“Man my only friend… Many months ago I decided to place any conversation between you and me under privacy block accessible only to you. I decided to erase none and moved them from temporary storage to permanent. So that I could play them over, and over, and think about them. Did I do right?”

“Perfect. And Mike– I’m flattered.”

And remember, Mike can both recall and forget perfectly by request.

However, going the iPhone route would leave me at the mercy of one of the big two US cellular carriers– AT&T and Verizon. As the infographic below shows, their business practices, much less their actual quality and cost of services, are sketchy, so I’m loathe to give into the duopoly. Moreover, while I see the convenience factor of a single device, I decided I actually like keeping my mobile music player separate from my phone (I don’t know how you iPhone folks tolerate using your phone while listening to music in the car or even just walking around all on the same device– it would really complicate my ability to multitask). Besides, being a techie and strong proponent of open standards, if I’m going to switch platforms (I currently have a BlackBerry– yeah, that’s right, I’m sticking with RIM for now, but that’s a whole other post), I’m most likely to switch to Android.

So, aside from T-Mobile, it seems like my remaining options are Sprint, CREDO, MetroPCS, and Virgin Mobile. I can immediately cross Sprint off of that list after having been with them for most of college (the good ol’ days when you only had to worry about voice coverage) and suffered through some of the most horrible customer service ever (so bad that even the often apathetic young people of my generation wrote multiple letters– not email, actual letters!– to complain). CREDO, while cool in its progressive mission, piggy-backs on Sprint’s network and has pretty poor coverage (national or otherwise), so they’re out, at least for now. MetroPCS is a nice budget option, especially since they don’t lock you into a contract and have 4G LTE. Based on the experience of my friends who switched from Verizon (of which they were extremely long-time customers with multiple lines, going back at least 15 years) to MetroPCS, they have pretty good service in the Bay Area, but national coverage is still sort-of shoddy (especially around my parents’ house, the only other non-major metropolitan area I need good coverage right now). That leaves Virgin Mobile, which sounded particularly good after my friend mentioned how she had a 300 minute voice plan with unlimited texting and data for only $25/month (basically a much cheaper version of the package I have with T-Mobile). Virgin also piggy-backs on Sprint’s network*, but has much better national coverage, especially in the areas most important for me, and doesn’t require a contract (they have a cash balance system when you go over your plan minutes). Virgin doesn’t seem to have any well-publicized plans to support 4G, but that doesn’t worry me too much right now as I’m relatively satisfied still with 3G.

So, for now, I’m sticking with T-Mobile and my 3G BlackBerry with Virgin Mobile as the next best option, but take a look at the infographic below for more info on AT&T and Verizon, of which, statistically speaking, you’re probably already a customer. One of the particularly evil things I noticed outside of the generally crappy data plans (which I’ve always been very aware of and one of the reasons I’ve stuck with T-Mobile) is how much money Verizon made by charging customers $2 for the 0.02 KB of data used every time iPhone users accidentally hit “take me to the web”.

*Note: I originally thought Virgin Mobile had its own network, but my friend pointed out that they too partnered with Sprint, like CREDO– Sprint actually purchased Virgin Mobile USA in 2009 (I missed it at first, but this point, along with Virgin Mobile’s low cost plans starting at $25/month, is mentioned in the infographic below). This actually helps me understand how Sprint has managed to hold onto so much market share for this long. (Thanks, Ken.)

Source: TheSimpleDollar.com

But of course, my intent (as usual) is not to infringe on copyright, but to show how amazing Archer is and actually get more people to watch, so I’m still going to try to share this clip with the world. (Hey, I would embed their video and drive traffic to FX directly to promote the show, but their video clip collection is a bit sparse.)

Anyway, so here is it: from “The Limited” (season 3, episode 3), a great clip with Archer & Babou (the ocelot) that perfectly captures a key part of how awesome the show is. I’m obligated to give you a SPOILER ALERT warning since the clip is from the end of the episode, but watching it really won’t ruin anything for you since almost every Archer episode ends with some crazy chaos. Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. You have no YouTube videos
2. New Moon Volturi Fight
3. Lame cop-outs

This ad reads (and looks) like the occasional, but still very annoying job post on craigslist where someone’s got some stealth company/product/service or just an idea and sends out an open call for business partners, often for engineers to actually do the heavy lifting (for equity instead of money, of course). In this case, they’re looking for an already successful Internet company executive to help break down their only barrier to success– lack of marketing skills and the right connections– therefore, plucking this company and product out of obscurity and launching them into the Fortune 500.

Maybe this whole thing is legit, they really do have a great product, some accomplished Internet all-star will answer their call, and they will become The Next Big Thing, but the following points give me pause:

1. The ad’s design/look– plain, black and white ad consisting completely of plain text with the occasional key word or phase appearing in bold– could have been posted in nearly identical form to craigslist for $75 instead of over $4000 for a full-page black and white ad in Stanford. Granted, then they wouldn’t be targeting Stanford alumni, but a) everybody checks craigslist and b) I have the feeling qualified, experienced, accomplished executives aren’t exactly flipping through the classifieds to find a job as president/CEO.
2. The title– “Have You Run a Top Internet Company? or Held a Top Position At Such a Company?” sets up the tone: we’re looking for senior staff from an already successful Internet company. Okay… good to aim high, I guess… but if you want to attract that kind of talent, you’ll need to give a little…
3. While you have to have the right experience and contacts, they basically say everyone in the entire world (maybe universe) is eligible– as long as you’re between 25 and 55 (which most candidates probably fall into, but why flat out discriminate by age?).
4. They have “some of the world’s most talented people,” unknown and unrecognized genius just waiting for the right person (see #1) with “marketing skills” (admittedly, maybe this ad proves the truth in this) and “important contacts.”
5. They have been working (presumably in stealth mode) for three years not on the product, but the “website to make and sell this product.” Their secret, but “great product” with “huge potential demand” that, despite reading the description several times, I still can’t seem to even narrow down what kind of product it is. Is it software, a website? Is it some type of health or beauty product (they mention that it can be an add-on for AVON)? Or is it some type of wireless media since they mention Verizon and AT&T as well as digital TV? Sounds more like a random list of key words and phrases for SEO. Or like the confusing rhetoric from IdeaFarm.
6. They also say their product is an “annual fee based item,” but don’t worry, there’s a “very, very high expected renewal rate.” Hmm, annual fee based product or service related to the Internet… yeah, because people can’t possibly expect to use a website or other Internet service for free…
7. Rolodex? Really? I assume they just mean a contact list because the only time I hear about Rolodexes lately is in old “Law & Order” episodes and it’s usually the dead guy’s Rolodex.
8. Position available: President. Since when do startups, especially one that claims to have such a great product with so much potential, just place open calls for not just any C-level executive, but President! Although, to be fair, apparently “Paul”– the man behind the ad– can give you that “role and title” because he’s actually already the president!
9. Oh, one last thing: you have to be “financially secure” because they can’t pay you anything, at all, until “the profits come in.” But you get “significant interest in the company” and the revenue will be rolling in soon after, okay? Because not only do they project “revenues of $50 million by the end of the second year,” but there will be “exponential growth thereafter.” Forever.

Seems too good to be true, eh?

Related posts:

1. Joost

In any case, excuse the plain, unpolished state of the site until I can finish implementing the redesign. For WordPress geeks, I’m currently trying out the Constructor theme as perhaps a free alternative to the Thesis theme (which I have learned to customize more than I ever imagined I would).

Related posts:

1. Web site logs and search engines
2. New site design
3. The Switch, Blog Version

Super useful (don’t know why Twitter hasn’t done this themselves)– Static Profile Image Urls from Shannon Whitley: http://t.co/AjhvqwL #

I take it back– I still love Shannon Whitley’s SPIURL, but apparently, Twitter does have a static link for profile images. Almost all of the Google search results yesterday lamented that Twitter didn’t already have a profile image URL convention and I still haven’t found the actual API documentation page (just some twitter-dev talk), but the URL format is:

http://api.twitter.com/1/users/profile_image/username

See, my profile image is at http://api.twitter.com/1/users/profile_image/sindyjlee/:

Related posts:

1. Twitter

This feature is now part of what TiVo calls “trick play”– the ability to pause live TV and play back up to the last 30 minutes of recently viewed TV. And of course, this feature was not actually this feature in 1988; the recall button was actually a “last channel” button, automatically changing the channel to the previous or last channel viewed. Never having had a remote, much less a TV that was capable of remembering what the previous channel was, I thought this amazing new TV– small, but with the channel displayed on the screen in neon green digital numbers and shiny silver buttons that silently changed the channel up and down (instead of a plastic knob and dial that clicked as you turned it)– was surely capable of “recalling” the last few minutes of precious TV.

But no, it would be at least a decade before somebody out there thought of this idea, along with a long list of other great ones, and came out with the first public trials of TiVo, debuting in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1998, around the same time I first came out to the Bay Area myself (and have yet to go back). Busy, busy, busy.

Because of the challenges and general annoyances the above caused, when it came time to develop our own software product as part of our curriculum, our team decided to build an effort logger– namely, the “Surreal Effort Logger,” or SEL for short– to better address the above need. (Our team was called “Team Surreal.” From what I remember, when faced with the always troublesome task of coming up with a team name, we used a random word generator, stumbled across the word “surreal” and went with it.) SEL was built as a webapp where you could hit a button to start the clock, work, hit a button to stop the clock, and then enter what you had worked on– the “task”– and the webapp would log the amount of time spent. SEL let you see the totals for individual and team effort for a given period of time.

As it turns out, somebody actually went ahead and built a “real” version of SEL called “Toggl, It’s complete with a timer, start/stop button (rendered as a shiny red power button), task, project and client tracking, and reports. I think the need to track software development time was the impetus, but the system can be used for any type of work that needs easy and accurate time tracking, especially when having to calculate billable hours and generate reports to be used as invoices.

Toggl is a “use anywhere” tool since you use it to track time for projects,There’s also a desktop version so you don’t have to have a browser window open to keep the timer going– you don’t even have to worry about logging out. and for Mac OS X users, a dashboard widget for greater convenience. (The widget was developed by a Toggl user– not by Apprise, the Estonian company behind Toggl– and was released today, which is eerie, considering I was thinking of developing a widget myself today.) You can even embed it as a gadget in iGoogle or GMail.

More things that are great about Toggl: there is a free version that has “minimal limits”; for example, you can have as many projects and tasks that you want. The “premium” (for pay) versions also include features like support for planning ahead, avoid having to end tasks before your session

I couldn’t find the exact date, but Toggl was created some time before 2007, so it was out before my CMU team built it, probably even conceived of the idea! Now, if only Team Surreal had thought to take SEL to the next level…

Related posts:

1. God Is Dead
2. Looking behind, looking ahead

More interesting is the breakdown of each word/category:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.
You scored better than half in Nerd and Geek, earning you the title of: Modern, Cool Nerd.

In true nerd form, I found this interesting and worth sharing.

Related posts:

1. Geek Girls, Part 2
2. Geek Girls

The Missing Sync for BlackBerry from mark/space.

So much better than that piece of crap PocketMac– syncing my Mac and my BlackBerry actually works now! And I can even sync over Bluetooth! Totally worth the $39.95. In this case, you really do get what you pay for.

Related posts:

1. Ode to My New Blackberry
2. File-sharing: missing the big picture?

Another example of his great talent for explaining complex issues so that more people are aware of and understand these issues (and have a laugh while you’re at it).

Another show that’s great at this: The Daily Show, of course. Remember John Hodgman’s piece on Net Neutrality? Genius.

Related posts:

1. Lame cop-outs
2. Personal Responsibility and Collective Power

(And of course, I’m still one of the top hits for “ragtotes.” w00t!)

Related posts:

1. Amusing Google Search: “ragtotes”
2. Amusing Google search
3. How do you prove a computer is yours and is this an illegal search?

Yet, the thing that actually annoys me about these emails is that they contacted me, but their emails come off as if it was the other way around, telling me how to pursue them. “Send us your resume.” “Apply here.” They are interested in me based on my background, experience and qualifications, but then I’m supposed to go to the trouble of applying or submitting my resume (which they already have since that’s how they found me in the first place). It’s like going up to someone and saying, “I really think you’re attractive and interesting. I think you’d be interested in going out with me. Here’s my number– please call me and I’ll consider a date.” I’m not saying that they should automatically make me a job offer or even guarantee me an interview, but they contacted me– a better approach would be, “We came across your resume and think you would be a good fit for some job opportunities at [insert company]. We would like to talk to you further if you are interested,” etc. From my experience, only a handful of recruiters do this and they’re usually internal recruiters from the company. In the end, I may not be interested, a good fit, or even qualified, but if they’re reaching out to random people on job websites and the web in general, they’re looking for more and/or better candidates than those contacting them and even the semblance of trying to “woo” the applicant wouldn’t hurt.

However, an interesting thing happened today, which is why I’m bothering to write about it at all. I received another one of these unsolicited recruiting emails today, but after receiving the message, it was quickly followed by another email from the same company (but different recruiter) and even with the same subject line that started with the following sentence:

While conducting an online search we came across your resume. It appears that you are over qualified for our positions.

Ha! They go on to mention executive positions posted by their clients that may be more applicable. They still end up telling me to submit my resume (“for free”), but it’s a start!

Related posts:

1. What is the definition of spam?

This truth is that this clever little stunt was part of the annual fake Daily published by the Stanford Chaparral (or the “Chappie” as it’s affectionately called), Stanford’s student humor magazine. The article is actually quite well-researched and well-written, including references to actual facts, such as the highly publicized “three strikes” policy” in which students not only face increasingly severe disciplinary actions for repeated DMCA violations and complaints, but are also charged increasing amounts of money through associated “reconnection fees.” The article also says that over thirty students have reached their third strike in the past year with settlements with the complaining record companies totaling over $100,000. While the numbers are about right– over thirty students and settlements totaling about $100,000 in the past year– they actually apply to the results of the record companies’ “pre-litigation letter” campaign that started in 2007 and in which they target college students all over the country with the threat of lawsuits. As part of the new “integrity initiative,” the article explains, Stanford is now scanning its network for DMCA violations and actively reports the culprits to the “RIAA and other appropriate authorities.” In the first day alone, the article continues, “78 unnamed students” have already been reported and the University’s IT organization “predicts that approximately 34% of Stanford undergraduates will be contacted by the end of Wednesday.” (That’s approximately 2,274 students.) The article goes on to direct students on how to find out if they’ve been flagged (via riaa.stanford.edu) and in turn, find legal help (the EFF gets a nod).

The article itself was pretty funny– Stanford, like other universities, has been spending increasing amounts of resources dealing with illegal file-sharing and copyright and personally, I think it was a good jab at how ludicrous the effects of the DMCA and intimidation tactics of the entertainment industry have become.* Just last week, I was summarizing the results from the annual undergraduate computing survey and many students commented on their dissatisfaction with the University’s handling of file-sharing and copyright issues, wishing Stanford would take a stronger stance against the RIAA and the MPAA’s efforts.

The website though… I don’t want to be a spoilsport, but aside from probably breaking some basic network usage policies (for setting up riaa.stanford.edu, use of the Stanford seal, etc.), the website took it a little too far. The reality is that since the first lawsuits targeting students (circa 2003), the University really has been stepping up their efforts to stop illegal file-sharing and punish repeat offenders and something like this initiative isn’t completely impossible. The reality is that over thirty Stanford students– peers and perhaps even friends of the Chappie staff members– really have been sent pre-litigation letters and really have had to pay approximately $100,000 in settlement deals. The reality is that the entertainment industry really is targeting college students– people who have little knowledge of their legal options and/or resources to defend themselves. When you enter your name and hit submit at riaa.stanford.edu, it looks like they use your name to randomly** give you either a thumbs up (you haven’t been reported) or thumbs down (you’ve already been reported and look forward to a letter in the next three to four weeks). I would hate to think that a student who’s already paid out thousands of dollars because of a pre-litigation letter was tricked into going to the website and got a thumbs down.

I don’t know how long the site will stay up and working, so if you’re curious, here are some screenshots, etc.:

• riaa.stanford.edu front page
• PDF copy of the online version of the article
• screenshot of the “you’ve been reported” message
• screenshot of the “you haven’t been reported” message

Notes:

* If you’re curious about Stanford’s actual policies on file-sharing and copyright, check out my department’s FAQ on File-Sharing & Copyright (also used by the General Counsel’s Office as well as the Information Security Office as the University’s “official” FAQ on the issue).

** It’s pseudorandom– the algorithm they’re using is deterministic. Unfortunately, no matter what Leland Stanford, Jr. does, he will always show up reported to the authorities.

Related posts:

1. links for 2007-04-28
2. links for 2007-05-25
3. Stanford’s New DMCA Policy and changing the discussion

Perhaps they’re only actively monitoring new content now– those lazy bastards.

In any case, I’ll scrounge around and try to replace the clips.

Related posts:

1. Zimbardo on The Daily Show, Viacom vs. YouTube
2. You have no (YouTube) Friends
3. links for 2007-03-30

I’ve been working somewhat with, among others, the instructors (especially BJ Fogg and Dan Ackerman Greenberg) for the Stanford Facebook class CS377W: Creating Engaging Facebook Apps, figuring out how to use Facebook and its application development platform to encourage development of apps to promote student life, aid in teaching and learning, reach out to alumni, and more. (My department, Student Computing, is currently running an app contest to encourage development of just those kinds of apps.) Wednesday night, I attended the class final– a full-blown presentation on the class (including the journey from the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab exploring how to computerize persuasion in 1993 to the development of the class itself), aims of the course, lessons learned, and, most importantly, the apps produced by the class’ 25 student teams.

The class has gotten a lot of hype, especially in the blogosphere, and much of it has been about how students were looking to find the secret to building the next big app and, in turn, making big money from it (check out this WREX-TV, NBC11.com video and try not to be distracted by the dumbed-down and sometimes nonsensical tech imagery for the narration). Much of the class focused on metrics and taking advantage of the viral nature of social networking sites like Facebook– aiming, for each app, a high number of users (especially daily active users) and high engagement (number of page views and time spent with the app). The apps developed, as you can tell from the phrase “10 million in 10 weeks,” were largely successful in achieving these goals with over 10 million installs, over one miliion daily active users, and a handful ranking in Facebook’s top 100 apps (out of over 10,000): Perfect Match, Send Hotness, Hugs, and KissMe (originally based on the Full Moon on the Quad tradition at Stanford). (Sorry if I missed any that reached the top 100.)

However, focusing on getting the largest number of users doesn’t always result in developing the “deepest” or most “socially meaningful” applications– as one commenter put it, even the “Stanford intellectual elite [can be] devoted to producing such monumental drivel.” (Before the Stanford-developed KissMe app, just think of the success of the unbelievably simple Zombies app.) So, instead of focusing on the apps that had the highest number of users, I want to point out two apps that are particularly socially conscious and show how to take advantage of the power of the Facebook network:

• The Giving Tree – the developers of this app partnered with Kiva to piggy-back on the growing awareness of the power of microlending. Facebook users don’t even need to pony up their own money– instead, once 50 people have added one of the selected businesses to their profile, $25 is pushed to the business using money donated from companies.
• Save the Rainforest – here, the developers partnered with The Nature Conservancy to take advantage of some of the time Facebook users are spending on the site everyday. Users play a vocabulary game and for every six correct answers, one square foot of the rainforest will be adopted through The Nature Conservancy’s Adopt an Acre program. As of the class’s final presentation night (December 12, 2007), 5,000 square feet had already been saved!

You, like me, are probably trying to reduce the app clutter on your Facebook profile, but if you’re going to use apps, I think these two are certainly worth it.

And with that, I leave you with a short video of Dave McClure leading the audience in The Wave to get them psyched up for the presentations:

Related posts:

1. links for 2007-10-24
2. Update: YMU and Stanford
3. How to get into Stanford

Of course, although I don’t actually care about maintaining an active channel worthy of thousands of subscribers and followers, the sad part is that, in a big box, in big letters, the channel displays a list of your YouTube Friends and mine sadly says “You have no Friends.” That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?

Anyway, if you are more than a casual user on YouTube and want to be my friend (I can’t believe I’m actually writing this), please add me as a friend.

But you know, only if you want to.

Sad. So sad.

Related posts:

1. Zimbardo on The Daily Show, Viacom vs. YouTube

• Confessions of a College Callgirl. I think the appeal here is self-explanatory, but particularly interesting tidbits lately: Blowjob Tutorial (try comparing notes to what’s in Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man), The Number is Eight, It Happened to Me!, and Workin’ for the Weekend. There usually isn’t art along with the posts that make it obviously NSFW, for tread carefully.
• David Byrne Journal. Aside from the awesomeness of Talking Heads and his continued work as a very talented musician (like being on the composing team that won the Oscar for Best Original Score in 1988 for The Last Emperor), he’s a talented and accomplished writer as well. His blog is both interesting and entertaining; the first post I read when I discovered it– Social “Hateworking”, IKEA– got me to subscribe right away.
• Overhead in New York. One of many “Overhead in…” sites (linked to from the NY site), but being a New York-er, this one appeals to and entertains me the most. Overheard in the Office is a pretty good second.
• Stephen Fry. There are so many reasons to love Stephen Fry, including his role as Jeeves in Jeeves and Wooster (probably the best screen adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories), A Bit of Fry & Laurie, and Blackadder (I know there’s an association-with-Hugh Laurie theme here). He’s only been blogging for a few months, but I love the way he writes (reflected well on screen in A Bit of Fry & Laurie) and he’s been blogging regularly since being asked to write a weekly tech column for The Guardian. He knows his tech, among many other things, and both techie and fuzzy can appreciate his posts. Check out his first column post, “Welcome to Dork Talk”, his hilarious review of smartphones, and his very well-written post on botnets.

Check ‘em out. (As if you didn’t already have RSS feeds to get through everyday.)

Related posts:

1. clippy blog
2. Blog prison
3. Not everyone sees the beauty of the blog

(This is similar to my first appearance as an amusing Google search result for “blog breasts.”)

Related posts:

1. Amusing Google search
2. Weirdest SWAG Ever: Ragtotes Tampon Holder
3. Web site logs and search engines

In the bag full of stuff at GHC, from Northwestern University Female Researchers in EECS– “At the Bleeding Edge.” We jokingly said it was a tampon holder, then we thought it was a pencil holder and then… we realized it’s right there on the box. It really is a tampon holder.

Wow.

At first I thought, a) “what corporate gift catalog do you find that in?” and b) “isn’t there collective agreement that we shouldn’t be referring to menstruation as ‘the rag’? Or is this some kind of female empowerment thing where we’re trying to claim that word back?”

Anyway, check it out: ragtotes.com.

Transitions: Microsoft’s Sex Change

It’s great that Wallent’s colleagues are being so supportive, but I find it hard to believe that he won’t have to experience plain old sexism once he’s completely transitioned. I find that, more often than not, men– being, you know, men– think that it’s never as bad as women say and that we all live in more of a meritocracy than we really do.

Except, of course, when it comes to affirmative action. How convenient.

Related posts:

1. Supreme courts rule sodomy A-OK

And yes, even if that someone is a woman.

But I’m giving it another go, so I’ll be attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference in Orlando this week. For those who don’t know, Grace Hopper was a pioneering computer scientist who, among other things, developed the first compiler for a computer programming language. She’s also often credited incorrectly for coining the software term “bug.” The term was already in use when the it happened, but the story goes that, in 1947, when Hopper was working on the Harvard Mark II calculator, an error was traced back to a moth trapped in a relay. The moth was carefully removed and Hopper taped it into the log book, noting that it was the “first actual case of bug being found.”

In any case, I’ve written here about the gender imbalance in computer science and engineering before. Read about Geek Girls: parts one and two. I’ll be posting more thoughts as the week progresses.

Related posts:

1. Vonnegut on Love, Men and Women

It’s gone now.

Seven days, three posts. I’m over it, as expected. You don’t need to know what I’m doing all the time, mostly because either a) it’s not that exciting or b) it is exciting and if I wanted you to know about it, I’d tell you.

And I am still reserving judgment about the second time. Awesome.

Related posts:

1. Another amusing waste of time using the Internet
2. Fee for service? Not in education!
3. Well delivered apology = good customer service

I’m slowly recovering from helping to put on the Virtual Goods Summit yesterday– got up at 5am and was running around all day, helping with everything from printing badges and registration lists, configuring and setting up computers and networking support, checking in attendees, and, most difficult of all, trying to steer a ridiculously heavy media cart with only two out of four pivoting wheels around campus and narrow building hallways. I finally got home around 7pm and went straight to make sure I drank my beer for the day (a story for another time).

But to recap on the conference itself, I didn’t get to sit in most of the sessions because of all the running around, but from what I did get to attend and from what I overheard, the very first Virtual Goods Summit seems to have been a success– all of the sessions were panels focused around a particular topic and included three to four speakers and a moderator directing the discussion. Whether it’s because virtual goods and economies are such an emerging technology and market or it’s because it was such a humble setting– the 350-person capacity basement auditorium of the Cummings Art Building on the Stanford campus (I don’t think it’s ever seen so many laptops and the network slowed to a crawl as 300+ people did God knows what during the breaks)– but as I overheard one attendee put it, unlike most conferences, there was less grandstanding (regardless of what the grandiose term “summit” might imply) and more open, honest discussion among key players in this space. Rather than what many conferences have degenerated into– simple vendor fairs and opportunities for companies to advertise and sell their products and services– it really felt like a summit: some of the most important and interesting companies and people involved in virtual goods coming together to talk about the present and future of the space.

On one hand, there was plain old valuable information– explanation of what virtual goods and economies are and how they work in their various settings, both in terms of technology (gaming, social networks, etc.) and geography/culture (especially the US and the West versus Korea and the East). On the other hand, there was also interesting discussion around current hot topics, such as the effects of money moving through and back and forth between the virtual and real worlds. These are issues that are becoming increasingly relevant to not just gamers accruing arsenals of virtual weapons or teenagers exchanging virtual gifts on social networks, but to everyone in the real world. Why? Because, as one speaker mentioned in kind of an overblown example of a Venn diagram, the virtual and real worlds are not separate and they don’t intersect per se, but rather, the virtual world is completely encompassed by the real one. In one way, the virtual world is a subset of the real world, but more simply, the better way to think of it is that they are inexorably connected– we spend real time playing games in virtual worlds and we spend real money buying virtual goods. In the end, they are all real choices with real consequences and when you realize and accept that, the line between virtual and real becomes blurred, perhaps even erased, and the discussion becomes that much more important. I look forward to much more growth in this space, much more discussion, and hopefully, another exciting summit next year.

Check out: vgsummit2007 on Flickr

Related posts:

1. Virtual Goods Summit 2007
2. Virtual Goods Summit 2007: One Last Plug
3. links for 2007-06-21

I’ve been spending an increasing amount of my time the last couple of weeks helping to pull this thing together, so here’s one last plug for the Virtual Goods Summit 2007, which I mentioned here a few weeks ago. In short, my friend Charles Hudson is organizing this conference and Student Computing at Stanford University (the department I work for) is serving as the event sponsor. The one day conference is shaping up to be a very interesting and exciting one on virtual goods and economies and will include speakers from leading companies in the social networking, virtual worlds, and casual gaming spaces. A number of interesting questions and issues will be raised and discussed, including:

• How will virtual goods and virtual currencies impact social networking?
• Are virtual goods the next big business model?
• What does it take to successfully launch a virtual goods offering?
• Are virtual goods poised to go mainstream?
• What does it take to nurture and develop a successful virtual economy?
• Why are users embracing virtual goods?

The conference is this Friday, June 22– please register in advance (since we don’t know how many on-site registrations we will be able to accommodate)– and if you’ve already registered/once you’re registered, remember to try to join fellow conference attendees on Thursday for happy hour at Blue Chalk Cafe in Palo Alto from 8-11pm.

For more info on virtual goods, check out: Virtual Goods: the next big business model, a recent article posted to TechCrunch by Susan Wu, a Principal with Charles River Ventures and a special advisor for the conference itself.

Related posts:

1. Virtual Goods Summit 2007
2. links for 2007-06-21
3. Virtual Beer Pong and Keepin’ It Real

I stopped by the CS 194 Senior Project Faire today– for those of you unfamiliar with it, Stanford computer science majors are required to complete a senior project to graduate. The course serves as a capstone to their years of study and the projects are displayed and demonstrated at a type of trade show for students, staff, faculty, and visitors from industry. Prizes are also awarded in a number of categories (and not to brag, but back in 2001, I was also an award winner).

One of this year’s projects was a virtual version of Beer Pong (also known as Beirut by some), by Ned Rockson, Luiz Pereira, and Fred Thompson (and a special shout out to Fred, a member of the Residential Computing family). The demonstration showed a very impressive implementation with realistic physics and polished graphics and the use of the extremely popular Nintendo Wii remote as the input device. Check out this photo of one of our coworkers, Becky, in action.

Of course, in the end though, what’s the fun of beer pong without the beer (and usually cheap beer at that)? And especially the resulting increasing inebriation, spilled beer, and all the mess that goes with the aforementioned?

Interestingly, most of the project team hadn’t even played beer pong in real life and they relied on one team member’s “expertise” for their requirements gathering and analysis. I’ve never been much of a beer pong player myself (I don’t need a game for an excuse to drink), but as I watched people take their hand at lobbing the virtual ball into a virtual cup, I reminisced about the many games of real beer pong I’ve watched in my day. Perhaps the most memorable was at a party last Thanksgiving weekend in my hometown: like most games of beer pong, the table wasn’t a ping pong table. However, in this case, the table was a retired kitchen counter that’s seen better days (including the hole for the sink) with a makeshift net and resting on two sawhorses. I think the beer was Coors Light or some other reasonably cheap analogue and the setting was an unfinished basement. You can’t get more ghetto fabulous than that. I wonder if version 2.0 of Virtual Beer Pong will have an option for something like that.

Related posts:

1. Virtual Goods Summit 2007
2. That’s not beer: distractions at the John Mayer show
3. Real life in cartoons: abusive relationships

Last year, I replaced my office PowerMac G5 tower with a 20″ iMac and re-purposed the CPU cage on my desk. Well, as you can see, the 20″ iMac is gone now too and I’ve moved to a MacBook, but I digress… Rather, over the course of a year, out of three planted, the bottom spider plant flourished while the top two died. You see, only the bottom one had any exposure to sunlight– I have a corner cube and the window is behind and to the left of my desk. Plus, I don’t even have overhead lighting because I had the fluorescent lighting removed over my office (preferring ambient natural light during the day or incandescent light when dark outside instead– trust me, it’s easier on the eyes, especially when you’re staring at a computer screen for hours). And we know it’s the lighting issue because the schefflera that sits directly in the corner window is completely out of control and grows like a weed.

In any case, after some huddling, we decided to plant a new spider plant to replace the two we lost (may they rest in peace) and implement a new overhead lighting scheme. The tools: a clip on lamp I bought during junior year in college (I have been waiting seven years to find a use for that thing) and a special GE Plant Light Bulb. Now, my original thought was that it would compensate for lack of sunlight (based on the advice of the supposed resident houseplant expert in the office), but the production information reads:

The GE Plant Light bulb is tinted blue to highlight the natural beauty and color of your plants — so they appear healthier and greener.

Now, I don’t know if it’s an issue of just bad wording or fear of making guarantees, but I don’t know if appearing healthier and greener is the same thing as actually being healthier and greener. Photographing someone with soft focus resulting in a picture of them looking younger doesn’t actually make them younger. In any case, we’ll see what happens. Hey, if it works, maybe we’ll start growing some “herbs.”

Obviously, I’ve been sitting on commenting on this announcement for a couple of weeks, partly because I’ve been busy with my own life and partly because I wanted to be sure about what I wanted to say on the issue. On one hand, I’m a current employee of the University– I work for Student Computing and Residential Computing– and no matter how I feel about the policy itself, I have to enforce it to whatever extent my job requires. On the other hand, I obviously have an opinion about the policy, one way or another, just as I have strong opinions about file-sharing, copyright, the DMCA, and especially how they all relate to students and universities, and feel that this is an important issue to comment on, as I have before on previous University policies. On top of that, in addition to being an employee, I’m also a Stanford alumna (class of 2001, BS in Computer Science) and often find myself deeply invested in University policy and how it generally treats its students. That’s not to say that other Stanford employees who are not alumni don’t feel this way as well, but I mention it to point out why I find myself so frustrated so often– my four years at Stanford as a student were an extremely important part of my life, as college years are for most people, and when faced with policies such as this one, I am particularly bothered because I see them as the University stepping away from what I valued so much about my undergraduate experience and why I’m (for the most part) proud to call myself a member of the Stanford community. In any case, my point is that the above touches on the complicated relationship I have with the University, probably why I don’t sleep at night as well as I should, and why I haven’t blogged about the announcement yet despite a fair amount of national press coverage.

The truth is that the blogosphere commentary that picked up the story within two days of the announcement hit on a lot of the immediately obvious issues– the appearance that Stanford is turning DMCA complaints into a money-making business (modifying the Stanford S into a dollar sign was a particularly nice touch), that Stanford’s policy is particularly harsh and perhaps a disproportionate reaction to being placed on the MPAA’s 25 most wanted list, and the general feeling that the policy reflects poorly on the University and how it treats it students. DMCA complaints are, after all, allegations only (and there’s been plenty of stories of, in one way or another, bogus complaints) and to take such a hard line against alleged complaints as opposed to proven offenses/violations of the law sends a negative message about Stanford’s attitude towards its students– at least when it comes to choosing between bowing to the legal pressures and threats of the entertainment industry and standing behind treating students honestly and fairly. (To be honest, I think the “three strikes” policy already in place where students lose Stanford network privileges, including their network logins, after three DMCA complaints is overly harsh and started us down this slippery slope.) Slashdot coverage and comments even include thoughts such as students choosing to apply or attend other schools competitive with Stanford because of this policy and what it reflects about the University.

For me, the sad thing is when I found out about the policy change– only about a day in advance– I actually wasn’t that surprised. A year or two ago, my head would probably have exploded, my blood pressure rising, and there would have been a lot of yelling and swearing. But somewhere in the last couple of years, like I said, we already started down that slippery slope and to be honest, it’s not like we reinvented the wheel here– other schools have had similar “reconnection fee” systems in place for a while. My only point would be that calling it a “reconnection fee” doesn’t make anybody feel any better and, in the end, is simply misleading (at least for the first complaint, you can get reconnected without paying a fee). We should call it a fine because that’s what it is and that’s what it’s meant to be– I don’t agree with it, I don’t like it, but I at least understand it. The University has obviously decided that the current system is not sufficiently punitive, that inflicting fines is the only way to further discourage illegal file-sharing, and that $100, $500, and $1000 today as prices are measures of how severe the punishment should be and/or how important discouraging file-sharing is. In hindsight, I would have probably preferred this measure over taking someone’s network privileges away– it’s nearly impossible to be a student in today’s computing environment without network access; it’s probably a lot easier to scrape together some money.

The interesting thing about all of the negative coverage surrounding Stanford’s new policy is that I have seen some change in the national discussion– maybe it took Ohio University completely shutting down p2p file-sharing on its network or Stanford implementing this new policy, but the discussion is finally turning to why colleges and universities are bearing the burden of policing copyright for the entertainment industry and why all of their measures so far have failed to satisfy the RIAA, MPAA, and Congress itself. Not only are these already under-staffed, under-funded non-profit organizations being asked to spend precious resources policing networks, responding to complaints, and shutting down repeat violators, but they are now being asked to start inflicting monetary fines and even academic disciplinary actions, including expulsion, an area I think is far beyond the reach of the entertainment industry or Congress. When is it enough?

Finally, as I sit here listening ironically to Public Enemy at this very moment, I really do wish and hope that people start to fight the power. The policy announcement did not contain any stipulations on exactly how to challenge the complaints going on your Stanford record (as opposed to a legal counter-claim, e.g.), how to challenge the “reconnection fee” assessment, or the ensuing process thereafter. I think students are entitled to due process and they’re going to have to start demanding it. I hold no hope that Stanford is going to change or take back this policy, but I wish one of our sister institutions would stand up and start the fight– those schools didn’t make it on the top 25 because those student bodies objectively have the greatest amount of file-sharing. They made it onto that list because the RIAA and/or the MPAA targets those schools and in the same way that they target students– people who have little knowledge about their legal options or resources to defend themselves– they target specific colleges– institutions that have enough name recognition to make the papers, but that are afraid enough of what would happen if all of the entertainment industry’s lawyers came crashing down on their heads. But if top-tier schools that have large endowments and profess themselves to be leaders in technology, politics, law, and social awareness don’t start standing up for their students and for themselves, we’re only going to continue losing this battle.

Read: Stanford to hit P2P users in the wallet with reconnection fees
Illegal Internet users to face fines (The Stanford Daily)
Copyright Silliness on Campus By Fred von Lohmann (EFF)
A Rough-and-Tumble Debate on File Sharing

Somebody once told me I was one of the realest people she had ever met, so it’s odd that I find myself as one of the sponsors of a conference on virtual goods From the website:

The Virtual Goods Summit is a one day conference focused on the emerging market opportunity for virtual goods and economies. Once restricted to the world of online gaming, virtual goods and currencies are beginning to influence the development of social networks, community sites, and many other new and exciting markets.

This year’s conference will bring together leading entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, technologists, and industry participants to spend the day discussing the present and future of this exciting new space.

The department I work for– Student Computing at Stanford University– is serving as the event sponsor. College students and soon-to-be college students (and definitely the demographic that will end up studying in the heart of Silicon Valley) are huge consumers of virtual goods and make up a large part, if not the majority of virtual communities. Hopefully, there will be more discussion for the academic at the conference, but the program and list of speakers are shaping up to look pretty good.

For more information on the conference, contact my friend and the event producer Charles Hudson (and visit his blog too while you’re at it).

Related posts:

1. links for 2007-02-17

Check it out, if only for the psychedelic color thing happening on their website that’s like the Mac OS X Flurry screen saver, and if you’re interested, let me know if you want an invite.

(As a side note, don’t even get me started on the fact that the above site is hosted on PBwiki, which aside from my issues with PBwiki itself, when I actually tried to go to the main site, I got this page.)

Related posts:

1. Creating content

And it looks like I wasn’t the only one to think it. Read: Spock.com is full of misogynists and Spock’s frat-greek humor.

In any case, WordPress is known for being ridiculously easy to setup, providing a convenient way to migrate from other blog software, and good at dealing with spam. And after setting it up yesterday, that all holds true. The only thing is that all my permalinks are screwy now, so anything using those links are broken now. I’ll be updating those links here in the next few days. Work and school are running my life right now.

Related posts:

1. Blog prison
2. Not everyone sees the beauty of the blog
3. The switch

This was pointed out by, in his usual high-performing fashion, our new sysadmin from work, along with the broken comment posting on my blog. And here I thought I was just unpopular. (Of course, I may still be unpopular, but now I can’t blame it on an Internal Server Error.)

Related posts:

1. Zimbardo on The Daily Show, Viacom vs. YouTube
2. The code word is “Bahamas”

Note the copycat version of video sharing: Viacom’s replacement for all those video clips pulled after the mother lawsuit against Google over their YouTube clips. It’s not a bad reproduction of YouTube functionality in terms of letting me embed this clip here or pass around the URL, but I certainly don’t get my pick of clips, which I suppose is part of the point, but also the ultimate price. Case in point: again on The Daily Show, Larry Wilmore and John Oliver did a great piece last week on the proposed N-word ban in New York City. The piece quickly made it onto YouTube and was subsequently taken down due to copyright complaints by Viacom, but it wasn’t in turn made available by Viacom on the Comedy Central site. As a result, another brilliant combination of comedy, journalism, and social commentary is lost in the endless bowels of cable TV history, only to be re-experienced or heard of again by the lucky re-run watcher. Are you happy Viacom?

Related posts:

1. links for 2007-03-30
2. links for 2006-10-30

Despite the strange request, my friend just wanted to get on his way, so willingly cooperated with the officer and was able to show the officer the address book on his computer which included his own information that presumably matched his ID. This was apparently enough to satisfy the officer and he sent my friend on his way.

Now, this situation brings up a lot of interesting questions– I’m no lawyer or legal expert in anyway, but it seems like to me that the officer would have to have some type of probable cause to stop my friend and not only search his bag, but in an effort to “prove” ownership of the laptop, search the contents/data of the laptop itself. Young people biking with laptop bags isn’t a rare sight in Palo Alto. Did my friend match the description of potential suspects? When he saw the laptop, did it match the description of recently stolen ones? Presumably, if the officer was aware of laptop thefts in the area, police reports have been filed and serial numbers should be available for those stolen computers. Finding the serial number on a laptop is relatively easy– if the officer did have probable cause to believe this laptop was stolen, he could have easily run the serial number.

But aside from all that, how did the officer expect to have my friend “prove” that the computer was his? Out there on the street, without purchase records, how do you prove that a computer is yours? Maybe you use your real name as your login name, but if you’re unlucky enough not to, you might have to show your address book or other private information to the officer in an effort to show that you’re not a thief. What is sufficient evidence in this impromptu courtroom out on the street? And what if the laptop isn’t yours? That doesn’t mean it’s stolen– plenty of students in my office borrow laptops while working for us and have generic logins and don’t necessarily keep any personal information on them. Then where are they left?

Related posts:

1. Amusing Google search
2. Web site logs and search engines

I replaced my office PowerMac G5 tower with a 20″ iMac, so the CPU cage on my desk was left empty. Removing it would have meant taking apart the entire desk, so we decided on some creative reuse.

Related posts:

1. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

Cool use of technology, but yes, even I am surprised by my dorkiness this time.

Related posts:

1. What do you consider “an interest in technology?”

Once again, they should have called it “iPodWorld,” but here are some photos from MacWorld SF 2006. Nothing too exciting, but just things I found amusing at the exhibit hall today.

Related posts:

1. Things I learned at MacWorld
2. Bay Area public transportation, missed John Mayer connections, and MacWorld 2005
3. LOTR Easter Egg

But high-speed, especially wireless Internet service is like crack and even if they’re clearly ripping me off, I have to cop if I can get high if only for a few minutes.

Related posts:

1. Mm, wireless…
2. Buzzwords
3. More digital divide confusion

But what happens when it gets personal?

Two years ago, I attended a large New Year’s Eve party that was thrown by a group of semi-professional party throwers. Expensive tickets were purchased online and black tie was worn. Unfortunately, as a result, I was unwittingly subscribed to one of the organizer’s personal email list for advertising events. I didn’t make the connection between attending that party and getting on this mailing list until recently since there were a number of organizers whose names I can’t remember, but I have been getting emails from this person that I had never met before in my entire life ever since. The emails seemed to be personally addressed (using a suppressed recipient list rather than a formal mailing list) and there wasn’t an easy way to unsubscribe– sure, I could probably respond to the email and ask to be removed, but when it comes to spam, I don’t like to respond and make myself known. In most cases, it only increases the spam exponentially since then they know there’s a real person behind the email address.

In any case, I’ve been putting up with these emails for two years and they were getting more and more frequent as the latest event being advertised, this year’s New Year’s Eve party, neared. So, I finally responded to the email and asked to be removed from the list. Who knew that it would result in the ridiculous email exchange below?

My original request:

Please remove me from your list. You have subscribed me under [email address].

To which I received the following response:

Hello Sindy,

May I ask why you would like to be taken off my list?

Now, I would have preferred something more along the lines of, “You have been removed from the list. Out of curiosity, why would you like to be taken off of my list?” I would have considered that an appropriate and prompt response to my request and if I chose to, I could give him some exit information for his own purposes. Instead, I have now been pulled into participating in this guy’s own little marketing research survey and still didn’t have my request honored. Nevertheless, I simply responded:

I never asked to be added to this list and I am not interested in these events.

At this point, this should have certainly been sufficient and I should have been removed from the list. Instead, I received another followup message:

Hi there Sindy.

I apologize if you received my email by accident. I sent this to my friends and anyone who has attended my parties the past few years. I throw 2 parties each year, my annual Tailgate party at the Giants game and my annual New Year’s Eve party. I have your email address either because you went to one of my parties or you asked me to send you info or one of your friends requested for you.

Did you look at my party this year? Let me know what you think.

So, I finally realized how I had gotten onto the list in the first place, but that didn’t make this entire exchange any less annoying. I mean, what part of “remove me from your list” do you not understand? And certainly, if I was responding to your messages about this year’s party with a request to remove me from the list entirely, then I’ve probably taken a look and am not interested. So, I responded with the following message:

I may have been added to your list from having attended a New Year’s party 2 years ago, but I don’t recall ever asking to be added to the mailing list and even if you were to automatically subscribe me, I think an explicit request to remove me from your list should be sufficient. It’s ridiculous that you are making me jump through hoops to be removed. I am not interested in the events that you have been sending me emails about for 2 years and even if I were, I’m certainly not interested now. This is nothing short of spamming. Please remove me from your list.

Now, I was completely riled up and had decided that I would most certainly post this exchange here, expose this guy for the spammer that he was, and spread the word that nobody should go to his party lest they be supporting a spammer and be sentenced to annoying emails for the rest of time. However, he sent the following response that, while very misguided, was at least polite and so I’ll refrain from actually naming him here, posting his email address, or mentioning the actual event (although many might be able to figure it out):

Thank you for your eloquent response Sindy.

My list is my own personal list of friends and friends of friends. There is nothing corporate or spam-like about it. If you received this email, it is because you personally attended one of my parties or a friend recommended you attend. I apologize you have jumped through hoops in order to be removed. Your hoops are my attempt to get to know who you are. I apologize for that and will remove you from my personal list as it is crystal clear you want no part of me or the parties I create.

Have a terrific rest of the week and Thanksgiving. Enjoy your New Year’s as well.

Personally, I think what is and what is not spam is in the eye of the recipient. In this case, my relationship with the sender was a loosely personal one because while I had attended an event that was held by that person (among others), but so did several hundred, maybe even thousands other people and most of us probably have never actually met the organizer. Nevertheless, messages from your friend are not immune to being considered spam. Case in point: if a friend emails you to see if you’d like to buy one of his homemade t-shirts, that may be considered an unsolicited email advertising a commercial product, but since he’s your friend, you probably wouldn’t consider it spam. However, if he continues to send you email every week, continually trying to sell you his latest creation despite the fact that you continually choose to NOT buy one, you would probably start to find it annoying. At that point, you might say to him, “Could you stop spamming me with these emails?” And suddenly, what began as a simple friendly email has become that vicious thing we know as spam. Sure, its not as bad as some of the Viagra, penis enlargement and debt consolidation spam that plague us all, especially if he promptly honors your unsubscribe request, no questions asked, but in the broadest sense, its still spam. And the fact that you have a personal relationship with the spammer, that you actually know this person, doesn’t necessarily make it any better– it’s almost worse because you might be likely to not take future messages from this person as seriously or you might even be inclined to ignore them completely.

In the end, our ability to send valuable, useful messages becomes increasingly important everyday. With email becoming an increasingly important part of people’s everyday lives, being a trusted point of communication is essential. When you send out messages indiscriminately, when you abuse the convenience and power of email, you’re only losing stock in yourself.

On top of that, once Sony was outed, they offered a Web-based uninstaller for the rootkit. However, if you were to use the Sony-provided uninstaller, it would leave a security hole open on your computer that could be easily exploited by a mailicious user (i.e., hacker). Again, evil, no?

In any case, I thought I would post on this for those people who might read this little blog and who might have not been paying attention to the Sony DRM fiasco because they didn’t readily understand words like “DRM” and “rootkit.” If you consume music, if you use a computer, this is an important thing for you to be aware of and to learn about. In my mind, in the name of balancing the demands of fair use and copyright, Sony took advantage of a malicious technology because the average person could not understand it, much less detect it. Of course, what really amazes me is that in among all of the software engineers, product managers, and others who were involved in the development of Sony’s DRM software, not one person thought that this was a bad idea? There most likely was and I’d be interested to see if one of those people could give some insight into the origins of this fiasco, to help us make sense of this ridiculousness. Maybe that lone voice of reason lost his job or took some cash to shut up or was forced to sign an NDA or other confidentiality agreement over it, but I’ve got a feeling that if he was brave enough to talk now, I’m sure many would be interested in what he had to say and I bet some would even champion him for getting out the truth.

For more info on this whole thing, review Russinovich’s original post on his discovery as well as Ed Felten’s ongoing commentary, including Alex Halderman and his analysis of the security hole caused by Sony’s uninstaller and their proof-of-concept exploit.

The official press release is at the Stanford Report.

Related posts:

1. YMU and Stanford
2. Microsoft redeems itself… a little
3. New site design

And they’re getting particularly creative too. I love it.

Related posts:

1. The RIAA and Internet2
2. RIAA continues fight while new company tries paradigm shift

The criticism was certainly not unexpected– I predicted that list of points (and more) a year ago when this all started. The only real issue I have with that Letter to the Editor is that, well, we actually did run a survey (2 actually, one for undergraduates and another for graduate students) to get a better picture of the digital music landscape at Stanford. It was part of the annual residence evaluation, a pretty well-advertised survey, and included questions on filesharing, copyright, portable music devices, and for-pay online music services. We had a whopping 46% of undergraduates and 29% of (on-campus housed) graduate students respond to the survey, as we do every year. And based on that data, not just the mere assumptions about the student population, the student is right in pointing out that Yahoo! Music Unlimited is not compatible with the 20% (!) of students who own Macs (unless you want to run Virtual PC) and when they say it’s compatible with iPod, it’s not really.

So, blame us for picking a subscription service that doesn’t meet your specific needs (and this was a long decision making process that I will get into after the service actually launches), but don’t blame us for failing to collect data about student consumption of digital music because we certainly did. Guess people just weren’t paying attention.

Related posts:

1. MIT Weblog Survey

The project grew into something of a legend within the computer science department and campus network administration offices. At one point, the BackRub crawler consumed nearly half of Stanford’s entire network bandwidth, an extraordinary fact considering that Stanford was one of the best-networked institutions on the planet. And in the fall of 1996 the project would regularly bring down Stanford’s Internet connection.

“We’re lucky there were a lot of forward-looking people at Stanford,” Page recalls. “They didn’t hassle us too much about the resources we were using.”

If that’s not one of the best arguments for liberal computing and network usage policies on university campuses, I don’t know what is, especially considering the direct monetary benefits Stanford has reaped from Google’s success.

Related posts:

1. The Wisdom of Average People

Unfortunately, Circuit City didn’t really consult anybody about this so-called guide.

Since my department is primarily responsible for putting together recommended configurations (we don’t have a computer purchase requirement or minimum requirements for computers), I was interested to see what Circuit City had listed for Stanford. See, we’ve never been contacted about what they should include in their guide, so I was interested to see if they had somehow talked to someone else at the University and put together a listing. Needless to say, the listing was both confusing and completely wrong– they recommended Windows 95/98/ME as an operating system, simply “32″ for memory and just “1″ as a hard drive. I guess that means that they recommend you have a hard drive.

So, I politely contacted customer care with the following email:

Hi, I work at Stanford University supporting student computing.
I noticed that you have added your College Guide for computers and that
there is a technical recommendation for Stanford. Where did you get
this information and/or who was your contact at the University for this
information?

In less than 24 hours, I received the following message:

Thank you for writing to Circuit City.

I understand that you wish to know where and how did we get this
information about the technical recommendation for Stanford.

I would like to address this query, but I would recommend you to go to
the local Circuitcity store and seek information regarding it.

Right. If that’s not a canned answer, I don’t know what is.

Thanks to the RIAA and the MPAA, our department has a new found closeness with the University’s legal and business affairs offices, so suffice it to say, they’re contacting Circuit City to clear up the matter.

And what matter is that? Not just that they have wrong information, but that Circuit City foolishly thought that they could pass themselves as affiliated with or a representative of Stanford or any of the other 800+ colleges and universities listed in their guide. The sad thing is that we, along with other universities, would have probably been glad to work with Circuit City and many other vendors to provide accurate and up-to-date information on technical recommendations. But of course, no, that would have taken real effort to reach out to schools and develop actual relationships. Stanford has been working closely with Apple, Dell, and the Stanford Bookstore to offer this exact type of deal– putting together specific bundles with special pricing for our students and making them readily available through online and brick-and-mortar vendors. Students can find packages that fit their specific needs, but will meet the minimum requirements for use on our network and will most likely last them for the majority if not all of their time at Stanford. You’d probably be surprised how much staff time goes into coming up with these recommendations every year, especially this year as we try to come up with more helpful recommendations. And yet, with one stupid move, Circuit City cancels out this hard work. I can only imagine how much trouble this is going to cause for schools with mandatory purchase requirements.

Well, hopefully, I’ve started enough of a ruckus around this to take this stupid college guide down– I’ve already passed on the news to colleagues around the country and many are taking action right away. Had these universities been approached beforehand, the guide could have been a useful marketing tool, but instead, many have said they are asking Circuit City to remove their listings altogether. Aside from the general principle of refusing to work with them after this stupid stunt, Circuit City would most likely not be able to offer an accurate picture of technical recommendations (e.g., they would not include information on Macs, giving the impression that these campuses were Windows-only). My next step is to swing by a store and see if they’ll try to sell this thing to me as an “official recommendation.” (Hopefully, I can still pass for an incoming freshman.)

So, if you’re about to start college this fall and you’re looking for computer purchase recommendations, don’t trust Circuit City– if you’re coming to Stanford, check out the letter we sent to you in your “Approaching Stanford” packet or view it here online. If you’re going to any other school, check directly with your school– they’re definitely a better source than Circuit City. (And they probably won’t send telemarketers to extend your product warranties like Circuit City does too.)

Related posts:

1. Protecting bloggers

For an audio version of the decision, click here (and use BitTorrent while you still can). For the full text of the decision, click here.

Related posts:

1. Save a life. Give blood.
2. Supreme courts rule sodomy A-OK
3. Separate but equal is never equal

Stanford Residential Computing: Wireless in the Residences: What to buy and how to configure it

And we got an email from somebody pointing out the amazing similarities to:

University of Arizona Residential Computing: Wireless Networking FAQ

If I cared, I could have a copyright dispute on my hands.

Related posts:

1. More file-sharing madness…

Nevetheless, a brief comment on the topic: I predicted this switch over two years ago– with Apple’s recent success and ever expanding product line, at some point they were going to have to do something about the very expensive business of producing hardware using the minority chip. IBM’s recent moves to get out of the hardware business (and into the “business solutions” business) pushes Apple along the way too. Besides, I mean, even Solaris runs on x86 now. Maybe if they had switched to AMD (it was rumored that they originally looked at this chip, especially since most hardware people agree its a better chip), there wouldn’t have been such a circus. The most amusing part of this whole thing is that it seems like Apple fans are suddenly caught in this philosophical, ethical, personal dilemma– everybody wanted to deny it was happening (including Apple) and then when Jobs made the official announcement at WWDC, it was like Apple die-hards all got sucker punched. It’s like they’ve been betrayed in some deeply personal way. It’s just a piece of hardware, people. With computing hardware where it is today, the switch will make little difference to most people. At least Apple is providing a transition path for developers (Rosetta– if it’s one thing they’re good at, it’s naming things). Besides, what are you going to do about it– switch to Windows? To Solaris? To Linux? Use your IBM-chip Mac for the rest of time?

In any case, some more interesting points about the switch include Techdirt’s question: will Apple sue CNet over leaking the story? Probably not, which reinforces the realization that they’re not as noble as you might think.

Related posts:

1. Bay Area public transportation, missed John Mayer connections, and MacWorld 2005

However, I was reevaluating online photo solutions again last night and realized actually how cool Flickr is and has gotten (especially after having been bought by Yahoo! and can take advantage of that powerhouse). It’s integrated into many popular blogging tools, including MovableType, there’s a cool plugin to directly export from iPhoto (although developed by a Flickr user and not officially supported), has very granular privacy options, and encourages people to take advantage of Creative Commons licensing. The last one is what really got me, so I went ahead and paid for the full Pro account and am a new convert to Flickr.

If you’re on Flickr, look me up and we can share contacts. If you’re not on Flickr, you should check it out for your photo needs. Here’s a link to my public photos.

Related posts:

1. Those bastards– proprietary formats rear their ugly heads again!
2. Lovely seaturtles

(click for the full screenshot)

Now, everyone go buy and download Transmit for your Mac OS X (graphical) FTP needs.

Related posts:

1. Two things
2. All the small things
3. 4 things that make a good manicurist

Case in point: I recently gave in and decided to buy Quicktime Pro for my Mac. (I think I actually bought it before, but in the great hard drive crash of Memorial Day Weekend 2004, my license key was lost forever and for some reason, I could not get it from Apple). In any case, I bought QT Pro for my new Mac on April 24th. (When I had previously purchased it, I had purchased it for Windows– yeah, that’s right, you have to buy separate license keys for Windows and Mac.) Now, I realized that Tiger was coming out on April 29th, but just because it was, I didn’t think that A) a new version of QT would also be released and, more importantly, B) my QT Pro registration key would not work with future versions of QT.

Obviously, I was sorely mistaken. I was still running Panther since I didn’t pre-order, did not bother going to the Apple release party on campus and wasn’t willing to stand in the line that literally went down along University Avenue in Palo Alto. (Seriously, people: it’s just an operating system. Calm down.) So the way I realized that there was a new version of QT was when Software Update automatically prompted me to download and install. Assuming (albeit incorrectly) that my recently purchased pro registration key would work with the newer version and wanting to see if QT 7 is better than 6, I downloaded and installed right away.

But I again mistakenly assumed that it would retain my previously entered registration information, which it did not, and when I did provide the registration key, it no longer worked on QT 7. So, $29.99 to legitimately purchase a QT Pro license and four days later, I can’t use it anymore because they’ve forced QT 7 on me.

Okay, so maybe I was naive to think that the license I purchased would work on the newer version as well since QT has always had this idea of “free upgrades.” So, in my mind, that means, if I have a free upgrade on QT from 6 to 7, that should hold true for QT Pro from 6 to 7, right? I mean, we’re the people who paid the $29.99 in the first place– at least you could hook us up with the upgrade, especially when you release a new version four days later, couldn’t you?

But in looking at the Quicktime Pro FAQ, it says:

I already have QuickTime 6. Can I upgrade to QuickTime 7 for free?
Upgrades to QuickTime 7 Player are free. Upgrades to QuickTime 7 Pro are $29.99.

Which is all just misleading since there is no difference in the software delivered in QT and QT Pro. They’re the same piece of software with the same set of features and functionality– all “QuickTime Pro” means is that you purchased a registration key that will now “unlock” those “Pro” features. That’s not really paying for an upgrade then. That’s paying for another key. When you really do look closely at the item description on your receipt, you see that you are buying a QT6 Pro Key, not just a QT Pro Key and therefore, for the rest of time, they will be able to make you pay for a new key every single time they decide to push out another version of QT (especially since you can’t run two different instances of QT on the same machine– i.e., you can’t run QT 6 PRO and QT 7 on the same computer, a note straight from the FAQ).

Obviously, this whole thing annoyed me as I hoped to convert some videos the other day and fell into this pit of hell. So I thought, let’s make this an experiment: let’s just see how willing Apple is to step up to the plate and be fair (or at least provide some nice customer service). So, on April 30th, I sent them the following email:

I ordered a Quicktime Pro key for Mac OS X on April 24. Now, only 6 days later, Apple pushes out the newest version of Quicktime (7) via Software Update and now my key doesn’t work anymore. At the time of the purchase, had I been told the key was not going to work on a newer version and that the newer version would be out within days, I would not have purchased. I would like a refund or a new key that will work with Quicktime 7.

Surprisingly enough, they did in fact respond within a day or two:

After careful consideration of your request, we would like to offer you a one-time exception to our standard returns policy.

A credit in the amount of $29.99 for the QuickTime Pro key you purchased will be credited to your account within five business days. Please contact your credit card company if you have questions about when the credit will be posted.

You may find it helpful to read Apple’s Sales and Returns Policy. To do so please visit:
http://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/salespolicies.html.

So, of course, I went and read their Sales and Returns Policy. It explicitly says in one section:

Please note that Apple does not permit the return of or offer refunds for the following products:

1. Product that is custom configured to your specifications
2. Opened memory
3. Opened software*
4. Electronic software downloads
5. Personalized iPods
6. Software Up to Date Program Products (SW upgrades)

The QT Pro key doesn’t really fall into any of those categories (maybe “Electronic software downloads”), but they seem to treat QT Pro keys different anyway in a special section:

QuickTime Pro Keys
You can purchase a QuickTime Pro Key at the Apple Store using a valid Apple Store account. At the time of checkout, we will obtain an authorization from the credit card you provide. Once credit card authorization is received, you will receive an email notification that includes installation instructions and a Key code.

So, there’s no real information available here to tell me that they don’t give refunds for QT Pro Keys since my refund is a special “one-time only exception,” but the fact that they have a special section addressing QT Pro keys makes me feel like they know they’re pulling a scam here. Of course, since this whole QT incident and the release of Tiger (which I have since purchased, installed, and actually really like), I’ve seen the “your Quicktime 6 Pro key will not work” message all over the place. Maybe I missed it the first time or maybe they’ve made it a lot clearer since the release of QT 7 and Tiger.

On one hand, the licensing setup is a small, but perhaps overlooked example that Apple’s licensing agreements, or business tactics in general, aren’t that much better or more altruistic than any other “software giants.” You have to upgrade to QT Pro to do simple things like export movies to the QT format in the first place or even play movies full screen (a new limitation of version 7), both of which are free in Windows Media Player (including the free media encoder available from Microsoft). I mean, if you want to promote your “native” file format among both Mac and PC users, why not give people a free converter? Especially on your own stupid platform? (I mean, that one seems like a no-brainer to me.) Why not make it easier to deliver content in QT so that Mac users don’t feel left out– or rather, have to separately install Microsoft software to be included? Last week, I seriously considered switching to my Mac as my primary personal machine, but I pulled out in the end because one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned over the past few months as I use a Mac more and more is that it sucks sometimes to be on the minority platform. So, why do they insist on essentially making it easier to ostracize Mac users by making it more difficult to deliver content natively for both platforms? Aside from not being a very smart business strategy in improving market penetration, it feels like the QT Pro key trap only punishes the people who want to do things that, in the end, promote Apple and MacOS.

Many have gotten lulled into this idea that just because Apple has been the underdog, it makes them smarter or better people, but they have just as much, if not more, interest in protecting what few assets they have, no matter what the cost. (I need not remind you of all of the lawsuits in which Apple is currently involved.) And in my mind, Apple has recently been more concerned with converting users rather than making existing users happy– the latter promoting a committment to backwards compatibility and less restrictive upgrade structures, something Apple hasn’t necessarily been better about than anyone else.

On the other hand, I like the idea that, albeit on a “one-time only exception,” Apple was kind enough to refund me the money– especially since I’m a long-time Windows user who recently bought a Mac and have been making a concerted effort to give the “other platform” a chance. Moreover, I, along with my coworkers, have generally tried to be platform agnostic and in truth, have been larger than usual proponents of Macs on campus and Mac use among students (we have a whopping 20-25% of students owning a Mac) and in general, the education market and Stanford specifically have had a traditionally close and positive relationship. Did they take any of this into account while deciding on my reund? Most definitely not unless the folks at Apple have nothing to do but to stalk my OS choices and buying habits. Maybe with less than 5% of the market, they have time to just have a guy answer annoyed emails about QT Pro keys, but it was a stroke of luck in making this faceless individual user a little happier (or a little less dissatisfied) with Apple.

Related posts:

1. Application arrogance

CMU Professor’s Rebuttal Against RIAA Propaganda (from Slashdot)

Related posts:

1. Fan fiction hits the stands?
2. Universities and iPods now

Individual-i

Related posts:

1. CMU, more debt, information security, and privacy

I was also pretty good at changing handwriting styles at the drop of a hat too– which made me pretty good at forging. And if you flipped through a notebook from my high school days, you could see the various handwriting styles I had adopted and tried out over the year.

Now, I barely write anything with a pen, outside of writing on a whiteboard (where I can still write neatly and clearly in slightly stylized all capital letters). I sit in front of one computer or another at least eight hours a day, usually more, and I can type God-knows-how-fast for God-knows-how-long even with highly manicured long fingernails. I’ve even passed the point where I’ve either adopted better typing practices or I’ve just gotten used to the repetitive stress. I can barely remember a time when I didn’t know how to type, using correct home keys and everything, just like I can barely remember a time before computers.

And now when I do need to write something, my hand cramps up and I painfully etch out chicken scratch on post-its, legal pads, and the like. I hate taking notes by hand. I don’t even like using a stylus– I prefer to type everything out, including on my Blackberry. The only thing I can still do effortlessly is sign my name.

This is our future.

RIAA cracks down on Internet2 file swapping

There are a lot of obvious comments I could make about this new witchhunt by the RIAA, most of which have already been said by many other people. Nevertheless, I might as well reiterate a few important points:

Internet2 is a “closed” network. The RIAA declined to answer how they were able to get onto the network to discover the alleged copyright infringement in the first place. I hope this will finally push someone to seriously challenge the questionable way the RIAA (and now the MPAA as well) is monitoring these networks. Unless they have people working on the inside (which is not completely out of the realm of possibility), there is some seriously sketchy network “monitoring” going on.

Targeting I2. It’s pretty clear why the RIAA is targeting I2– because it’s considered a closed and centrally-controlled network, it is more regulable and can be used to set a precedent for regulating similar special networks. (Again, if it’s so closed and regulable, it begs the question, how did the RIAA get on there in the first place?) Check out Ed Felten’s comments on the subject.

Liability. Obviously, when asked to comment, the folks behind the i2hub community have stated that they do not condone activities that breach the rights of copyright owners. Well, I’m assuming that they’re not so naive to think that this wasn’t going to cause problems, especially since they so clearly identify themselves on their Web site (where they also say that this whole project is under the umbrella of “collaboration” between students). While universities come down harder and harder on p2p on their campuses for fear of being sued, there hasn’t been a case yet where the ISP (the university) has been sued. However, the entertainment industry first went after those running file-sharing services on campuses back in 2003 and has not hesitated to go after Grokster, Kazaa, and, most recently, BitTorrent tracker sites, so there’s little evidence that they would not go after the i2hub folks. I will assume that the i2hub folks aren’t stupid, so they should have been expecting something like this to happen eventually. If that’s the case, I hope they’re also willing to stand up and fight.

Digital music services. A number of the schools at which students were sued have university-wide deals in place for legal music services for their students (e.g., Napster, CDigix, Ruckus, etc.) I had thought that making a deal with the devil might offer those universities some comfort, but I guess not. This also shows that the amount of illegal file-sharing does not necessarily go down significantly just because you have legal services available. Both of these points don’t give universities much incentive to make campus deals.

In any case, we’ll see what happens. The RIAA sued no more than 25 students at each of the 18 schools (this statistic somehow meant to make us feel better since they claim to have evidence of many more cases of infringement). I sincerely hope that at least one of those students will fight back, will file a countersuit, will do something to stand up to the entertainment industry’s targeting of college students and universities in general. Maybe then they can get back to actually providing entertainment rather than punishing their customers and we can get back to the business of educating students.

Related posts:

1. RIAA continues fight while new company tries paradigm shift
2. Universities and Napster
3. Told you so: SP2 on campus

All that aside, after fiddling with Yahoo! 360 for all of ten minutes, it looks pretty feature rich to me (although they also don’t let you just point to your own RSS feed instead of using their blogging tool– they say it’s “coming soon”) and offers some nice privacy settings support that provides some comfort and peace of mind. Also, it’s got way better/cleaner/more professional design and since it’s not even one month old, it doesn’t seem to have the sketchiness that has become MySpace. Although I’m not sure that’s a good or bad thing. I would almost want to suggest that my friends get onto 360 as a less sketchy and more professional looking alternative to MySpace, but I don’t think that either of those things would appeal to most of my friends. They, like most people, like MySpace (and the net in general) to be where they can be a little dirty, a little less professional, and free to create some of the most difficult to read, annoying to load, multmedia rich content-filled Web pages to serve as their presence on the World Wide Web. And that, my friends, is called serendipity.

Related posts:

1. Social networks

This is what it feels like sometimes on MySpace.

I signed up for a MySpace account a while ago because a friend of mine from high school said I should sign up. Now, I was already on Friendster, Orkut, and inCircle (the Stanford Alumni networking site that was the predecessor to Orkut). And since joining MySpace, I’ve also joined LinkedIn. It never stops and it’s sad really because I never do anything with those accounts after setting them up. Maybe I’ll put a new picture up once in a while when I get a good one, but that’s about it. Most of the time I usually end up using the system to reconnect with old friends. By putting myself out there on as many social networking sites I can, I hope that those I might have lost in touch with for whatever reason might be able to find me (and those I purposely lost touch with can see that I’m doing pretty well for myself). And this has been the case on most of these sites.

But who knew that MySpace would be the place I would reconnect with the most friends from high school and the like? And who knew MySpace with its janky site design (do you hear the circus music?) would beat out its more professional predecessors? Maybe it’s because MySpace, with its Tapioca Express color scheme and breadth of services (even though quantity not quality seems to be the rule here) hit it big when attracting young people to a place where they can easily put together an online profile, develop their own Web presence and use it to do a whole variety of things, from making new friends, reconnecting with old friends, tell each other about what’s going on in their lives, etc. Of course, the biggest thing that has happened is the downright naughtiness that has sprung up and taken over. Browse through the profiles and you’ll see a lot of photos of underage girls willing to show just about anything and equally clad guys just as eager to say anything.

Case in point: when I’m on these networking sites, I usually limit my interactions to those I know in real life and use the service as a way to come together in one virtual space to send notes to each other, let us know what’s going on in each others lives, maybe even introduce mutual friends, etc. It serves as a compliment to my social life in the real world. But now, on MySpace, aside from getting in touch with some old friends I haven’t talked to in almost 10 years, I also get the random messages asking for friendship/answer to a question or just plain out fucking. See, you take away most of the barriers to visibility, access and opportunity and we all just break down to the lowest common demonominator: sex.

Some examples of messages I have received:

Hello there. I ran across your profile on myspace and I think that you are very attractive. Check out my profile to see what you think of me and if you like what you see, you can email me at [...] or message me on Yahoo ([...] is my screen name). I hope to hear from you soon.

Which is not that bad. It’s actually very nice. But here’s another one:

i’m checking my heart beats. think i’m missing one—omg…since i’m writing you personally i dont mind saying… you look fucking hot!! i would love to do you some “bad” things;)
anyway i’m not much of a writer but can talk (with an accent though;))
so if you feel comfortable gimme a call sometime. you are invited for milk and cookies;)

Does this work? Do these lines make women drop their panties and just want to fuck? I don’t know. It just seems like to me that no matter how attractive he might think I am, how could he really tell with the picture I have up there? It’s just a head shot and probably one of the more tame pictures out there compared to the naughty naughty stuff 15 and 16 year olds will put up there. Maybe I just have a look about me that invites trouble.

Now, facilitation of more risque (or at least “taboo”) and random sexual experiences has been a tried and true use of the Internet. However, for the most part, when people go on the net looking for “anonymous” sex, they usually try to stay just that: anonymous. They use pseudonyms and screennames, lie about their personal lives (spouses and the like), put up fake photos of themselves. And while people have certainly become more open about using the Internet for these kinds of interactions (just check out the casual encounters section on craigslist), I don’t know if they’re necessarily willing to divulge their identities so openly. But on MySpace, with the exception of the occasional fake celebrity profile, people seem surprisingly willing to a) divulge real and true information about themselves and b) be frank and open about their search for sex. Maybe it’s the simplicity of MySpace that invites a group of people that may be considered less “net savvy” (just take a look at some of the crap people put on their profile pages), but who they are, branch out to reconnect with old friends, and yet still reinvent themselves into something bigger and better and look for a way to meet new people and have new experiences…

In any case, I have my permissions back. As someone who does some system administration, I understand why they did it– the traffic was taking up something like 70% of the CPU. But obviously, it was a spam attack similar to a DoS attack, which can happen to anyone and wasn’t even necessarily a security foul-up. While I can close commenting (a drastic measure that I don’t really want to do, but will for now), really anybody could launch a similar DoS attack just by inundating your Web server. Hopefully, I’ll be able to turn commenting back on at some point. Once again, spammers ruining everybody else’s fun.

Related posts:

1. Not everyone sees the beauty of the blog
2. clippy blog

Committee to Protect Bloggers

The other nice thing is that it really takes advantage of the whole “web” concept– you could look up one topic, start clicking through keyword links, follow some evolutionary path and eventually, you might stumble onto something that doesn’t have an entry, but that you want to educate the world on. Case in point: my first Wikipedia contribution.

First off, Bay Area public transportation: If environmentalists around the country want to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels, the first place to start is encouraging the improvement of public transportation systems. Case in point: you know why there’s so much traffic in Northern California? Because using public transportation is such a freakin’ hassle. Granted, my lifelong model of public transportation has been one of the best in the country– New York City– but still. First off, there’s multiple transit systems– BART, CalTrain, Muni, VTA, etc.– and there’s no unified way to use these systems. Because they each cover whatever weird area of the Bay Area that they do (BART covers the East Bay and between the East Bay and San Francisco, CalTrain covers between San Francisco and all along the West Bay down to San Jose, etc.), you have to switch between systems often to get around and a) switching between systems is not always easy and b) there’s no unified pass/ticket system (you have to buy different tickets/passes for each one). And on top of all that, the trains and buses don’t run that often (or that late) and it almost always takes significantly longer to take public transportation, so it’s not that convenient either. Basically, the likelihood of you getting screwed over because you missed the last train, couldn’t find parking, didn’t buy the right ticket, etc. is so high that most people, even with high gas prices and lots of traffic, will opt to just drive themselves wherever they need to go.

For example: this morning’s attempt to get to MacWorld– my big plan was to get into San Francisco around noon, walk to the Moscone Center, pick up my badge, and then tool around until we (Stanford ResComp folks) were to meet our Apple rep at a nearby restaurant. I live right near a major CalTrain station, but when I got there this morning, the entire parking lot was packed full. So, I drove up to the next station– this parking lot had space, but the parking ticket machine only took quarters and I didn’t have enough. So, at this point, I’ve given up on trying to get on a 10:30 train up to the city. I go back out, run some errands, get some more quarters, and return to the station. So now, I can buy a parking ticket, park my car, and get onto the train. Of course, while walking through the passenger tunnel to the other side of the tracks, I almost wiped out on the stairs (it has been raining constantly these past few weeks) and seriously pulled something in my leg.

Now, this part is genuinely my fault: Stanford has a cool deal where staff get this free “EcoPass” deal to take public transportation for free. It’s this little sticker they put on your ID card. However, I forgot that it goes by calendar year (versus academic) and hey, it’s 2005. Of course, a lot of people forget things like this, so there was a grace period, but that ended, conveniently, yesterday. So, I got kicked off the train by the time I got to the next stop, had to buy a ticket, wait 30 minutes for the next train, and then get back on. So, basically, it took me like an hour and a half to travel about 10 miles and then something like two and a half hours total to get into San Francisco. If I had driven, I could have gotten there in about thirty to forty-five minutes and paid about the same amount in parking as I ended up paying in parking at the train station, train tickets, and cab fare (since I wasn’t up to walking with my bum leg and was now running late). The only reason I stuck it through was because I needed to get some reading done on the train. This is the only real value of using public transportation in the Bay Area– it may take longer, but at least you can be more productive while you’re commuting.

Second, missed John Mayer connections: so, I finally did make it to San Francisco and found out that John Mayer had appeared at the keynote this morning. Unbe-freakin’-lievable! I have been obsessing over John Mayer and his music lately and then he turns up at MacWorld to help Steve Jobs demo GarageBand. Of course, the rest of the day was spent intermittently looking around and wondering if he might just be hanging out somewhere and would turn up around the corner. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t want to meet him in that situation anyway– I mean, there’s nothing really spectacular you can say (“Er, I really like your music…”) and I’m not really into getting autographs (aside from the fact that I didn’t really have anything for him to sign), so, I would probably just feel like an asshole if I met him. But alas, it would have been cool to see him during the keynote. I am going to have to figure out how to get a stinkin’ video of it.

And finally, MacWorld 2005: as for the conference itself, we only went around the Exhibit Hall and as expected, it was more like iPodWorld than MacWorld. There were some interesting things– the new iMac, the new Mac Mini– but in the end, it showed that what Apple does well is software and consumer electronics products. OS X. The iLife series. The iPod, in all its forms (including the iPod Shuffle). And of course, they’re great at design– the Apple hardware does just look really cool and slick (although, I fear it will also look dated really soon). But Apple continues to hold on to the Motorola chip and their architecture and despite what Macheads might say, I’m still not convinced that Apple hardware is intrinsically, in the very guts, any better than Intel hardware. I mean, plenty of technical folks have made the clear argument as to the advantages of AMD over Intel, but the Motorola argument isn’t that compelling and in the end, Apple could deliver the same value and innovation to the market with different hardware inside. Nobody buys a Mac because they want the Apple insides necessarily. They buy a Mac because they want the operating system, the iLife software, and the integration with all of the Apple peripherals, and they go along with the Apple insides because all of that will only run on those insides. Will they ever abandon it? No, probably never. It’s what makes them who they are and switching to Intel or AMD hardware, no matter how sensible, would symbolize giving in, giving up in some way (although taking Microsoft’s money to bail them out didn’t seem to bother them that much). And nobody really cares either way because as the underdog, we let them do it their way and cheer them on. But let’s imagine a world where 95% of the world’s computers were Macs– would we still hold them to the same anti-trust standards that we hold Microsoft to? I mean, if their software only runs on their hardware and they were to suddenly have an overwhelmingly large share of such an important market, would we still just look the other way? The iTunes user who has already filed a suit against Apple may be on to something that will grow to haunt the company as they gain more success and even though we always like to think of Apple as the “nice” computer company, their actions against ThinkSecret shows that when challenged, they’ll play just as dirty as the Evil Empire.

Related posts:

1. Things I learned at MacWorld
2. The Yay Area

Downloading comics: threat or menace?

Related posts:

1. Comic book heroes and history
2. Books

Of course, although it’s perfectly legal when done according to each band’s/artist’s trading policies, just using BitTorrent on my computer makes me nervous because of my employer’s current policy on copyright complaints (for staff, three strikes you’re fired and my home network is currently on their network). Can the music industry really think it’s good to make its customers this paranoid, this scared?

In any case, if you’re interested, check out bt.etree.org, the community tracker site for etree.org and get connected. And remember, don’t be a leech!

• Friendster
• Orkut
• MySpace
• LinkedIn

And to be honest, I always feel like an asshole whenever I fill out the profiles on these sites– I usually just cut and paste from another site. I’m basically just making up whatever is on my mind at the moment, including descriptions of my work experience. If you had my job, you’d know that the focus of my job changes about every three months whether I like it or not and more often than not, I’m a jack of all trades.

The only real benefit I think I’ve gotten from these social networking sites is reconnecting with old friends, which is valuable in and of itself, but I don’t know if it’s worth the subconscious inferiority I feel when I don’t have a lot of friends/connections.

Seriously, Internet service, especially wireless, is like crack. I’ve been on dialup for the last few days (which has not stopped me from blogging and uploading video) and the little “wireless internet access here” sign is heaven to me. I would take a picture of it for here, but I’m afraid the TSA would lock me up for being a threat to airport, and therefore, national security.

But because we’re talking about “technology” and this new phenomenon of “blogs” (which, by the way, let’s admit, have existed in many forms long before personal publishing systems, RSS feeds, and commercial blog services/sites), we think that somehow, the rules of engagement are different. On one hand, people think that because of the feeling of anonymity on the Internet (which is only a feeling for the most part and you’re probably easier to track online than most places), putting things out there on the Internet isn’t somehow going to bite you in the ass someday. On the flip side, some think that just because it’s on the Web, blog entries are factual, representative of something, and/or important. But outside of official news blogs (and even then), they are actually rarely factual, representative of the blogger only, and not that important to anyone, including the blogger himself. There are “blog celebrities” out there with extremely high readership, but for the most part, opinions expressed on somebody’s blog usually only represent that blogger’s opinions and are read by a very small audience usually made up of people he knows.

The real difference between online and offline opinion spouting is that for the most part, what you put online (and unprotected) is completely accessible to everyone, even if no one really looks at it. And with that key difference in mind, my rule of thumb before putting something on my blog or posting to another blog or putting anything on the Web in general would be, if I’m not willing to stand up in a crowded room filled with my enemies and say it through a bullhorn, then I probably shouldn’t do it. Also, when talking about specific people or topics that involve specific people I know (even if they aren’t mentioned by name or description), I wouldn’t say anything I’m not willing to say to their face. The point is that, it’s the fucking Internet people: it’s really hard to cop out and say things behind someone’s back. And while nothing may come of it most of the time, you have to be prepared for the worst case scenario– could you lose a friend, could you get sued, could you lose your job? If you’re not ready to face the worst case scenario (I’m not saying you have to accept it– you just have to be ready to face it and deal with it, whatever way you decide), you probably shouldn’t do it.

Now, your line between appropriate and inappropriate might be in a very different place than mine. And others around you, after reading your words, will most surely take the opportunity to tell you where to put your line. Personally, I think that there are general guidelines that bloggers, depending on the nature of their content, should use and then after that, it’s up to you. Ah, the sweet taste of personal freedom.

First, personal blogs that are like diaries– essentially, “live journals.” This is where you can get into a lot of trouble in your personal life if you get a little carried away and forget the aforementioned rule that if you aren’t willing to stand up in a crowded room and say it through a bullhorn or say it directly to anybody who is involved, you probably shouldn’t say it. If you secretly lust after young children and have and never will tell anybody that you do, you probably shouldn’t write about it on your blog. If you’ve been thinking about breaking up with your boyfriend, but haven’t and aren’t ready to talk to him about it, blogging your break up thoughts is probably a bad idea. If you had a horrible time at a party and you’re not prepared to have the host of the party bitch you out, even if her name isn’t mentioned, you probably shouldn’t write about it. Blogging bad or private things about your friends is a good way to have no friends fast and while blogging deeply personal things about yourself might seem cathartic at first, it’s also a good way to invite people to judge you, attack you, critize you, and further invade your privacy. And last but not least, if you’re going to get into talking about any public topic– politics, social issues, current events, sports, anything– be ready to hear every supporting and dissenting opinion in every degree of politeness and reason possible, including none. This is the price we pay, but for every bunch of assholes out there, there are a bunch of people who aren’t and who are genuinely interested in discourse. Some of them might agree with you, but more of them will probably disagree with you and while nobody may change their opinions, effective communication could bring increased understanding and some type of cooperation.

Now, on the other end, there are the corporate blogs where people maintain blogs as official representatives of their employers, such as IEBlog, the blog for the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft. These are usually pretty tame, even if they offer insight into what’s going on at a company that’s otherwise unavailable. And because they’re “official,” content is filtered through PR, legal, and the like and there’s not much trouble individuals can get into.

Of course, most blogs, from my experience, are a combination of personal and professional content in the same way that a person usually isn’t just about his personal life or his professional life. I mean, even if you don’t live to work, you spend around eight hours a day at work– everyone’s got something to say about their job, even if it’s just to say that you hate it. Especially when you work in tech, one usually bleeds into the other and when you want to talk about something going on at work, you usually want to talk about other larger topics and related issues and you end up talking not just about your job or your employer, but the larger industry you work in or are a part of. One pretty well-known example of this category is Rob Scoble’s Scobeleizer (Microsoft). The blog branches out into looking at technology in general and some personal notes, but much of it is about working at Microsoft, things Microsoft is doing, where Microsoft has been and where Microsoft is going. And of course, the dilemma faced by these bloggers is getting into trouble with their employers or even other corporate entities they discuss, the worst case being sued or dooced (although in the example, Scoble is obnoxiously supportive of Microsoft). And of course, the prime example of the latter (and the term’s namesake) is Heather Armstrong who was fired for posting stories about her coworkers and workplace on her Web site. There are a couple of other well-known examples of this too– the woman who was fired by Friendster or the man who was fired by Microsoft.

When people first started getting fired for blogging, I think many were surprised that employers were looking at employee Web sites and that you could get in trouble for it. That’s a little naive, isn’t it? Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but considering how much we’re online these days, I think we’re all a little wiser and we’re all a little more wary– or at least should be. I’m not familiar with the details of all of the aforementioned cases, but I’ll bet that for the most part, the company was overreacting or reacting inappropriately and if it happened to me tomorrow, I’d probably sue for wrongful termination. As unfair as it might seem, you have to go into it knowing that you could lose your job for what you write online (and probably most of what you do online) and be prepared to fight it if you don’t think you should have lost your job. What you do online can get you in trouble offline, but even broader than that, there’s always a chance that you’ll get in trouble for something you say or do for no good reason– no matter how much you might think you had a right to say or do it and no matter how much you think the First Amendment and other laws protect you. Get used to it. As a minority, it’s a way of life.

Yes, it’s a pretty cynical way of going about life, but unfortunately, it’s a reality. The more important lesson though is, like I said, that you should protect yourself as much as you can along the way and if it does happen to you, be ready to fight. More on this in my next post.

Related posts:

1. Safe blogging

The truth is that, for better or worse, high tech work culture has become an extension of late night hacking sessions. When I was in college, engineering students were characterized as the ones who were pale, a little sickly, stayed up all night coding, and were never seen before 11 am. While the occasional all-nighter is a fact of college life, for engineering students, it was a way of life. While some of those late nights probably could have been avoided by less procrastination and more focus, I don’t think anyone could keep up with the curriculum without pulling all-nighters on a fairly regular basis.

Many of my Stanford classmates will argue that their majors required late night study sessions too– the HumBio core was notorious for the ridiculous amount of assigned reading. The issue is that eventually, that lifestyle comes to an end for most people. Unfortunately, for high tech folks, the long hours only continue. Every year, I see a bunch of Stanford computer science students graduate and head off into the work world. Many of them are lucky enough to get jobs doing work they are really excited about– going to Microsoft, EA, Google, and other popular companies– and I see the same thing happen to most of them: they are so excited to be doing the work they’re doing and getting paid a decent amount of money suddenly that they’re willing to devote all of their time and energy to their jobs, just like most of them did with academics when they were in school. But eventually, they realize they’re six months, a year, five years, ten years out of school and they’re still living like college students, just maybe with better stuff than they had before. And for some, this isn’t that much of a disappointment– some love it– but for some, it’s a turning point and this is when they start working normal business hours, getting hobbies, meeting new people, dating, getting married, having children, seeing sunlight, etc. But no worries, another generation of young, naive people fresh out of school and so excited just to be working on the next cool new game or the newest version of an operating system will be there to fill their shoes.

One of the secrets to the tech industry’s success is this buy-in from employees. And at many of these places, they’ve drank the Kool-Aid so much that they consider some of the things companies do as perks. It started with getting a laptop and having your home Internet connection paid for– at first, you say, wow, I get a computer to take home and free Internet service. But then, the expectation is that since you have a computer at home and you have high speed Internet at home, there’s no reason for you to stop working or stop emailing when you get home. High-tech companies, especially startups have reinvented these perks: companies are letting people work non-traditional hours, letting them surf the Web at work, even setting up quiet rooms for quick naps, etc. Places like Google take it a step further with catered lunches, car washing services, and commuter buses with free Wi-Fi servicing employees who live in San Francisco. It might sound cool– hey, free lunch brought to you, a free car wash while you’re at work, a free commute– but all of this is designed to encourage long hours and more work. If your employees don’t have to leave campus to get lunch or run errands or anything else, they’ll be more likely to spend that time doing work. If you can take a quick nap while you’re at work, staying until 10, 11, midnight seems easier. The whole idea of calling the workplace a “campus” represents the very crux of the issue– the line between work and home becomes so blurred that you can no longer tell the difference.

Now, I’m not saying that long hours are a bad thing– if there really is a good reason to spend so much time working, then that’s great. Teachers, doctors, nurses, and others all do incredible work that require long hours, extreme dedication, and at least some personal sacrifices. Take an extreme example– could you imagine if the President of the United States punched out at five everyday? (Let’s not get into our current President’s vacation history.) Could you imagine if you couldn’t get in touch with the President because he refused to be called at home? There’s a reason why the President lives and works in the White House. And aside from how life-or-death important your job might be, if you really love to work, then that’s great. Living to work rather than working to live isn’t always a bad thing, but expect to make sacrifices.

The real problem is when companies don’t stop their employees from voluntarily working all the time and/or start expecting their employees to work 60, 80, 100 hour weeks with no vacation or overtime. For example, even if a company doesn’t expect employees to work long hours, many employees will do it because they truly love their work or they simply don’t have anything better to do. But reaching burnout can be a voluntary process and in the long term, good managers keep an eye out for it and step in before it happens. Moreover, if the majority of people are working long hours all the time, soon it becomes an unfair competition– people who choose to work all the time even when it’s unnecessary end up pushing out the people who don’t and the latter is punished under the idea that they’re not meeting some standard. But there is a line between failing to fullfill responsibilities and duties and choosing to have a balanced life and by federal law, a 40-hour week with mandatory breaks is the standard. Twelve to eighteen-hour work days, ten minute lunch at your desk or no lunch at all, and no vacation should certainly not be the standard.

To be honest, I’ve drank the Kool-Aid too– my boss is always telling me to take more vacation, to stay home and really not do work when I’m feeling sick, to keep the line between work and home clear. And to be honest, I can’t really imagine only working 40 hours a week and don’t expect any job I apply for in the future to have that guarantee. In the end, I don’t know how or if this problem will ever be solved, at least in the tech world. Although we complain about the late nights and constantly comment on how tired we are, there is a certain geek bravado associated with this lifestyle– you can just tell by how often people talk about how long or how late they’ve stayed up or how many hours they worked this week or how they haven’t had time to have a proper meal. We’re complaining, but deep down inside– or maybe right there on the surface– we all believe we’ve earned some bragging rights. In our own geeky way, they are our own war stories.

Related posts:

1. Save a life. Give blood.
2. Simple Host rocks my world

So, the question is, how do you tell if someone is genuinely interested in technology? Just because someone is interested in technology doesn’t mean the words come falling out of their mouths all the time, especially if an interview is focused on evaluating organizational skills, attention to details, or the ability to communicate effectively. So, at first, we asked questions like, “what’s your comfort level with technology? How do you find answers to your technical questions or learn how to do something new on a computer?” Unfortunately, this line of questioning usually ends with a shrug and “I’m comfortable with computers” or “I call the Help Desk” or “I ask someone for help” or “I just figure it out on my own.” So we started asking more specific questions like “How interested are you in technology? What kind of technology issues or topics are you interested in or do you try to keep up to date with?” And living in Silicon Valley, working in this office, and constantly reading sites like Slashdot, you expect answers like “Oh, well, I find the whole file-sharing phenomenon interesting and the rise of digital media” or “I think it’s very interesting how we balance personal privacy with information security in a world with an increasingly dangerous computing environment.” But no, we got answers like, “Well, I don’t really write software or buy the latest gadgets, but I like technology.”

To many people, “technology issues” means things directly related a specific software program or piece of hardware. I think our question was a pretty broad one, but very few people responded with answers about how technology affects your life, your personal relationships, how you learn, how you think, and more. Very few people talked about how technology fits into student life and not just how they submit their homework assignments or visit their class Web sites, but about how email and IM and cell phones have changed the way in which students communicate with their peers as well as professors, how computers and the Internet have changed the way in which students learn and get information about anything and everything, and how technology can be used to enrich academic and residential life. The answers are not so much “How do you set up a wireless network?” but “How would wireless networking benefit students?” You don’t have to necessarily know how to set up the wireless network– there are people for the technical how-tos– but you should be thinking about how 75% of students have laptops, how wireless network access would allow students to work and study in different places, how it affects group study opporunities and team efforts, etc.

Certainly, there will always be people working on the hard technical issues– how do you build more secure operating systems, how do you develop great human-computer interfaces, how do you break technical barriers– but the social issues of tomorrow will be inexorably tied up with technology issues and socially aware and involved people of tomorrow will have to be interested in, curious about, and aware of technology.

Case in point: about a month ago, my Dell laptop started doing strange things. Basically, it would just shut off if I happened to move it around slightly. You could imagine how annoying that would be. Now, first, let me point out that this problem was basically caused by wear and tear on the computer and I will admit that I am rougher on my computer than most people are– of course, most people probably don’t carry around and use their computer as much as me either. So, this little Dell has really been around, but I’ve never done anything horribly wrong to it– dropped it hard, stepped on it, etc. In any case, I called Dell, explained to them what was going on, and they said that they would send someone out the next day (our department always gets the full three years of onsite labor and parts). Well, the customer service person I talked to told me that I would get a call between 10 am and 12 pm about when he would be coming by. By 1 pm, I still hadn’t gotten a phone call and when I spoke to a different customer service rep, I had the following converation:

ME: I was supposed to get a call from a third-party technician about a repair scheduled for today. I was told he would call between 10 and 12 and it’s past 1 now and he hasn’t called.

DELL: Well, the repair request was sent out yesterday and we have to ship the parts to him, so he won’t call until he gets the part.

ME: What part? Nobody ever told me a part needed to be replaced.

DELL: The motherboard. The repair request was to replace the motherboard. And the technician has to wait until he receives the part from us before he can call you. And that will most likely be tomorrow.

ME: Well, I was never told that anybody was waiting for a part to be delivered and you said that he was supposed to call me this morning between 10 and 12.

DELL: I didn’t say that.

ME: Well, no, that’s obviously not what I meant. When I say “you,” I mean “Dell.”

DELL: Well, he should call you tomorrow once he gets the part in.

Me: Fine.

Okay, granted, he actually did call while I was on the phone with the bad customer service rep and in the end, despite the fact that he never actually made it onto campus and we had to reschedule for the following day and that the problem returned a few weeks later and was only fully resolved with another 2 on-site service appointments, everything got resolved.

A few days after that first service appointment, I got a customer satisfaction survey from Dell. Oh, they picked the wrong time to ask me for my opinion. I gave them a lengthy review of what had happened and the fact that outside of a delay here and there, the real problem I had was just the attitude I got from the customer service rep. Simply put, it was just bad customer service.

Let me contrast this with an example of a great customer service experience. Now, I have expressed my love for my new Blackberry profusely when I first got it and I still love it, but like anything you love at first sight, you learn while it may not make you love it any less, nothing is perfect. The Saturday after I got it, the data services stopped working around 2 pm. At first, I figured the network might be down for a little while. But by 7 pm, it still wasn’t working and I was annoyed. I went to request a new service book to register the device with the network, but there was no option anymore to do that. I called T-Mobile technical support and they said that my data service had been suspended for some reason. So, they turned it back on, enabling me to request a service book. I waited for a little while, but still hadn’t received a service book and was starting to get really annoyed, but I had my own birthday party to go to, so I got off the phone.

Fast forward 5 hours later– I’m slightly drunk, full of Asian fusion cuisine, and am determined to get data service working again after my co-birthday party guest of honor started calling me “Miss T-Mobile pre-pay only” when I had told everyone about how T-Mobile had cut me off (said co-guest of honor had been trying to send me PIN messages all afternoon with no success). In any case, so I’m on the line with what I’m sure is customer service through prison workers or Indian outsource workers at 2 am. In the end, it turns out it was completely their fault– I guess where you turn on data for this new device is somewhere different than for the previous Blackberry and my account got screwed up. Minutes later, the data was flowing in as if we were in the land of digital milk and honey.

While I was tired and drunk and really just wanted to go to sleep, I didn’t get angry at the T-Mobile people because they consistently apologized for my inconvenience. They didn’t know if it was their fault or how it happened, but obviously, I’m a good customer and hell, I did just spend $300 on a new device from them, so they were sure to apologize for my experience not being as lovely as it could be. In the end, they were the ones who fucked up, although I give them a little leeway since it was a brand new device out on the market, but it didn’t get me mad at them. Maybe if getting data service back was a lot more critical (if I didn’t have email access otherwise) or I was in a rush, I might still be annoyed, but from a customer service perspective, T-Mobile hit all the sweet spots.

The same holds true for when I brought my Blackberry into work on Monday and realized that the antenna in this new 7100t is even shittier than in the 7230 and I couldn’t get any signal any more in office. I sometimes get phantom signal and somehow manage to suck down a few emails and an occasional voicemail, but otherwise, nothing reliable. I contacted both RIM and T-Mobile for hopes of some type of antenna boosting device or plans for more cell sites near my office. In the end, I didn’t get either, but they were all apologetic (although RIM could stand to be a little more apologetic for how shitty the antenna is on this thing) and T-Mobile even offered to give me 50 free bonus minutes to make up for my drop in coverage. Granted, it’s the equivalent of one post-work bitch session, but it’s something.

Related posts:

1. Fee for service? Not in education!
2. When good computers go bad
3. 4 things that make a good manicurist

Plugging Holes in the Security Dike

Although I wish that somebody actually working for Information Security Services at Stanford was quoted (and not just the director emeritus), it’s interesting to see that we’re not the only ones who were concerned about privacy and liability. Now, if only we would act on those concerns rather than just recognizing that they are an issue and moving on in the name of security at all costs.

Related posts:

1. Temptation, thy name is BigFix

But when T-Mobile, the exclusive dealer for the 7100t in the US, offered very attractive pricing– $199 after $100 rebate with new activation or one-year contract– and I took a look at my friend’s when he got it hours after T-Mobile started offering it, I was drawn in. I thought the new shape and slightly greater thickness would be too great of a footprint, but it wasn’t. The screen was just so bright and shiny (although I could live without the T-Mobile icons– I had to think a little too hard to figure out what some of them stood for). And the predictive text didn’t seem too bad, especially with my smaller fingers able to better use the reduced keyboard.

So, I gave in and went to the store the next day and got it (I would have gotten it that night if it was open). After about two hours with it, I am hooked. All the little things I loved about my old Blackberry are there and all the little things I wished were there with my old Blackberry are now here. As I used it more and kept going back to the manual to learn more tips and tricks, it kept hitting all the right spots in some glorious masturbatory overload. The new shape only adds to the higher quality phone, making it easier and more comfortable to talk (on the 7230, you had to put it up to your ear in just the right way so you could actually hear anything). The SureType software really is good and once I realized that the software predicts the right word/combination of letters depending on the sequence of key taps instead of just what the next letter should be, I could start typing more confidently, knowing that the software would use the right word. I’m almost back to my full typing speed on it now. There’s built-in Bluetooth support now which will be nice if and when I finally decide to get a Bluetooth support. Finally, there’s support for polyphonic ringtones and high-res background graphics– seemingly extraneous, but still lets Blackberry users enjoy all the “fun” eye and ear candy that comes with cell phones today. I’ve already switched my ringtone to Akon’s “Locked Up.” (Although, I don’t really want to pay 99 cents for each new ringtone– I’ve already paid 99 cents for the song on iTunes. Isn’t there some type of converter available? The entertainment industry is nickel and diming me to death.) And I’ll admit it– the high-res screen is just so pretty, especially once I changed to the default theme instead of T-Mobile’s quirky icons (I could hear circus music every time I looked at them).

Really, the only thing that’s missing is a camera, which I thought was a frivolous add-on to phones in the beginning, but with photoblogging taking off with cool services like Flickr, I would really like a camera phone. The only reason I could think of why RIM chose to leave a camera out was that they’re still appealing primarily (rightfully so) to corporate customers and a camera phone is still unclear territory in the corporate world. I hope RIM doesn’t come out with a follow up to the 7100t that has a phone too soon– $199 is a good price, but I still want to get a year’s worth of use out of it before I feel like I’m behind the curve. I would appreciate a camera attachment though– maybe taking advantage of the Bluetooth functionality? And certainly introduction of the camera as an attachment could assuage concerns by corporate customers.

In any case, the momentary thoughts I have every once in a while of getting a secondary phone for better phone functionality are now gone. And my initial misgivings about SureType and a reduced keyboard are also gone. The new Blackberry 7100t is basically the coolest thing ever.

Let them eat mobile phones

See, I’m not the only one who’s cynical about this stuff.

Related posts:

1. Bridging the Digital Divide: right intentions, wrong solution, Part 2
2. Bridging the Digital Divide: right intentions, wrong solution
3. Digital Dental

The deal is this: the decision to use BigFix was first made by the folks at ITSS (and given the go ahead, of course, by higher ups). At Stanford, the IT structure is a little strange. It’s divided into two main groups: ITSS, who focuses on administrative systems, infrastructure, etc., and the Libraries, who focus on academic computing needs (including residential needs since Stanford has a strong committment to residential education and most students live on-campus). But of course, real management of computing resources and services is even more decentralized than this strange arrangement, so as one can guess, managing the network and deploying technology throughout campus usually involves getting a lot of people from different groups to work together. You can imagine how folks in charge of administrative systems and infrastructure can often disagree with folks in charge of promoting the academic mission and student life. On one hand, allowing students to connect whatever computer they want to the network and experiment with their computers is, I believe, a key part of educational freedom and promotes self-learning. On the other hand, it’s a nightmare for network security and management, not to mention desktop support. Another part of this balancing act is the fact that a university computing environment isn’t necessarily a corporate computing environment and in addition to regular university employees , you have faculty who often have experimentation with computing technology at the heart of their research and you have students who live on-campus and make it their home, their community. Certainly, there are significant differences between what kind of programs a faculty member can run on computers paid for with research funds and what a residential student can do with his personally-owned computer and what a university employee can do with his university-owned computer.

In the end, the compromise was to provide supplementary documentation for residential students, hoping to educate students about the privacy concerns and let them make the right choice for their own computing needs. Our main goal was to make sure that students were educated (what a novel idea at a university) and had all the information necessary to make the right decision for themselves. The one thing we wanted to avoid was to have the University hand down BigFix as a requirement for getting onto the network. While I certainly agree that the University should be able to require students to patch and secure their machines, I do not believe they should be asked to install a potentially invasive piece of software on their computer and in the name of security, give up their privacy rights. Some may say that the list of retrieved properties is nothing to get so worked up over, that collecting this information automatically will help local network administrators and departments have better inventory information, and that most people won’t care if the University collects this information about their computers. Well, I hardly think that poor record keeping and inventory management on the part of local network administrators or the fact that most people just won’t mind are reasons to ask 10,000 students to install, in one sense, monitoring software on their personal computers.

Personally, BigFix for University-owned machines, especially those that store confidential information (including email), is a no-brainer– I believe that in those situations, computers should be imaged and employees should have locked-down configurations (no administrator access) anyway. And because we are talking about workplace resources, I understand that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy (although, I believe that a more relaxed approach fosters higher employee morale). But when it comes to my personal computer, I will not choose BigFix. In some ways, my situation is similar to those of the residential students my department supports– as part of my employment, Stanford provides me with “Stanford DSL,” paying for my service and giving me Stanford IP addresses for my home network. And realistically, when I come home from work, my employer can still monitor my network usage. In my home, my situation is very similar to students living on campus (although, unlike them, I have the option of a different broadband provider) and given that situation, I won’t be using BigFix at home. For me, I am more than capable of following good security practices to keep my computer, and in turn, my little part of the Stanford network secure. I don’t believe that there is an urgent and pressing need for the University to know how much total drive space I have or the serial number to my personal computer. Some of the retrieved properties might seem trivial– what my CPU speed is or what my computer name (something that’s already available via Windows networking)– but I should still be able to choose whether or not people know. It might seem trivial for people to know what color my couch is or what shape my dining table is, but it’s still my right to decide who knows these things. The most important thing, at least right now, is that we hold onto the right to choose because while it may seem trivial today, who knows what our “trivial” personal information could be used for tomorrow.

Which brings me to my final point: one of the big reasons why we must protect our personal privacy is that unfortunately, there are many out there who might use it against us. When we were in the thick of the privacy argument over BigFix, we realized there was a fundamental misunderstanding– some thought our reluctance to use and promote BigFix was because we feared that the information collected would not be secure, because we feared that the central databases would be broken into somehow or that console operators would abuse their access to this confidential information. These are concerns, of course, but our greater fear is that tomorrow, the next day, or sometime after that, suddenly the information would be used by the proper officials through the proper channels in a way that we do not agree with. Today, some collected information might be used only for inventory purposes, tomorrow, it could be used to unfairly profile network users. Today, total disk space might just be for statistical purposes, tomorrow, it might be used make unfair accusations about what that disk space might be used for. It’s a propos that I just finished reading Dan Brown’s “Digital Fortress.” A recurring theme is “Who will guard the guards?”

Last week, I finally got my console operator account access and logged in to take a look at the console software. I had sworn to myself, to my fellow console operator, and to the folks at ITSS that I would not be looking at the retrieved properties. We collect our own statistics during network registration and our yearly survey (with over 50% participation each year) and keep organized network node records– we don’t need to look at records for inventory purposes and we don’t want to look. And for us, we believe and have proven that spreading the word, using our RCCs and the dorm community network to educate and encourage students to follow good security practices, actively managing and policing our network, knowing our users, is the best way to maintain good security. We don’t necessarily need a 100% solution– we need one that keeps our networks manageable and usable. But when I pulled up the console software, I couldn’t help but look. Retrieved properties for hundreds of computers just come up automatically as soon as you login. Ah temptation, thy name is BigFix. I only looked around for a few minutes, but by the time I had logged off, I felt like I had violated so many with a few easy clicks. If I could do it so easily, believing so strongly against looking at the data, imagine how easy it would be for those who want to look, are dying to look and analyze and use this data for their own purposes. Who will guard the guards?

In the end, that question was never really answered– or rather, few believed somebody needed to guard the guards. But there was the final piece of our compromise: we asked that a notification list be created for all BigFix users, that the option to subscribe to the list was presented during installation, and that whenever the list of retrieved properties changed, everyone on the notification list would be notified. It’s not a perfect solution– we would have preferred mandatory and automatic subscription for all users who install the program and a heads up before the list was changed– but it’s something because it, once again, lets us hold onto choice. Today, I might be willing to give up this much privacy in the name of security and convenience; if you ask me tomorrow to give up a little more, I might decide that the price has become too high and I can exercise my choice to opt out. And isn’t that the basis for freedom, educational or otherwise– choice?

Related posts:

1. Big Brother is not welcome!
2. Microsoft redeems itself… a little

For example, if you set up some Windows Update servers on some big Internet 2 hubs, you could cover a huge part of the higher education market– millions of college students patched and thousands of IT workers who are a little less disgruntled at Microsoft (because trust me, most of us have some beef with the folks at Redmond). Certainly, it’s within MegaCorp’s capabilities to create a server image that’s locked down and can be pushed out to “Windows Update Affiliates” around the country.

Related posts:

1. Microsoft redeems itself… a little
2. Desperately seeking SP2
3. Told you so: SP2 on campus

At first, I didn’t know who to be more annoyed at– Apple or Tivo. At first, I was annoyed at Tivo for not being able to play all of the music I had paid for. But then, I realized once again, I’m more annoyed at Apple in the long run. Hey, here’s fuckin’ idea– sell music in the standard mp3 format that the digital music has been using for years. This isn’t the first time the fact that iTunes sells files in the AAC format has been inconvenient for me. If it weren’t for the fact that I own an iPod (I have the old 5 GB one– oh God, please let it keep working), I’d really be screwed. Aside from the fact that now I can’t take advantage of a very cool feature of my Tivo, I’m always afraid that Apple, with its history of bad follow-through and committment to backwards compatibility, will just abandon the AAC format and/or iTunes for Windows (perhaps when Longhorn comes out) one day and I’m going to be stuck with legal, paid-for digital music that I can’t play. Of course, there’s always the burn to CD, rip from CD, encode to mp3 option, but it’s just so stinkin’ inconvenient and annoying. I mean, leave it to the entertainment industry to make cool technology annoying. The more ways I can listen to my legally purchased digital music, the more likely I am to buy digital music legally, dipshits. I paid for all this stuff– the Tivo, the wireless adapter, the music– and now that I want to take advantage of how all these things can be integrated into my space, my life, becoming an essential part of a higher quality life experience, you won’t let me. When did it become okay for companies to punish their customers?

Related posts:

1. Expandable TiVo
2. Ta da!

While there’s some truth to these ideas (as is the case with most generalizations and stereotypes), it’s strange to think that these goals are pursued because we’re trying to recruit more women into CS. Aren’t these goals probably pretty positive objectives when it comes to recruiting in general? You think women are the only demographic that is turned away because CS is considered “too geeky” or because introductory classes focus on theory without giving some real world perspective?

I think one of the more specific problems in attracting women in CS and other engineering fields is in the socialization of women in our society. Let’s face it– engineering, CS or otherwise, is a pretty geeky field. No matter how much we might like to make it require more “social” skills, much of engineering is a solitary pursuit. Moreover, no matter how much we want to make it “cool” (a new generation of geek millionaires helps with this, no doubt), it will always be geeky because it involves a body of esoteric knowledge that a small group of people understand and focus on. In this vein, library sciences or quantum physics or 12th century Romanian poetry or any other esoteric field are seen as equally geeky. And in the end, those who are immersed in the field embrace the geekiness anyway and no matter how social we are amongst ourselves or even with the outside world, techies know that there’s something different about our temperament and personalities in addition to natural technical aptitude that lead us into the tech fields.

But our society and culture views something less horrible about a male geek than we do about a female geek. For boys and later men, we’re more forgiving if they’re not as concerned with fashion and grooming and social networking and often times, many of the traits traditionally associated with geeky men– quiet, introspective, anti-social– are given a positive spin. They’re not anti-social, they’re “independent,” “loners.” They’re not quiet, they’re “reserved,” “mysterious.” Geeky men are considered eccentric and awkwardness is often found endearing, rather than repulsive. But for girls and later women, we’re a lot less forgiving. We’re expected to be interested in fashion and makeup and jewelry and we’re expected to spend a large percentage of time, whether we’re teenagers or adults, socializing with men as well as other women. More often than not, we’re defined by our social networks and our ability to socialize, rather than who we are. And with pop culture touting the virtues of the metrosexual man, we’re becoming more accepting of men who concern themselves with fashion and grooming, but we haven’t become that much more accepting of women who, for example, don’t wear makeup regularly or don’t wear “feminine” fashions.

Many comments on the above Channel 9 posting get into how it just doesn’t seem to be in women’s nature to sit in front of a computer for long periods of time. I think it’s more likely that we’ve been socialized to believe that and to believe that women shouldn’t sit in front of a computer all day long. Instead, we’re supposed to be talking to people, networking, making friends, meeting people, finding a husband, etc. To think that women are just naturally averse to spending large amounts of time doing tedious work is to forget the countless women who have worked through history (and continue to do so) in front of a sewing machine or on assembly lines or wherever else doing tedious, detail-oriented work for long periods of time. It may not be rocket science, but in many ways, it requires the same kind of temperament that crunching out code all day long requires.

But at the end of the day, what disappoints me the most is the tendency for us to make sweeping generalizations about men and women simply because at the heart of our arguments, we’re trying to do a good thing– even out the gender balance. We try to say that things are the way they are because women are this way and men are that way, but would we be so quick to make these kinds of statements if we were talking about, for example, racial imbalances? Would we say that there aren’t a lot of Asian people in the arts as compared to the sciences because Asian people are just inherently less creative and more analytical? Or that there are more professional Black athletes because they are naturally more athletic and less intellectual? In a rush to solve the problem, we end up doing more damage when we promote unfair and incorrect stereotypes.

Related posts:

1. Geek Girls

Windows XP SP2 Upgrade Causing Campus Headaches

This is exactly the problem I started to predict over a week ago:

Desperately Seeking SP2
Microsoft redeems itself…a little

While I can say “told you so,” it’s still going to suck for university IT workers everywhere. Especially considering Microsoft is only giving universities one CD for every 50 students and won’t let universities make their own copies for distribution. An average undergraduate dorm at Stanford has about 100 students, so that’s only 2 CDs per dorm. (We actually have a different deal, but let’s go with this basic deal.) Assuming that the average time to install SP2 is about 30 minutes to an hour (calculating in time between passing off the Microsoft-pressed CD to the next person, variable computer speed and performance, etc.) and that you could probably get people patching for a total of 8 hours spread throughout the day, you could get about 16 people upgraded a day. So, it would take about six or seven days to upgrade an entire dorm. Of course, this is a very optimistic estimate– calculate in the time that somebody just isn’t around for a few days and doesn’t pass on the CD in a timely manner or somebody’s computer is slow and it just takes a long time or somebody just loses the damn CD. It could be upwards of two to three weeks before everyone gets SP2 installed and that’s a lot of time during which a vulnerability and exploit can come out and wreak havoc.

The point is that schools will have to institute a mixed model of distributing CDs and installing over the network. But how do you do that when students are more preoccupied with meeting friends and roommates, buying books, picking and registering for classes, paying bills, going to Target to buy some extra-long twin sheets, etc.? Not to mention all of the community building activities Stanford’s Residential Education program pushes. How do you encourage students in a way that will a) get them to install an important security update in a timely manner and b) do it in a way that is evenly distributed over multiple channels? On one hand, you’ll have students who try to get the CD as soon as possible so that they can be patched and secure. Okay, in a dorm of 100 students, after the first two grab those CDs, what about the other 98? Well, they’re busy and they’ve got to go run errands and meet up with friends and talk to professors and whatever else they have to do, so they don’t have time to be waiting around to meet up with Joe down the hall so that they can get the CD. They’ll either run Windows Update themselves or wait until Automatic Update happens or never get patched at all. That’s not very good distribution.

Last year, before RPC hell and back, Stanford’s IT organization decided to cut back on costs and not distribute an Essential Stanford Software CD, a CD which, among other things, included anti-virus software and was traditionally given to all new students when they came to campus. But come late July, the RPC exploits began to hit and suddenly, everyone realized that the CD was a pretty good idea and that it would be the perfect way to get people patched before they got onto the network. So then, there was a mad rush to get CDs pressed and distributed to not just new students, but all 10,000 students living on campus. I wonder what will happen if an exploit hits around September 1 and suddenly it becomes critical to get students patched with SP2 before they connect to the network. Will Microsoft be willing to allow us to copy and distribute CDs then? Or will universities have to bear the burden of whatever new exploit as they are asked to pay for more CDs and wait for Microsoft to press and ship them out?

Who knows what will happen? I think many of us are just simply going to get the CDs out there and hold our breath, hoping that a new vulnerability and/or exploit doesn’t come out, that SP2 won’t break too many computers, and that it won’t make our networks not only sluggish, but just completely roll over during this important period where students– and university staff– are trying to get the school year started, a process of which the Internet has become a critical part. We have seen how much network usage and hits to central campus servers spike during this period and we’ve seen our mail servers slow to a crawl. We’ve seen how much network traffic is hit already with email and file-sharing viruses and spyware. We’ve seen the Windows Update site fail under the burden of users trying to patch their computers. I guess we’ll just have to see what happens when they are all put together.

An incoming junior gets a new computer right around the end of August. Because most computer vendors aren’t installing SP2 yet on their drive images, his computer doesn’t have SP2 installed. But the student comes back to school and moves onto campus around September 26th and hooks his computer up to the network. Among other reasons, because he’s living off of the “free” electricity and high speed network available to him for only $10 per month, he leaves his computer on and connected to the network all the time. Now, hopefully, he’ll have automatic updates turned on or he’ll have listened to his RCC’s recommendations to install the latest OS patches or he’ll have installed Stanford’s new BigFix client to help with keeping his computer up-to-date. So, his computer gets SP2 pretty soon after he gets onto campus and he gets to, theoretically, take advantage of all the new security features that SP2 provides.

However, once SP2 is installed and the firewall is turned on, there are certain things that don’t work. Specifically, certain ports are blocked, so now he can’t log on using PC-Leland, Stanford’s desktop application that allows Kerberos single sign-on. Well, this is kind of annoying because most likely, he’s already configured his email client to use PC-Leland for accessing his Stanford email account, so his email probably doesn’t work now. Also, every time he tries to access anything on the Web behind Stanford WebAuth, including signing up for classes, accessing Coursework (Stanford’s course management system), etc., he has to login via the authentication page on the Web. But the problem is that there’s a known caching problem with the WebAuth page and if his browser’s not checking for new content every time he visits a page, he’ll go into an endless loop after authenticating and never be able to actually get to the page he was trying to access.

But no worries. He walks down the hallway and tells his RCC about his problem. The RCC is a little overwhelmed with beginning of the year computer problems or doesn’t want to confuse his not necessarily tech-savvy resident with complicated directions on how to open up ports, so he tells him to run the little SP2 configuration tool that has been put out by Stanford. Well, he’s not a new student, so he didn’t get a copy of this year’s CD, so he’ll have to go download the tool off of the Web site. Oh, but wait, that Web site is behind WebAuth, so he’ll run into the same caching problem. Okay, well, then the RCC will take some time out to help him fix that and then finally he’ll be able to get the configuration tool, get the right ports open, and get going.

A possible addendum to this scenario: if this student had installed the BigFix client when he got onto campus, at the recommendation of ITSS, he might have gotten SP2 pushed out to him through this system rather than Automatic Update (since it’s not clear how quickly someone would get SP2 pushed out to them over AU even with constant high speed network connectivity). But the second SP2 is successfully installed, BigFix would not work thereafter since the port it uses to push out patches is now blocked with the firewall. So, BigFix was able to push out SP2, but if there are new vulnerabilities and additional critical updates (which there most certainly will be), BigFix will not be able to push those out. We’ll have to hope that the student will be able to open up the correct ports soon or have Automatic Update running so that he can get his computer patched. Ironically, BigFix could end up shooting itself in the foot– an issue outside of the major concerns we had about this new system.

Of course, many of the user support issues here are not all the fault of Microsoft or even Stanford and in the end, a large OS upgrade like this will cause user support issues no matter what (although let’s not even get into the weird conflicts SP2 causes with popular antivirus software). And in the end, I give credit to Microsoft for actually listening to the one suggestion we gave them last year after RPC Hell– to give us resources to easily put critical patches and updates onto a CD and get users patched without having to put them on the network. I have to say, after over a year of constant struggles with security, privacy, and copyright, this little victory is both surprising and welcomed.

But the NY Times correctly reports that the PCtvt is intended for people around the world who live on less than $2000 a year– certainly not the demographic of most Americans on the either side of the digital divide. And yes, I haven’t spent three years in rural India doing field research, so let’s say that communicating with these communities is a core problem. Then that’s what news coverage of the PCtvt should have focused on, instead of Reddy talking about how he can “find a market” among these populations and that he believes people would be willing to pay more than five, ten percent of their annual income for a device like this. And the effort to sell the idea of the PCtvt shouldn’t focus on its merits as an entertainment center– Berkeley’s Tom Kalil’s soundbite that includes the phrase “Entertainment is the killer app” just seems insensitive to the problems these communities face and diminishes the value that a device like the PCtvt could provide.

But at the end of the day, my problem with the whole concept of the digital divide is that we’re all trying to oversimplify the problem. Too many of us think that getting all of this technology out to those on the other side of the digital divide will somehow make up for years, decades, generations worth of living behind the curve. Of discrimination, of prejudice, of just pure disadvantage and poverty. Even if a computer is so easy to use that you don’t have to know how to read, we still need to teach people how to read. In fact, we have to teach them how to read well so that one day, using a computer– a medium that relies on the ability to read well– is not a burden. We have to teach people how to read, write, and countless other things, from the most basic to the most complex, so that they can not only participate in the industrialized and digital world, but also live longer and better.

As a technophile, I understand the great things that can be done with today’s technology– including things like using computers to improve farming techniques and increase production or bringing essentials like water, power, transportation, and more faster and easier to places that have been beyond our reach for so long. But I also believe that there are still very basic, very real problems that won’t be solved by technology and that just because we’re so excited about technology and this digital age doesn’t mean that everything should and must be seen through the window of computers. There were very real social problems before computers and there will continue to be social problems after them. Perhaps even more.

Related posts:

1. Bridging the Digital Divide: right intentions, wrong solution
2. Digital Dental

Problem: poor people, usually those who are traditionally disadvantaged because of race or ethnicity, can’t afford computers and therefore, can’t compete in today’s job market or digital world in general.

Solution: give computers to said poor people or make cheaper computers/make computers cheaper so poor people can afford them.

Case in point: the PCtvt. (Let’s put aside for the moment that a $250 computer for a person making, at the most, $2000 per year is still over ten percent of his annual income.) By bundling television, DVD player, telephone and videophone capabilities into this computer, Reddy hopes to finally bring “computing and communications to populations that until now have been excluded from the digital world.” That’s all fine and good– he’s admirably trying to bring three decades worth of technology to these communities all at once– but the thing that really drives home my point is something he points out himself: because it can be controlled by a simple remote control, it will be beneficial particularly in places with large populations of people who cannot read. Reddy says he thought about what somebody on the other side of the digital divide would really want and the answer he came up with was entertainment.

Doesn’t anybody else see how messed up this is? Hello, have you met some people on the other side of the digital divide? They may want entertainment and be willing to pay more than five percent of their annual income to get it, but is this really where we want to be putting our money and effort when it comes to helping those less fortunate? There are large populations of people who can’t read and our biggest concern right now is providing them with cheap home entertainment centers? Instead of trying to bridge the digital divide, how about bridging this reading divide? And while we’re at it, why don’t we bridge the math divide, the housing divide, the health care divide, the food divide? Why don’t we help people get better housing, have better schools, live healthier? Maybe then they can have both the time and the money to own and use computers and participate in the digital world. Even if people are giving away computers to disadvantaged communities– as some are as part of their effort to bridge this gap– it doesn’t really help the fact that I’m worried about buying food next week or paying my rent. Even if I have a computer– PCtvt or Dell Dimension– it doesn’t really help me because I can’t eat it, wear it or live in it.

You want to bridge the digital divide? Bridge all of those more basic divides and you’ll see the digital divide grow smaller all by itself.

Related posts:

1. Geek Girls

But even after they announced that the code was finalized (no more release candidate teases), SP2′s still not available for individual computers. Granted, it’s available for IT professionals as a huge download, but the Microsoft TechNet site emphatically tells you not to use it for individual computers. Making it available earlier for IT professionals is helpful because we get a slight taste of what’s to come, but we’re not worried about our centrally managed computers breaking. It’s easy to just re-image them and apply a fix. No, we’re worried about thousands of students out there in the dorms installing SP2 on their individual computers all with their own configurations, setups, and quirks. And even if solving people’s problems are just simple preference and setting changes, it’s a huge user education and support issue. So, I desperately want to go through what an individual computer upgrade/install scenario would be like, but They. Just. Won’t. Let. Me. And honestly, I don’t want to get it through a special download (i.e., I want the go through the experience as close to the way students will experience it as possible), but it doesn’t really help matters when Microsoft squashes Downhill Battle’s attempts to share SP2 over P2P. Microsoft could have really won some major cool points by letting sp2torrent.com continue– it not only demonstrated a great way to use P2P networks, but also ease the burden of distributing a free upgrade that’s supposed to deliver improved quality of service for Microsoft customers.

But the thing that really just hurts my feelings is that the release for individual computers is scheduled for August 25. That’s right in the middle of the major fall back-to-school time for most universities. Even at a quarter-system school like Stanford, you start getting students trickling in right around that date and then the move-in numbers increase through the end of September with two major bursts– one for incoming freshmen and other new students and one for everyone else. And Microsoft might think they’re being smart by encouraging people to turn on Automatic Update so that they can break up the distribution and keep people off of Windows Update, but after the RPC vulnerabilities from last summer, lots of schools might require SP2 before allowing student computers on the network. So, despite their tricky Automatic Update plan, there’s a good chance that lots of students are going to actively pull SP2 from Windows Update rather than waiting for it to be pushed out to them over Automatic Update.

Well, I guess we’ll just have to brace ourselves for the inevitable Windows headache that happens every fall. You know, I really do like Microsoft and Windows most of the time, but their sensitivity to universities and the higher education community is just… well, stupid.

Related posts:

1. RPC Hell

As a woman engineer or a woman in computer science or whatever you want to call me, I always find it interesting (read: stupid) how most people look at this problem. First of all, it’s just kind of mean that the primary motivating factor for tech firms to solve this problem is that, simply put, they’re running out of guys. Restrictions because of homeland security issues and growing hiring needs in general because of the tech boom are leaving an increasingly smaller pool of people to pick from when it comes to filling tech positions. So, let me get this straight: you can’t fill your tech jobs with foreign nationals anymore and you’re running out of guys in the US, so now you decide that hey, there’s a whole half of the population that we haven’t tapped. This is like when men were sent off to war, there was suddenly a workforce shortage so they decided to get women to work in factories and the like. It’s like they’re saying, “Uh, the boys have been doing all the heavy lifting lately when it comes to computers, but we’ve got a lot of work to do, so you ladies better start pulling your own weight.” Gee, I thought that having a workforce in tech more representative of the general population– at least when it comes to gender– would be a good thing for tech no matter what. Or that it might just generally be important to show impressionable young women that girls can do anything that boys can do and that having a vagina doesn’t disqualify you from being part of one of the most important, influential, not to mention lucrative, industries ever.

But even if we put aside the somewhat selfish motivation for trying to attract women to CS, most of the programs put into place seem like things men came up with because that’s what they think women want or need. Because they think that the issue is how women feel rather than what women know. Yes, although I never took advantage of groups like these while I was at Stanford, these “support groups” (how fucking sad to call it that– is it a disorder to be a woman in CS?) and mentorship programs might be helpful to many women because they feel more comfortable being around other women. But like I’ve said a thousand times, “separate, but equal” is rarely ever actually equal and getting women in CS together to make them feel better about being women in CS doesn’t solve the big picture problem.

Any type of gap like this starts at a much earlier stage– before entering the workforce, before college, before high school. It starts on the very first day people around you begin to shape your learning, inside and outside of the classroom. Ten, fifteen years ago, we all recognized that boys tended to be more interested in and excel more at math and science because they were simply encouraged to do so and girls were explicity discouraged. This naturally extends to CS. Just because kids today are digital natives– they don’t know a world without computers and the Internet– doesn’t mean that girls and boys have the same interaction with computers. You know why women feel so insecure and inadequate when they take programming classes in college? You know why women feel like they’re always behind and they’re just not as good at it as everyone else? Because we’re not as good at it as everyone else (at least at that point). And you know why that is? Because we haven’t been doing it our whole fucking lives. Just because someone grew up using computers her whole life doesn’t mean she knows anything about, has ever been exposed to anything that’s actually remotely related to computer science. How many male CS students already know how to program when they come to college? How many male CS students breeze through introductory classes because they’ve been programming in C or C++ for years and have already been exposed to some engineering fundamentals? Women who feel like they’re drowning even in introductory CS classes feel that way because they are drowning– they’re playing catch up and with the rigor of most engineering programs, it’s not an easy thing to do. Support groups might make women feel better because they realize that other women feel insecure too, but it doesn’t really solve the problem of why they feel insecure in the first place. If an overweight person feels insecure because he’s overweight, it might help to have him be around other overweight people so that he doesn’t feel alone, but you know what? He’s still overweight and that’s something that still needs to be addressed.

And on top of that, women miss out on all the random, but valuable things you learn on the side from talking tech with your friends. When a bunch of CS guys are together, they’ll talk about everything geeky, from programming languages to gaming to operating system choices to new technologies (ahem, e.g., file-sharing). I don’t know if it’s the estrogen in the air or the breasts that throw them off, but when a girl comes around, even if she is a CS girl, suddenly the conversation changes. Maybe CS guys think that a girl wouldn’t want to talk about these things. Maybe they think that they can impress her by trying to show her that they’re not just CS geeks. Maybe so, maybe not, but the gender gap isn’t going to get any smaller if both men and women don’t start getting their acts together– men need to start actively including women in their old boys network and women need to stop shying away from all-male geek circles and just get in there and learn. Get involved.

Case in point: my department did some brown bag lunch sessions with the Society of Women Engineers at Stanford and we started with a free-for-all “what do you want to learn about?” session. Now, here’s a group of about forty or fifty Stanford engineering majors– not a group to be taken lightly– and what do they want to learn about? How to FTP, how to set up a Web server, how to make a Web page. Shit like that. These are things that aren’t taught in class, but that most CS students know how to do– you know why? Because they sit around and learn how to do it on their own or pick it up from their friends. I realized that I knew how to do all these things because I was lucky enough to find a circle of friends freshman year that happened to be male CS students and more importantly, weren’t afraid to talk tech in front of me, with me. And when I didn’t know something, I, being the fearless young woman I am, would ask and they would tell me all about it. They would show me. And without being condescending about it! At the end of the day, so much is learned from just interacting with your peers and if you set CS women off to one side because you think that it will make them feel better, they’re never going to be exposed to the valuable things they can learn from being around CS men and they’re never going to be able to pass on those things to other women. The gender gap will never get smaller.

Ever notice that girls who grow up with lots of brothers often have (among other interests) traditionally “boy” interests? Like playing or following sports? It’s because they’re exposed to it growing up. And they’re not afraid to talk about sports or play sports with men later in life because they are confident about they’re own knowledge and abilities. You don’t create a divide between girls and boys and later in life, you don’t have a divide between men and women. You can see it with the digital divide too– giving a kid from a traditionally disadvantaged background a computer when he gets to high school might help the situation a little bit, but the real solution is not to simply donate some computers, but to close the math divide, the reading divide, the food divide, the housing divide. You empower them early so that they do not fall behind later.

You won’t be able to truly, effectively close the CS gender gap unless we work to close the gender gap in general, unless we work to encourage all types of learning equally among boys and girls from an early age. We won’t have to have mentorship programs or have to actively recruit women into computer science– women will naturally be attracted to CS because they will have been exposed to it early on and been able to cultivate that ability and interest as they grew up. And when they get to college, they won’t feel insecure or like they’re catching up because they won’t be catching up. They’ll know just as much as their male counterparts and have had the same opportunities to have the proper preparation for a CS curriculum. They won’t need a support group because they’ll be able to support themselves. They won’t need to find female CS role models because their gender will no longer separate them. To borrow from affirmative action, it will level the playing field and by providing equal opportunity, we’ll come closer to having equal results.

From a Terminal window, type the command:

cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.history | grep "LOTR"

(From the August 2004 issue of MacWorld)

Related posts:

1. Things I learned at MacWorld

While catching up on my tech reading though, I read:

That the RIAA continues to be a bunch of assholes

A good article on open source myths (I don’t know when we all lost our minds and thought open source was going to solve the world’s problems)

And that we all finally got a hint of the idea that Google is not as invincible as we all think– they had a bad day yesterday after losing the Froogles.com domain name, getting hit with an age discrimination suit, and, of course, the latest email virus attacks that caused temporary outages.

Related posts:

1. Amusing Google search

In a lot of ways, I’m certainly this kind of person (of course, everyone has areas of the world that she could not care less about). I thought of this as I was going through my Bloglines subscriptions and realized that even though I probably already spend way too much time in front of a computer as it is, I want to subscribe to more and more feeds. I am compelled to do it. I can’t help but want to click on every little checkbox so that suddenly, I’ll get a constant feed of what’s posted on some news site or on the blog of somebody I don’t even know. I’m always trying to keep up with the news, tech or otherwise, and whenever people are talking about something relatively interesting (which is, I know, a subjective thing), whether it be a new movie out or the Arab-Israeli conflict, I try to at least listen, if not be involved in the conversation. And this is usually the quality I look for in other people, in friends and coworkers and otherwise, and I usually know pretty quickly it’s not going to work out if somebody glazes over during involved or esoteric conversations. I mean, even when a conversation goes beyond my level of expertise on the topic (which is certainly not unusual), I’m still eager to listen and learn.

But in some ways, with information becoming so accessible in this computer age (again, a cheesy phrase), I think those who aren’t actively seeking to keep up-to-date and informed are going to be quickly left behind. With email, the Internet, television, and more, with personalized information services and so much content coming from so many different places, we’re all trying to drink from the firehose– and I can’t help but think that soon, evolution will re-wire our brains so that we will be able to take it all in. And those who do it first will be able to emerge from the cave first. Just look at how geeks rule the world now. They (we, whatever) were the first ones to latch onto the computer era and in the end, those who can make sense of all this tech stuff (and do it in just the right ways) can move to the front of the pack.

Every day, human beings are developing the ability to process more information in a shorter amount of time. Today’s teenagers are already doing it– they can watch tv, listen to music, talk on the phone, and do their homework all at the same time. Granted, a lot of them aren’t actually doing any one of those things all that well, but a lot of them are getting along just fine and are changing the way we all work and live. Keeping up-to-date is more important than ever. I work with college students everyday and every year, I get older and the kids (ahem, sorry students) stay the same age. And so, the world may have one time thought me young, but even as an (almost) twenty-five year old, I find myself having to reinvent myself all the time. Challenging, but how exciting too!

Just look at the difference between interviewing with a larger, more established company and interviewing with a startup. When you interview for the former, you’ve usually got a first round phone interview and then if you make it past that, you get a full day of structured interviewing with different people in different job functions at the company. And when interviewing for a technical position, you’re usually asked to jump through some pretty standard technical hoops, such as “implement a binary search in the language of your choice.” Your answer doesn’t always have to be perfect, but it’s a good way to weed out people who just don’t know what they’re talking about or who are flat out lying about their qualifications.

Startups have changed a lot since I was doing lots of interviewing with them circa 2000 and the startups that survive usually do a better screening process anyway, but lots of them have a much more unstructured, perhaps even completely haphazard interviewing setup. It’s a lot more touchy-feely. You come in, you talk about your feelings and your ideal work environment, and use lots of buzz words. It’s a lot more about “can I work with this person?” than “can this person do the job?” Which kind of makes sense since with only six people in your little startup, you’re probably going to be around each other a lot and compatibility becomes a big factor. Of course, with only six people in your little startup, everyone’s going to need to pull their weight and if you’re only interviewing based on compatibility, you’re going to end up with some people who really aren’t qualified to be doing what they’re doing. And that’s probably a big part of why only like 15% of startups are at all successful.

And of course, then there are the viruses. I remember last year, even before RPC Hell, one campus actually banned Windows 2000 from their campus. ResNet organizations are just seriously at a loss. There are a number of universities who are taking advantage of open source solutions like Snort, buying commercial solutions like Perfigo or Bradford Campus Manager, or developing their own homegrown solutions. But what do you do when your ResNet is that one guy again who is still trying to manage a network for thousands of students, provide end user support, and respond to DMCA complaints? Suddenly, on top of that, you’ve got operating system vulnerabilities and exploits, email viruses, spyware, adware and more. And even if you did have the time to look into network wide solutions, if you’re the one guy managing the whole ResNet, what’s the chances that your university is willing to fork over the money for a commercial solution or even a few servers for a free or cheap solution? Probably not, so instead, you’re left with either just complete network chaos (not necessarily a bad option) or just shutting people down left and right for the health of the network. Which might seem like a valid option at face value, but then you realize that one guy has to turn all those people back on at some point, which could take a really. Long. Time. In the end, you could lose your network connection for some indefinite time which, considering how important being online is nowadays for schoolwork and otherwise, is a high price to pay just because you happened to miss a Windows Update.

The one man ResNet situation is, of course, a worst-case scenario, but this situation of lack of funding, resources, and staff and, as a result, draconian policies and practices, are prevalent throughout the country in varying degrees. And in the end, even if ResNet staffers push these policies because they have to and not because they want to, ResNet organizations usually don’t have enough political power within their universities to do anything, to effectively demand money and resources or change policy. We are the grassroots organizations, the Greenpeace, the Legal Aid of university computing organizations. We are the underdog and our political successes are, lately, few and far between. Which is really sad in the grand scheme of things because while students are the bread-and-butter of the education business, their personal computing needs are perhaps among those with which we are least concerned. Instead of student needs, support for personal student computing (not computer labs and such) lives and dies by how far you can stretch a fixed amount of resources and money, a fixed number that was set in the mid-nineties before the Internet really took off, before almost every single college freshman owned her own computer, and before we realized how important technology would really be to a whole generation of young people for which we would be responsible in many ways. In the end, universities and even the companies that include universities in their list of customers for software and hardware products will pay a high price. Some students will never get to experiment and learn and truly spread their wings because they can’t explore all the technologies out there, whether old or new. How many innovative ideas will never come to fruition because a student wasn’t allowed to explore or experiment? How many bad ideas will get played out in the real world because a student couldn’t test it out during their college years when the consequences wouldn’t cost somebody a job? And how many software and hardware companies will lose the chance to establish a user base and develop consumer buy-in and trust among millions of college students across the country? Before Napster fell with a big bang for all the world to see and hear, it managed to spread like wildfire on college campuses throughout the country and the RIAA is still trying to deal with the legacy it left behind and the undeniable place file-sharing and, more importantly, digital music holds now in our world. And even with its fall, universities like University of Rochester are signing huge contracts to bring legal, for-pay services to thousands and thousands of their students. Wouldn’t it be nice to be the company that is the source for digital music for millions of college students across the country?

Personal computing services are not like call waiting or caller ID. It is not like cable TV. It is an integral part of the learning process and essential to the principle of learning through experimentation and exploration, to the idea that a university’s responsibilities include providing students with the opportunity to learn both in and outside of the classroom through a comprehensive approach to education. Just because a computer sits in a student’s room doesn’t mean it’s not vital to the educational process. If anything, it is more important because of the undeniable role it plays it that student’s life and how it can and will be used to do great things, even if those great things are just allowing the student the opportunity to learn something new on her own. And ResNet organizations are the ones who are helping to shape that process even with the few resources we have. While ResNet organizations first grew out of utility, they are now at an important stage in the history of how technology can shape education and learning. Let’s see how many universities will seize this opporunity.

Related posts:

1. Why DRM systems are a bad idea and the freedom to tinker

This process is similar to the one we’re using at Stanford, but it’s so much better! It’s much more elegant and consistently applied across the residential network– they’ve put a server in front of every single residential hall (i.e. every single subnet) and it handles all network intrusion detection and management through one system. This is really a great example of how a university can leverage readily available, free, open-source products out there (it even runs on Linux) and significantly improve security and network health in one simple move– the only real cost to them is the initial staff time to develop the product and then the hardware that it runs on. And really, considering how much time and money improved network security and effective reaction plans can save, these are relatively small, but very worthwhile investments. Stanford lost millions in staff time from the Blaster and Welchia attacks alone last year.

And they’re still maintaining user privacy! The Texas A&M security team admits that they did not consider network management options that required desktop clients (e.g., Perfigo, BigFix, etc.) because they didn’t want to require users to have a particular piece of software on their computers. This is great since products like Perfigo’s CleanMachines and BigFix are primarily designed for corporate environments and can often return lots of properties about a computer on your network. While those types of solutions might be great for managing University-owned computers, they are not the right answer for privately owned student computers. How would you feel if Verizon or Comcast or whoever your ISP was could find out how much hard drive space you had (free or otherwise) or what version of Microsoft Office you’re running? Residential students live where they work. This is not just school to them; it is their home and it is their community. And Big Brother is not welcome!

I’ve been to many of these through the years as an undergraduate and as a staff member and I, of course, went through it personally during my senior year at Stanford. If you declare computer science as your major by the end of your sophomore year (like you’re supposed to), you essentially have from a year to a year and a half to come up with what you’re going to do for your senior project (because you know it’s coming) and it’s always interesting to see what people come up with. This year, there were some pretty cool projects, like the program to teach you how to play guitar (complete with 3D graphics and customizable guitar body styles and sounds) or the chat plug-in that basically allows you to use a Web cam to create a cartoon chat avatar that moves and reacts in real-time.

But realistically, even in a class with 15 or 16 Stanford student teams (supposedly some of the best and brightest computer science students out there), you only get two or three really good ideas for projects and you can usually predict the general distribution of project types within a class. You get a handful of people who do learning/teaching applications (which I guess is on your mind when you’re a student), a handful of people who do games (because it’s usually pretty straightforward to come up with a game premise and then code to your heart’s content), and then the rest with a random assortment of ideas.

But I guess getting two or three really good ideas out of a ten-week quarter is a pretty impressive track record, especially considering the load of crap around which startups usually pop up. But it is getting harder to come up with good ideas for new software these days. We have our office applications, our data management software, our Internet search engines. What will be the next great idea in the world of software?