Month: March 2005

White male blogging

Looks like Dave—excuse me, White Male Dave Winer—is springing off a Jeff Jarvis comment to jumpstart the latest blogging meme, and outing bloggers (including myself) as White Males. I liked (White Former Professional Journalist Male) Jeff’s (unpaid) ripost to (White Professional Journalist Male) Steven Levy’s (paid) column (the point of getting to a blogosphere is so that voices, not skin colors, matter), but it is interesting—as I preface every link with a reference to the link-recipient’s sex and skin color, suddenly I’m a lot more self-conscious about what I’m doing.

Incidentally, if you annotate every single link this way, two things become apparent: there are a lot more dimensions that matter than sex and color, and divisions like pro and amateur are difficult to make.

Blogrolling over

BuzzMachine: Turn it off.. Jeff Jarvis gripes about having problems loading sites that include blogrolling lists powered by BlogRolling.com. I’ve noticed the list is slow, too.

Two things: One, you should always consider the performance of an external resource before you include it in your blog template—even if it’s just an image. But for those who like the services that Blogrolling.com provides, including the useful “updated recently” information, consider reducing the potential damage from a service outage. On this blog, for example, I address potential problems with the service by (a) only listing my blogroll on my front page and not on pages that are linked to by my RSS feed; (b) arranging the HTML of my template so that my content loads first and the column containing my blogroll loads next. This is a simple CSS layout trick (well, not so simple—read my post about getting it to work) that not only helps mitigate problems with external services—my content is fully loaded and readable while the page works to load the blogrolls from Blogrolling—but also helps make your page more navigable in screen readers and downlevel browsers.

Second, this is the flip side of the argument I had with Lisa Williams at the last Berkman Thursday Night Meeting I went to. The great thing about the blogosphere is that blogging platforms have a fairly low “lowest common denominator” of features—headline + body + comments + calendar archives + permalinks (+RSS). This means that there is lots of room for innovation by a Blogrolling.com, Technorati, Flickr, or Feedster type service to add additional “missing” features. But because there is no platform that does it all, you have to worry about dependencies on outside services for these functions.

The second point is why I haven’t hopped aboard Flickr yet—besides the incredibly slow speed of uploading multiple images. My photos are too important a part of my site for me to outsource them, and so far I haven’t seen enough benefit from the social aspects of the service to outweigh the shortcomings of being dependent on Yet Another Blog Support Service.

Podcasting might come to this blog…

UserLand Product News: Enclosure Support for News Item Sites in Manila. For non-techies, that means it will now be easier for folks with Manila sites (like mine, or the ones on the Harvard bloggs server) to produce podcasts. Thanks, UserLand!

(There is one point left unclear by the article: has the API been updated to allow for enclosure support as well? If so, then tool vendors like Ranchero will need to update their tools to facilitate this new feature.)

Potboiler

To paraphrase something that Fury wrote this weekend: if there is anything more exciting than boiled dinner, it’s making boiled dinner; and if there is anything more exciting than making boiled dinner, it’s blogging about making boiled dinner. “Lucky you!”

Ah, but the line between New England boiled dinner and a celebratory corned beef and cabbage is very fine—mostly it depends on the presence or absence of horseradish and turnips, apparently. And on the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day, we decided to cheerily conflate the two. So, having packed Lisa and her mom off to the New England Flower Show, I started getting things ready.

I had a few other things I wanted to cook at the same time. We had roasted a chicken the previous night, and I wanted to get rid of its carcass (plus the other two carcasses in the freezer) by making stock. Also, Lisa’s dad had put in a request for Boston brown bread, which turns out to be made by steam-cooking a can filled with batter consisting of graham flour, cornmeal, and rye flour (mixed with buttermilk, molasses and baking soda) for several hours. So that turned out to be three large stockpots atop a stove that could really only comfortably fit two.

I started the stock first (dead easy, incidentally: tie a carrot, several parsley stems, a celery stalk, and bay leaf together with cooking twine; add an onion in large chunks; throw in whatever chicken bones and odd scraps you have handy; cover with water; simmer for several hours, skimming as you go; remove the solids and simmer a little longer to concentrate the stock and skim off any remaining fat) and then got the bread steaming. Somewhat to my surprise, the bread came out beautifully, sliding out of its can (I used a butttered pannetone mold covered with foil) with no resistance, and just needing a few minutes in a 350º oven to firm up the sticky top.

So that was one big boiling pot off the stove, leaving enough room to start the boiled dinner. Which was good, since the recipe I consulted suggested simmering the corned beef for five hours and it was almost 1 pm. I plopped two corned beef briskets (thank you, Costco, for cheap meat) and their spice packets in a big stockpot, covered with water, and brought the thing to a boil, then backed it down to a simmer. And that’s all I really did, except for pouring a can of Guinness into the pot an hour in.

The beautiful things about the meal were: 1) the boiling. On a wetly snowy winter day, as many things should be boiled as possible; 2) the lack of interference needed. I was able (with Lisa’s dad’s assistance) to remove a door that normally goes sticky in summertime when it swells with humidity and get the bare wood top and bottom of the door painted, hopefully mitigating the problem, while the corned beef (and my stock) simmered; 3) the flavor. The vegetables, added in the last hour or so, were good, but the corned beef was spectacular—falling-apart moist and flavorful without being overly salty. And Lisa declared the Boston brown bread her new favorite.

Signs, almost, of spring

left, fall. right, almost spring.

Q: How do you know it’s almost spring in Massachusetts? A: There’s a lot of sunlight on the latest six inches of snow, and it’s heavy and wet instead of light and fluffy.

Lisa’s parents came up this weekend for the flower show, and got to enjoy another heavy snowfall while they were here. But the snow stopped overnight, and when I took the dogs outside this morning, it looked like the whole street had burst into bloom with a profusion of white flowers. Comparing the trees behind the house this morning to the same trees this fall, I’m not sure I don’t prefer the winter version; after all, I won’t have to rake those snowy “leaves,” even if getting the snow off the driveway strains a few muscles.

Followup: Smithsonian Global Sound

In January, I bitched about the fact that the pivotal Folkways recordings of world music and American folk were only available on MSN Music. Sometime last week (I don’t know when, I’m behind in my posts), the Smithsonian partially redressed that market inefficiency by opening Smithsonian Global Sound, their own online music store featuring $.99/track downloads (though some longer tracks are more expensive), a wide catalog of field and folk recordings, and a choice of two DRM-free formats—MP3 and FLAC. That’s right, you can buy lossless recordings from the store. Add downloadable liner notes and we’re all in business.

I do have one criticism of the store. This is a good place to buy a la carte from the massive Smithsonian archives, but not a good place to buy albums. There doesn’t seem to be a per-album price, meaning that if you find an album with 20 tracks, you’ll pay 20 dollars. And I think “by the album” is the way that most people will want to explore this music. After all, it’s not as though you’re coming to the Smithsonian looking for “hot singles.” Another, lesser critique: there is no persistent “wish list”—your shopping cart is emptied when you leave your session and there is no other way short of managing a list offline to keep track of songs that you might want to buy at another time.

What’s confusing about all of this is the supposedly exclusive agreement that MSN Music had to sell this music through September of this year, according to the original New York Times article. It sure looks like the same catalog to me.

I’m not complaining, though. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some downloading to do.

Last HBS follow up, I swear: John Dvorak

Tech columnist John Dvorak weighed in yesterday on the ongoing MBA admissions brouhaha in his unofficial blog. His original post came down on the side of the “hackers”; I followed up in his comments to point to my post, and today he wrote the following:

OK after all my rants and various philosophical concepts the actual instructions for the student URL re-direction in the Harvard scandal is revealed here on the PowerYogi site. Reader/blogger Tim Jarrett sent me the link. Jarrett also takes a hard line approach to what I’d now call a script kiddy violation or simple curiosity. But, if indeed, there was a complex and dubious procedure then there may be some justification for complaint. In this case the indication is that the students should have known this was traceable. Making such an error shows bad judgement.

I still think the colleges should have sut up and not showboated and exposed the fact that they were using flawed software. And I’m still not convinced this can be considered “hacking” in any real sense. But I now retract my earlier comments and criticisms made today.

As Adam said in my comment threads, this whole thing has the makings of an excellent business school ethics case. There are so many dimensions, so much going on, that it’s impossible to take a hard line on it without looking at the facts.

I’m actually grateful to the folks who found the flaw and the lousy programmers at ApplyYourself, because I’ve had more honest and productive discussions about business and personal ethics and the Internet in the last four days than the last four years.

Microsoft ties the knot with Groove

My former employer purchased Groove today, making official what was already a very close working relationship. I’d like to be optimistic about what the acquisition will mean for the information worker part of Microsoft’s business.

But let’s look at the track record that the Information Worker business unit has in bringing innovative products into the Office mainstream. Live Meeting? Kind of integrated, still largely a standalone product, but it’s out there and fighting for market share with WebEx. PowerPoint? Visio? FrontPage? OK. All standalone apps, all acquired, that fill a niche in the information worker workspace.

But what about XDocs? This brave internal project came out of ashes of NetDocs as a “smart client alternative to Office.” Where is it now? InfoPath, which is being marketed primarily as a forms app.

Will Microsoft tap the benefits of Groove and make them available in a rich way throughout the desktop? Or will Groove just end up looking like the next version of SharePoint, which currently looks like the next version of a generic company intranet tool?

Excellent additional coverage from Robert Scoble, John Evdemon, Scott Rosenberg, Ross Mayfield, and Alex Barnett.

And incidentally: Alex points to Jef Raikes talking about a product announcement that I missed earlier this week, the launch of something called “Microsoft Office Communicator 2005.” Sounds interesting. Go try to find something about it on Microsoft’s Office site. Did you find it? Did you try searching? Did you try changing the search dropdown from “All Office Online” to “All Microsoft.com?” Ah, there we go. Hint to our friends on the Office web site: If you want to sell a product as part of the Office family, it would be a good idea to make it findable from the Office web page.

Chris Lydon gets a new gig

The Boston Globe says that Chris Lydon is returning to Boston airwaves with a new show, “Open Source,” designed to bridge talk radio and the blogosphere. (See Chris’s press release here). Sounds pretty good—and I smell a new podcast coming…

Interestingly, an article in the Globe today says some students at WUML, who will be co-producing the show, are a little upset that the school’s administration has put Lydon on their schedule—the students feel they’re losing control of their schedule. The administration says that Lydon will be helping to create a broadcast major. It sounds like a win-win for the school and Lydon, but I can definitely see how the students would feel marginalized in that discussion—especially since this isn’t the first time the school has taken air time for “adult-supervised” programming from the student DJs.

The FEC is full of FUD

Ars Technica: Followup: The FEC, FUD, and the blogpocalypse, Round II. Meant to post this yesterday as a followup to my earlier comments on the FEC’s commissioner. This is the other shoe, how it looks from the perspective of a Democrat, Ellen Weintraub, on the commission:

Reports of a Federal Election Commission plot to “crack down” on blogging and e-mail are wildly exaggerated. First of all, we’re not the speech police. We don’t tell private citizens what they can or cannot say, on the Internet or anywhere else. The FEC regulates campaign finance. There’s got to be some money involved, or it’s out of our jurisdiction.

Second, let’s get the facts straight. Congress, in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, limited how one can pay for communications that are coordinated with political campaigns, including any form of “general public political advertising.” The commission issued a regulation defining those communications to exempt anything transmitted over the Internet. A judge struck down that regulation as inconsistent with the law. So now we’re under a judicial mandate to consider whether anything short of a blanket exemption that will do. For example, can paid advertisements on the Web, when coordinated with a particular campaign, be considered an in-kind contribution to that campaign? Context is important, and the context here has everything to do with paid advertising, and nothing to do with individuals blogging and sending e-mails.

Third, anyone who says they know what this proposed regulation will address must be clairvoyant, because the commissioners have yet to consider even a draft of the document that will set out the scope of any such rule…

So that’s interesting. Going after bloggers isn’t an option, but going after paid advertising is. What about going after paid bloggers?

Enough winter.

We got about five additional inches of mixed snow and ice yesterday and last night. This was just after a day or two of warmer weather that allowed me to briefly glimpse my lawn again. Now I have to get the snowblower out one more time…

At least it’s just water coming from the sky, not ash. Even with all this snow, I’d much rather have sunny days like the one that we have today than the months of uninterrupted damp gloom that we had in Kirkland. Although by now we would have started to see our spring flowers… sigh.

The B-school admissions case: Sloan drops another shoe

Boston Globe: MIT says it won’t admit hackers. There have been a few developments since I wrote about this case yesterday, and this is the big one. There have also been some questions raised about a few points in the case. Philip Greenspun points out how ridiculous it is to call something this easy a “hack”—I agree. It’s more like an exploit. That doesn’t make it any more justifiable, of course. That’s maybe the hardest part of this case—where is the line?

As I wrote in response to a comment on yesterday’s entry, there is no hard and fast line on cases of unauthorized access like this, because I’m curious about how systems work too and have been known to tinker with URL strings. That’s why I looked at the “exploit” instructions before I made my judgment call. If it had been a simple matter of substituting a login ID and PIN into the URL string, I might have felt differently. The fact that a prospective user of this “exploit” would have to dig a hidden value out of the source of the form should have tipped off the prospect that “hey, maybe I shouldn’t do this.”

I want future Sloanies to be smart enough not only to apply an “exploit” like this, but to understand that there may be consequences if they do it.

HBS gets tough on ethics. Are they right?

Boston.com: Harvard rejects 119 accused of hacking. Following up the revelation that the third party company that manages online B-school apps got hacked, it looks like HBS (along with the Tepper School at Carnegie Mellon) is taking a hard line on admissions and blanket rejecting the 119 people whose admission files were hacked, while other B-schools (including Sloan) are taking a wait and see approach.

Does this mean that the other schools are soft on ethics? Maybe not, if the opposing perspectives in the article are correct:

Theoretically, at least, a hacker might have been a spouse or parent who had access to the password and personal identification numbers given to a business school applicant…

…[Cambridge Essay Service admissions consultant Sanford] Kreisberg said some applicants may had inadvertently tried to access the files, without realizing they were looking for confidential information, after they were e-mailed directions from other students who had copied them from the BusinessWeek message board.

It’s hard to tell from the articles, which don’t discuss the nature of the exploit. So let’s take a look. On the PowerYogi blog, the exact procedure used to do the hack is disclosed. Briefly, it appears that the hack relied (past tense, the info is no longer accessible) on a known URL that displays a dynamic page containing admission decision information, if any has been entered into the system. The parameters required to get the decision information are the applicant’s unique ID, apparently known as the AYID (or ApplyYourself ID) and a second ID number. The AYID is disclosed to the applicant on the URL for other pages that the applicant would normally visit. The second ID number can be discovered by viewing source on publicly accessible pages. Though the decision page is addressed via HTTPS, once you know the AYID and the secondary ID, you don’t need any other authentication information to access the page.

So the question is, could people have been tricked into looking at their records, as Kreisberg suggests? Answer: probably not. Following the directions to get the ID values should tip the applicant off that they’re going to see something they shouldn’t be seeing. And I don’t think it would be common for people to share out their user IDs and PINs for their online applications, so the odds of someone else checking your application status without your knowledge are pretty slim.

Bottom line: I think Sloan and the other business schools involved should take a hard line on its applicants’ files who were compromised as well.

And I think that all the schools involved should look at another vendor for online applications. ApplyYourself’s system doesn’t appear to meet even minimal standards for securing the sensitive information with which it is being entrusted. Hopefully Sloan CIO Al Essa is already looking closely at this situation.

In defense of plain ol’ SQL

Philip Greenspun Weblog: How long is the average Internet discussion forum posting?. I’m less interested in Philip’s answer than I am in the methodology: simple SQL select statements that give you very important product design data.

People talk about “data mining” and “business intelligence” as though they’re complicated, new skill sets, but really all you need sometimes to make the right call is a simple SQL query. And the right data set, of course…

Managing aggregator overlap

Brent Simmons talks about the issues with feed items that are about the same thing showing up in an RSS aggregator. I’m reposting the comment I made on his post here because I think managing the relationships between items is an important feature for RSS aggregators:

The ability to group feed items together based on what they link to is the only feature I miss in NNW from Dare Obasanjo’s RSS Bandit. It’s important for three reasons:

  1. It saves time. Some of the other comments cover this point [specifically, by grouping items that are about the same thing, you can read them all at once or just mark them all as read. Otherwise, you keep finding posts about the same thing all the way down your list of items.]
  2. It helps me follow conversations. Think of it as a client side version of Technorati–limited, of course, to the feeds I subscribe to.
  3. It aids in triangulation. I want to be able to quickly scan all the opinions of a new announcement, or quickly see the full original post that an item linked to so I can form my own opinion.

Maybe it’s not grouping, but some sort of optional “related items” UI that could show you items that link to the same things that are linked from the item you’re reading.