mobrec

So
There has been a lot of discussion about some new features that have been added to Rojo, an online feed reader. One feature getting the most buzz is the 'new' relevance feature.

I don't get it. For one, I have been a Rojo user since the shuttering of the excellent Searchfox, and I have had a 'by relevance' option for months. It was never clear exactly how 'relevance' was being determined, if at all. In response to a comment that I posted on techcrunch someone pointed me to this write up on readwriteweb that includes the following:

First, the purpose of “relevance” is to do for feed reading what smart search engines (like Google) do for search results — figure out what to put on the front page. Many readers are overwhelmed by the number of new stories coming from their feeds every day. So Rojo Relevance is about sorting those by “relevance” rather than date, to put the good stuff on top.

So basically, as Rojo defines it, relevance is absolutely useless to me and should more accurately be called 'popularity'. I want it to be relevant to what I am interested in, not the beauty contest/what-everybody-else-is-reading dogpile. That represents value to me.

I'll say it again: that was the beauty of Searchfox: it paid attention to what I read and ordered my river of news according to that, so that everytime I sat down to read, I was greeted with what I wanted to read first. Searchfox also was smart enough to mark a page of links as read as I advanced pages; this way, if I was interrupted in reading, I could simply hit refresh and get any new postings as well as the unread ones from my previous session. Apparently this is a very difficult concept for Rojo and others to understand and implement.

Can someone please implement a real relevance ranking in a feed reader and not another implementation of digg?

technorati tags: rojo, feedreader, searchfox, relevance, attention

So
I just finished The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman and have to say its a bit of a mixed bag. First, I found the book to be over-long, especially since the entire premise of the book in presented in the rather verbose introduction and then slowly tortured for the next four hundred pages or so.

Granted, some of what follows serves to expound on some of his introductory points but frequently it ranges into breathless, almost infomercial prose about certain big corporations that the author loves to name drop again and again and again.

In later chapters he starts ranging more into politics and this is were he starts to get both annoying and contradictory.

First he posits that no two countries participating in a global supply chain would dare go to war with each other. Really. I guess he missed the part where the US attacked Iraq, nominally over oil supplies (that the US wants to control). It seems the current (US) thinking is to go to war in order to control a global supply chain and not to protect it.

Next he spends an inordinate amount of time slagging off Islamic countries and enumerating their perceived shortcomings with various economic figures and assertions. Thomas, I'd be interested to hear those same numbers for Israel, as well. How many new patents are created there per year? What is their GDP growth? How does it compare to other countries in the region? With Europe? If the constant loans from the US are any indication, probably not well. My point is that he needs to be careful about where he shines his spotlight and to do it evenly and without bias.

It is also curious in this discussion that there is no mention of Turkey and the reforms that Attaturk put into place after the second world war. Granted, Turkey is not exactly a world economic powerhouse, but they have gone a long way toward separating religion from the government and economy. Also, I note that toward the end of the book he's back to swooning over the high tech situation in Malaysia (an Islamic country), where is laptop coincidently was built.

And speaking of the laptop, did we really need the tedious two page recounting of where every part in his laptop might have come from? I could have done without it.

Finally, the assertion that anyone who is concerned about the side effects of globalization (pollution, natural resource over-consumption, etc) is a 'socialist', 'communist' or 'Trotskyist' is gratuitous and something that I would expect more from Fox News than an even handed discussion regarding globalization.

Overall, I found this book overly long and ponderously presented. It would have made a very nice short essay (preferably without the race-baiting and political posturing).

technorati tags: books, globalization, technology, economics

So
Computerworld is running a article about how some researchers are warning of the perils of RFID viruses. In a word, bullshit. An RFID tag is simply a data source and, typically, very little data at that. If you have a poorly written application that does not do the appropriate data validations you can create a problem for yourself regardless of the source of the data.

This is worth repeating: the issues identified in the article included SQL Injection, buffer overflow(!) and other classic examples of exploits that can be applied to any poorly written application. The fact that an RFID tag was the data source does not make it a specific RFID issue — it's just data.

So if someone creates a 'virus' and puts it on an RFID tag, great. You can write a virus and embed it in a JPEG image or mp3 file. However, unless you have an application that specifically looks for the virus payload and provides an execution environment there is absolutely no way that it can do any harm to your computer system unless it can actually execute the virus code.

One last point about data security. Hopefully, the industry has learned (via rampant indentity theft) that putting personally indentifying information in an RFID tag is a very, very stupid thing to do (and may actually be illegal in some locations). It is likely that the RFID tag would only have some sequential number/identifier that is read and tied back to some other more meaningful definition/data elsewhere. So if a bad guy gets the RFID identifier, they still have to know about the other system, locate it, compromise it and make sense of the data relationship. Could it happen? Sure. But is it as simple as the press makes it out to be, probably not. Bonus points to the implementers smart enough to encrypt the RFID data in the first place.

Here is a rather contrived scenario from the article:

For example, airports are considering using RFID tags to track baggage. But Tanenbaum warned that this application could pose a large problem if an RFID tag is read and delivers a much larger set of data in return. A false tag on a piece of baggage could exploit a buffer overflow to deliver a virus to the RFID middleware. Once the virus code is on the server, it could infect the databases and corrupt subsequent tags or install back doors — small programs that allow for the extrication of data over the Internet, Tanenbaum said.

Right. Or you could have the appropriate data validations in you processing system and not worry about RFID data or data from any other source for that matter.

technorati tags: rfid, virus, hysteria, security, datavalidation

So
I returned from my trip to San Jose this week to discover the fine folks (or bots) at Blogger had determined that my blog was a splog:

Your blog is locked

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

You won't be able to publish posts to your blog until one of our humans reviews it and verifies that it is not a spam blog. Please fill out the form below to get a review. We'll take a look at your blog and unlock it in less than a business day.

If we don't hear from you, though, we will remove your blog from Blog*Spot within 10 days.

Awesome. So how did it determine that my blog was a splog? Golly, it must be because it is linked to by, oh, about 6 external sites according to Technorati (clearly suspicious). Maybe it's because I have links to my Flickr, last.fm and other personal information so that no one could possibly find me and report me for my 'spam blogging' activities.

Added irony: when I spell checked this posting with Blogger's own spell checker, it suggested 'blocker' as the correct word for 'Blogger'. It also suggests 'degenerate' for 'Technorati' as well.

I don't suppose that I will ever actually get an explanation (or an apology). Time to consider looking for a new place to host this blog? Maybe.

technorati tags: blogger, blogging, spam, splogs, suckage

So
Microsoft has 'innovated' again by introducing the Apple Newton 13 years after Apple originally did. From my previous post you might derive that I was a big fan of the Newton and was a bit surprised by the complaints about the form factor.

Yet here we are in 2006 and MS has produced an even larger, heavier unit that even the largest Apple Newton. Have a look at this MS article that describes how the Newton was the wrong form factor, it should have been smaller like a Palm Pilot or larger, like a tablet:

The Newton hardware could have been developed along a number of lines, making it either larger or smaller. Instead, it was left in that dead zone of being too big and heavy for a pocket and too small to have a large, visible screen.

So which part of the 'dead zone' does that leave their new product in?

technorati tags: origami, microsoft, apple, newton, pda

So
Collision Detection has an interesting post on how KFC is attempting to thwart people who fast forward through commercials by making a commercial that is tailored to skippers. The idea is that if they put a single frame in the commercial with, say a code to get something for free, then people will actually not only watch the advert but watch it frame by frame to find the embedded code.

Of course, this sort of overlooks the fact that only one person needs to do this, then post the code to their blog or discussion forum to save everyone else the trouble. Sounds a bit dubious to me. Time will tell.

technorati tags: tivo, adverts

So
With a little ipodLinux magic, you can make that old iPod (aka last year's model) useful again by converting it into a portable version of the wikipedia.

technorati tags: wikipedia, ipod, ipodlinux, encyclopodia, ipodhacks

So
This music video is absolutely hilarious whether you're a geek or not. Sad thing is, I know people who to which this would personally apply.

technorati tags: fun, humor, xbox, videogames, geeks

So
Instructables is an interesting web site where you can show people things that you made and share how others can make them for themselves. Definately some creative and handy people posting on this site.

We like to think about the physical world as something that is programmable. We like to think of objects or stuff you make as 'code'. In other words, we are approaching the physical world as something that is describable and replicable.

technorati tags: ideas, creativity, instructables

So
An interesting article at the Guardian on The Death of Handwriting. I have definitely seen a trend in this direction at work, especially now that wireless access is available throughout the entire campus. People bring their laptops to meetings presumably to take notes, but more often to check email, IM and do other things rather than focus on the meeting. I am a bit of an oddball in that I show up with my (paper) notebook and pen to take notes and jot down diagrams. I find good old paper and ink to be much more expressive and versatile in this situation.

I have noticed that with all of the time I have spent on the computer over the years that my penmanship has deteriorated and I am making a concerted effort to do more writing (versus typing). When I was in college I was proud of how well I wrote and even had several profs comment on the legibility and layout of written work.

I guess it is in the same vein as my using an analog watch; I find myself drawn to good ole paper and ink to capture my thoughts during the day. Or maybe I'm just getting old.

technorati tags: handwriting, writing, analog