web browsers. It again becomes an
interesting way to attempt to legislate morality. In the end, it
will not be technically possible, but could give lawyers a way to go
after the producers of “unacceptable” content. Yeah …
“unacceptable” to who? ([tags: ])

The conversation at one point moved to downloading content from the
Internet, and the subject of Digital Rights Management (DRM). 
Several sites were mentioned where you could get free content –  Pandora (which is a very cool streaming site – part of the Music Genome Project), and one of my favorites Epitonic. ([tags: ])

There was a brief exploration of the whole area of Wikis and the
inability of the “average” user to use “yet another markup
language”.  I have to admit that it truly aggrevates me that the
various Wiki platforms have subtle differences … and most do not
provide WYSIWYG editors.  and we spent some time discussing the
fact that there is a not a really good – Open Source – AJAX/WYSIWYG
editor.  I mentioned the fact that my parents can use Microsoft
Word, but that having to learn a whole symbology wasn’t going to
happen.  It reminded me of a great Podcast by Robert Lefkowitz @ OSCON 2005 … I’ll have to blog about that one!  ([tags: ])

Phil Burnes through out comments about Flock … a very cool Mozilla-based project, I brought up a very cool article that a friend sent me from Make
Magazine … it was about Mologogo
… which is a very cool mash-up of Cellular phones with GPS and Google
Maps giving you a very cheap “real-time” geopositioning/geolocation
system.  We wrapped up on one of my favorite subjects … wearable
computers.  We didn’t spend a lot of time on it … I’ll have to
bring some of my toys to one of the next breakfasts!  ([tags: ])

On the way out, Phil brought up a good point.  His gatherings
bring together an incredible group of people with diverse interests and
experience.  It is the level of experience of some of the people
that really brings a great spin to the whole conversation.  We
ended up going almost 2.5 hours … and it was a great conversation the
whole time … and we could have gone longer!  I’ll look forward
to January!