Card Sharks

As you prepare for the holidays, do yourself a favor and watch this cold-water-in-the-face video.

“Free checking, huh?”

Literacy in America

This is image 197 on xkcd.com

Thanks to Dylan Wolf for the pointer to the xkcd site.

If you built it I would come

I’ve already given this idea to the on-duty manager of the grocery store where I shop but she probably filed it under looney ideas gleaned from talkative old men in the checkout line and did little or nothing else with it, so I’m offering it to any of my programmer friends who might want to make a name for themselves and in the process create a useful tool for crazies like me who look for innovative ways to use our Internet connection.  I, like most everybody else and maybe even you, dutifully hand the cashier my “value card” as he or she is about to ring up my purchases so that I can get the discounts that accrue from having given them my name and address and having allowed them to tag me with a unique Customer ID.  They use it, among other things, to print out a listing of the items I have purchased that day, neatly categorized into sections like Produce, Package Meat, Grocery, Frozen Food, Dairy, Candy/Gum, etc., and at the conclusion of that listing they announce that Your Savings Today was $7.48 on my most recent (9/16/07) expenditure of $56.66.  I walk away, informed and satisfied that it could have been at least $7.48 worse.

Now I’m reasonably sure that’s not all they do with the information gathered from scanning the bar codes of my purchases and pairing them with my unique Customer ID.  Quite likely, they use the information to update their records that I made off with one bottle of Tide laundry detergent, thus depleting their supply, and conclude they should replenish that item at that particular store.  And throughout their supply chain they use my data to inform their business partners of my shopping behavior.  But as far as I am concerned, my data is lost forever in the supply chain.  It’s not available for me to use any more.

So here’s my idea.  Let me see the accumulated information the store collects on me.  Many of my purchases are cyclical.  For instance, I buy deodorant, shampoo, shaving cream, milk, and laundry detergent on some regular interval.  How often?  I don’t know, but I’ll bet the store knows, if they wanted to look.  They have a web site, and I’m pleased to report they do offer a way for me to look up weekly specials on that web site and create a shopping list from them.  But if I were able to log into their web site with my unique Customer ID (and a password I chose), I could discover it was about time for me to buy more shampoo or deodorant, and creating a shopping list on their web site would be enhanced by becoming a simple matter of checking off items and specific brands that I normally buy. 

To me, it seems there must be a database that contains all that information and it can’t be all that difficult to make access to the data available on the web to the customer who helped to create it.  Or said in another way in the hypothetical words of Moses Schwartz, my local mythical grocer, “Let my data go.”  Make it easier for me to spend my money with you! And if you build it on the web, I promise you I will come.

Technorati Tags: database, Food City, application, marketing

Speaking of Technology

I sometimes believe the wheels of technological progress would screech to a halt without the use of acronyms. And facility with acronyms seems to be the shibboleth that divides the technological cognoscenti from those who are lost in space when they walk into Best Buy or Circuit City. Seniors, in particular, find dealing with some pimply-faced geek wannabe who has scored a job selling the latest computers, digital cameras and MP3 players to an unsuspecting public to be an anathema. God forbid you should have a problem with your computer and have to try to determine whether that Geek Squad Savior who rode in on a white PT Cruiser is blowing smoke up your ass when he tells you you’ve got to buy a $300.00 component just to get your email to work again. They’ll sling acronyms at you so fast that it’ll make your head spin. As the old saying goes, “If you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance, baffle ’em with bullshit.”

I began this post thinking I had conceived a useful neologism — acronymphobia, but once again I was wrong. There is, of course, nothing new under the sun. Larry Adams had already defined it here thusly …

The fear of not understanding all the different acronyms used in business, in the media, or on the streets. Some persons may not understand a speaker or a writer when too many unfamiliar acronyms or cryptic words are used in a conversation or a report. Some persons feel a sense of panic or inadequacy.

The first link in this post (to the Wikipedia explanation of an acronym) points out that …

In the English language, the widespread use of acronyms, initialisms, and contractions is a relatively new linguistic phenomenon, having become most popular in the 20th and 21st centuries. As literacy rates rose, and as sciences and technologies advanced, bringing with them more complicated terms and concepts, the practice of abbreviating terms became increasingly convenient.

So since the 1940s, most notably manifested in the so-called Alphabet Agencies of the New Deal, we’ve relied on acronyms to help us communicate and in some instances to obscure what we are communicating, particularly from the uninitiated. Governmental agencies, different disciplines, and in particular specialized fields of study all have their own set of acronyms that facilitate getting ideas across without having to spell out the referent. In fact, organizations used to publish books that could be used to decode the mysterious combinations of letters that were required to function within those organizations.

Fortunately, the Internet which must bear its share of responsibility for the proliferation of these acronyms also provides a solution. If you’ve ever found yourself at a loss to know what XML, RSS, CSS, PHP or any similar acronym means, you can turn to The Internet Acronym Server for a translation. You might then have to plug the decoded version of the acronym into Google or Wikipedia, but with a little patience and a few clicks you can find out what the acronym means. It’s just a pity that you can’t always find it while you are standing face to face and matching wits with someone who may be 40 or more years your junior at the computer store.

But here’s a shopping tip, play dumb. If you’d like to frustrate the little bugger, insist that he translate each acronym he tries to snow you with, and then if he’s successful in doing so, ask for an explanation of just what eXtensible Markup Language, for example, means and what it is used for. You may have some fun in the exchange, but be careful. If you play this game often enough, you just might learn something and then you may find the acronyms slipping into your own vocabulary and alienating you from your peers.

Seasons Greetings

Here’s the text of the first email I sent out today. (Names omitted for the usual reasons.)

Dear friend,

I’m addressing this message to you because I have, in the past, received a number of Word files from you as attachments to your messages. My purpose in sending it to you is not to single you out, accuse you or blame you but rather to alert you to this issue, and besides I had to have someone to address the message to, so that I could copy the others on my BCC.

This Microsoft Security Bulletin, dated December 5, 2006, http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/929433.mspx, documents a so-called “zero day” vulnerability in Microsoft Word that could allow remote code execution. Feel free to visit the Microsoft site and read the full bulletin for yourself, but I provide “my” summary in this message for your convenience.

The vulnerability affects these Microsoft products: Microsoft Word 2000, Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Word Viewer 2003, Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac, and Microsoft Word 2004 v. X for Mac, as well as Microsoft Works 2004, 2005, and 2006.

Here is the important part.

“In order for this attack to be carried out, a user must first open a malicious Word file attached to an e-mail or otherwise provided to them by an attacker.”

As with all such vulnerabilities, this one is a severe pain in the butt, since it is frequently useful to be able to share files with friends and associates in this format, but I suppose it is just one of the prices we must pay for the ease and convenience of being connected electronically.

Since the approaching Holiday Season presents an occasion to send “all your friends” a Word file containing pictures of your family and a narrative that explains all the wonderful things that have happened to you during the past year as well as your wishes for the season, you may be tempted to send such a document electronically. I urge you not to do it. Call me Scrooge if you wish, but I’m not opening any such documents I receive. A plain-text email with a wish for a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays or Happy New Year will get read; an attached Word document won’t.

If you want me to look at your Word document that you so carefully composed, print it out and mail it in the U. S. Mail. At least that way, all I have to worry about is Anthrax or a letter bomb, both of which are at least modestly more difficult to create.

As they say, Happy Friggin’ Holidays!

Television

On May 9, 1961, Newton Minnow, John F Kennedy’s appointee to the Chairmanship of the Federal Communications Commission, delivered his now-famous “Vast Wasteland” speech to the National Association of Broadcasters and described the state of television at that time thusly …

When television is good, nothing–not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers–nothing is better.

But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you–and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.

Newton Minnow’s “Vast Wasteland” speech

I would encourage you to read the entire edited version of that speech at the link cited above. It isn’t long and it is, in my view, well worth the effort. Then ask yourself whether in the ensuing 45 years the Broadcasters have taken his advice to heart.

My answer is that the deplorable situation he described back then has deteriorated … considerably. As bad as he thought things were at the time, those days can only be seen as the Golden Age of television in light of what has happened since then. The landscape has become vaster, now sporting hundreds of channels where there were previously only a few, and the wasteland of that time now seems almost like the Garden of Eden.  Compare what existed then to today’s mix of so-called reality shows, inane family shouting matches, and what Fox news calls “fair and balanced” reporting but is nothing more than a one-sided propaganda machine that merely serves to exacerbate the division of these once-United States into red and blue camps that can no longer talk sanely to each other or focus on the common good.  We’re making great progress alright … along the road to Hell.

Yet, I think Minnow’s basic statement is still true.  When television is good, there is nothing better and when it’s bad, nothing is worse.  So to turn this rant in a somewhat more positive direction, I’ll report that I recently caught a one-hour presentation on PBS (what else?) about PopTech and was fascinated. They (PopTech) have a web site and a blog that I’ll be monitoring.  Though I’d love to attend one of their annual conferences, the price ($2,295.00) for a three-day conference is a bit steep for my budget.  In addition to the consistently worthwhile offerings of PBS, I find that the group of channels that Discovery offers are worth the time spent watching them.  So it is possible to find things on television that improve the mind rather than rotting it.

As with anything else in life, a great deal of how you see things depends on the choices you make.  What you attend to determines your outlook and consequently what you think about reality.  I just shudder at the choices some people make, particularly when they wish to vent their feelings about how the world is because I know their point of view is based on “data” from sources that I consider suspect.  Of course, I suppose they may feel the same way about me and my choices too.

technorati tags:PopTech, PBS, television

Blogged with Flock

A warning about BingBox

Tom Simpson has done some investigation about this new online community and says …

Keep Your Kids Away From BingBox

» Keep Your Kids Away From BingBox – Webfeed Central

Because I know Tom to be knowledgeable about what is and isn’t safe online, I suggest that you heed his warning.

technorati tags:BingBox

Blogged with Flock

Naked in the town square

Have you ever experienced the panicked feeling that comes from dreaming that you were naked and exposed in some public place like the town square? I have, and I have heard from others who say they have too. I’m sure many a psychiatrist has been able to pay for a yacht or put braces on his children’s teeth by interpreting such dreams, usually by making such clever observations as “You feel exposed.” Well, the field of psychiatry may soon experience a rennaisance, because a lot more of us are destined to “feel exposed” due to what I choose to think of as the dark side of connectivity.

From the time the first cave man decided to draw pictures on the wall of his cave, we have left revealing evidence that succeeding generations could discover and interpret. But in this connected age, that evidence has become both more profuse and more persistent. Not only do we reveal our thoughts and feelings in blogs like this one, but we also leave digital footprints as we pass through this life — footprints of where we were when, of how we squandered our wealth, and of who was a part of our social network. By our Internet postings in blogs, on forums, on web pages, and in email, and because of the digital trail of our financial dealings, we voluntarily and involuntarily  relinquish any claim we may have ever had to privacy.

Michelle Conlin has said, “There is no such thing as an eraser on the Internet.” Even email that is recalled inside a corporation’s email system is often read before it can be recalled. And once an email is sent, it is backed up not just on the recipient’s system where it was sent but also in the backups that are produced on the systems that transmit it along the way.

A fascinating article in today’s New Scientist Technology, titled “Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites,” details the government’s interest in mining the information that we are supplying about ourselves at a dizzying rate.

“You should always assume anything you write online is stapled to your resumé. People don’t realise you get Googled just to get a job interview these days,” says Callas.

New Scientist Technology – Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites

The Callas referred to above is Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Sillicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He also says in that article, “I AM continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves.” As innocent as it seems to list your friends on a service like a Friend of a Friend there are government entities that are interested in that information, all in the name of security.

No plan to mine social networks via the semantic web has been announced by the NSA, but its interest in the technology is evident in a funding footnote to a research paper delivered at the W3C’s WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh, UK, in late May.

That paper, entitled Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, by a research team led by Amit Sheth of the University of Georgia in Athens and Anupam Joshi of the University of Maryland in Baltimore reveals how data from online social networks and other databases can be combined to uncover facts about people. The footnote said the work was part-funded by an organisation called ARDA.

What is ARDA? It stands for Advanced Research Development Activity. According to a report entitled Data Mining and Homeland Security, published by the Congressional Research Service in January, ARDA’s role is to spend NSA money on research that can “solve some of the most critical problems facing the US intelligence community”. Chief among ARDA’s aims is to make sense of the massive amounts of data the NSA collects – some of its sources grow by around 4 million gigabytes a month.

New Scientist Technology – Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites

I love the Internet, but there was a sleepy time in the distant past when what you did and how you chose to live your life only faced the threat of a nosey neighbor or a town gossip. Today, it’s a lot easier for people to be nosey, and in our innocence or naivete many of us are cooperating with them by voluntarily relinquishing our privacy.

A generation raised with world-wide connectivity and the social networks that fosters will never know what privacy is … or rather what it was, since for all intents and purposes, privacy no longer exists.

technorati tags:privacy, NSA, data mining

Blogged with Flock

Customizing applications

I have previously blogged about the virtue (as I see it) of being able to customize your applications to your own preferences. This afternoon I see that Daryl has made a plea for such customization of a feature in Flock, the alerts he receives from the Flickr Photo browser. He said:

In its current form, with some of the contacts I happen to have on my list, the photo topbar provides more of a distraction than a benefit. It provokes me far too often to stop what I'm doing so that I can look at photos of little consequence.

Daryl’s Flock Blog

I know what he's talking about, and in general I agree with his proposed solution or at least with some variation of it. I'd like the ability to turn off notifications when some of my Flickr contacts post pictures and to specify how frequently I am notified about updates to their photostream. If I could specify that for some contacts I want to be notified as soon as they've posted their photo and for others that I want to be notified only once an hour of their updates, that would be an improvement over the current way it operates, I think.

But the point of this post is to raise the question for Flock's developers of whether they are really willing to give us to the ability to fine tune Flock's functions. There is, of course, an Options section in the Tools menu where I can specify a variety of preferences, such as which web services I use, which search engines I want as the default, which blogging service I use, etc., but in my conversations with them, I've met with some resistance (it seems) to building in a lot of configurability into Flock.

I've seen this resistance with regard to at least two of the functions that make Flock unique, the blog editor and the web snippets area location.

In its initial incarnation, the blog editor was a free-floating separate window that tended to get lost, particularly if you ran your browser maximized. Next the blog editor opened in a tab, not in a separate window. Since the editor has recently been improved and updated (completely re-written, if I understand correctly), it opens in a separate pop-up window that by default is opened on top of other windows. Right now there is no way to set it to open instead in a tab, and I have yet to see any discussion of the fact that the option to change that default behavior is going to be available. I have, however, seen a number of user comments indicating they would prefer to have it open in a tab. I don't think it should be only one way. Let the user choose which he or she prefers.

The web snippets feature (previously called The Shelf) was originally a topbar just like the photo browser or the Mapper function. In its most recent rendition, it is located in an area at the bottom of the browser window that auto-opens when you drag a web snippet to it. (Web snippets are nothing more than a bit of text, a graphic or a link that you find on the web that you want to retain, perhaps for later use in a blog post.) Back when it was a topbar, there was some discussion of making it a sidebar or a bottom bar instead. At that time, I said my preference was for us users to have the option of making it either, simply another thing that we could specify as we saw fit.

The resistance I sense among the developers to that idea goes something like this. "We don't want the browser to become bloated, and besides most users would end up just using the defaults anyway. And what's more, many users might find it hard to discover the configuration options." They are the developers, of course, and I am only a user, so I can't argue with the point that providing user preference options might contribute to bloat. However, I don't think the argument that most users might use the defaults or that many of them might not discover the configuration options holds much water. Though both suppositions may be true, that isn't any reason to deny users, who are willing to explore the features of the product and want choices, the option to "have it our way."

So as I write in support of Daryl's idea, I also would like to prod the Flock developers to become more open to giving the user greater choice about how Flock behaves. Stop short of making the code bloated, but go as far as possible in providing users choice. It's easier to create fans if give them the ability to control the application through configuring it to their desires.

technorati tags: Flock, configuration, choice

It’s about time for Cardinal

I saw this comment (#7) over on Mike Neel's blog this morning and decided I'd better post something here on my blog before such comments begin appearing in my comment section. So let me try to catch you up on some of the things that have been capturing my attention during the last week or so.

Yesterday morning I allowed my curiosity to get the better of me about the upcoming Cardinal release of Flock sometime in May. If I understand correctly, Cardinal will be the first actual beta version of Flock. Up until now, all the releases have been termed a "developer preview," and they were accompanied by a warning that the software wasn't even to the beta stage yet. Despite that very preliminary, and yes even buggy, version of the browser, I began using it back in November as my default browser. At any rate, yesterday I decided to download the latest "daily build" of Flock to see what has changed, so I downloaded version 0.7.0.3.0 and installed it. A number of changes have been made, some of which I like and some of which I don't.

For instance, I am now using the new built-in blogging editor for this post. When you press the hot key for it (Ctrl-B), the editor pops up a separate window, which is okay I suppose, but one of the things I notice immediately that there is no way to enter categories for the post. That means that posting to the blog will have to be a two-staged adventure. First, I can draft the post in the editor, but afterwards I'll have to open the post in WordPress and change the categories there. That is not very efficient and surely it is an oversight.

Also the editor doesn't seem to separate paragraphs with a space when you press Enter. I won't know how the post will appear on the blog until I publish it, but if it doesn't add the space between paragraphs I'll have to add them during that second stage of editing the post when I am adding the categories. I can, of course, modify my behavior to add those extra CR/LF (carriage return / line feeds) when I'm editing the post, once I discover how the editor treats them, but this behavior is a departure from the previous versions of the editor and to me it seems an undesirable change. Also this version of the blog editor no longer has a spell checker built in. Given my poor spelling skills, that is definitely not an improvement.

Another change in this version of the software is that the widget for selecting which collection is displayed at the top of the browser has been moved from the left side of the window to the right. Why? I have no idea. Again I can get used to that, but it doesn't seem to be an improvement to me and I see no rationale for the change.

What used to be called "the shelf" is now referred to as web snippets, and its location has been moved from the topbar to the bottom window. A feature has been added that allows you to highlight text, graphics, and links and drag them to the bottom of the window which causes the web snippet window to open automatically where the item can then be deposited. Once you've done that, moving the cursor back to the browser window closes the web snippet window. I think the rationale for this change was to make the web snippet window easier to use. I'll just have to see whether this configuration proves easier and more desirable. So far, I'm not convinced that it is.

One of the things that I do like about the new version is the modification they have made to the photo browser. I can now see all the photos of my friends on Flickr instead of just the ones that are public, meaning that I can see the photos that are classified by the photographer as for "friends and family" only when I am one of their contacts. That makes sense and is a change that needed to be made. Also the developers have added a link to each photograph that permits you to drag either a small or a large version of the photo to your blog post. I'm pleased with that capability. Previously you could only drag a small version of the picture so this new ability gives greater choice, and I'm almost always in favor of that.

So, despite my kvetching about the little niggling things I don't like about the newest version of Flock, I'm still a big fan of this browser because I've become reliant on the tools it provides for interacting with the web. I like the fact that when I mark something as a favorite in the browser it updates my del.icio.us site.

Flock is very innovative in the ways it encourages you to participate online rather than to merely observe content that others have generated. And since I favor all of us contributing to what's online, I think Flock will make a major contribution to that capability. Other browsers are like radios (one-way conversation) whereas Flock is more like a telephone.

Update: Upon publishing from the blog editor, I discovered to my delight that I did have the option for adding categories after all because upon pressing the "publish" button I was presented with a list of my categories from which to choose, and when I clicked on the "advanced" button I found that I could even enter Technorati tags too. So the paragraphs in which I complain about those absent features just reflects my lack of familiarity with the features. On the other hand, my observations about the CR/LF issue were correct, so in the future I'll know that if I want a blank line between paragraphs when I'm using the blog editor, I'll have to put them there. That's not hard to do, though, so I'll just modify my behavior to account for the way it works.

technorati tags: Flock, Cardinal, Web2.0