RIP Aaron Swartz

Posted on January 12, 2013January 27, 2013 by lhl

I was first introduced to Aaron (impossibly young), over a decade ago at a tech conference (OSCON?). And, while we were never close, we often floated in the same circles (tech, activism, civic and political tech) and over the years our paths crossed many times, in emails, projects, at conferences or meetups. The last time I saw him was in Boston, June 2010. We met up outside a food court in Cambridge and caught up on the projects we were starting/wrapping up and swapped some thoughts on civic and campaign tech.

More than a friend, Aaron Swartz was a fellow traveler. He was one of us. In many ways, the best of us. It was a punch in the gut when I read the headline last night. He dedicated much of his life and his many talents in fighting injustice and trying to make a difference.

And beyond the sense of loss, there’s a bitter taste that injustice and indifference has won the day.

Rest in peace Aaron Swartz.

Hacker News – today’s top headlines almost all articles related to Aaron’s suicide. First article
Remember Aaron Swartz
Official Statement from the family and partner of Aaron Swartz
Cory Doctorow remembers Aaron
tbl on www-tag
The inspiring heroism of Aaron Swartz – Glenn Greenwald writes a long piece
HN discussion)
Philip Greenspun: Aaron Swartz
Remembering Aaron Swartz (1986-2013) – Wikimedia remembers Aaron
Aaron Swartz, hero of the open world, dies – Brewster Kahle remembers Aaron
Wired Threat Level: Aaron Swartz, Coder and Activist, Dead at 26

We often say, upon the passing of a friend or loved one, that the world is a poorer place for the loss. But with the untimely death of programmer and activist Aaron Swartz, this isn’t just a sentiment; it’s literally true. Worthy, important causes will surface without a champion equal to their measure. Technological problems will go unsolved, or be solved a little less brilliantly than they might have been. And that’s just what we know. The world is robbed of a half-century of all the things we can’t even imagine Aaron would have accomplished with the remainder of his life.
Open access, open internet, closed book – mefi obit thread
Remember Aaron Swartz by working for open society and against government abuses – Dan Gillmor on anger and activism
processing the loss of Aaron Swartz – danah writes a fantastic piece that captures both what it was like to know him and explores what he got caught up in (and why we’re angry)
Legal Case Strained Troubled Web Activist – WSJ covers Aaron’s last days
Aaron Swartz Faced A More Severe Prison Term Than Killers, Slave Dealers And Bank Robbers – see the EFF on how broken CFAA is
Aaron Swartz’s Lawyer: Prosecutor Stephen Heymann Wanted ‘Juicy’ Case For Publicity – eat a bag of dicks Stephen P Heymann. Hope it was worth it.
On humanity, a big failure in Aaron Swartz case – oh yeah, you too MIT.

Marty Weinberg, who took the case over from Good, said he nearly negotiated a plea bargain in which Swartz would not serve any time. He said JSTOR signed off on it, but MIT would not.
Aaron Swartz, Asking For Help, 119 Days Ago – sigh, sadness
Aaron Swartz was ‘killed by the government,’ father tells mourners

“Steve Heymann had shown no interest in justice,” Swartz’s girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, 31, told the Los Angeles Times on Monday. “His only interest was a notch on his belt, another young kid he could claim to put away. But I think as the case wore on, as it became clearer how weak his case was, he became more and more of a bully.”
Lawmakers slam DOJ prosecution of Swartz as ‘ridiculous, absurd’
I’m Rep Zoe Lofgren & I’m introducing “Aaron’s Law” to change the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)
The Criminal Charges Against Aaron Swartz – Part 2: Prosecutorial Discretion – Orin Kerr has an interesting writeup and the comments on the post and the HN discussion are both worth reading and thinking about. I do think the key is the systemic issues raised: the much more heinous crimes that aren’t prosecuted (HSBC), the de facto policy making that happens from prosecutorial discretion, the de facto punishment for indictment (either plea bargain or spend millions at trial and face a 99%+ conviction rate). While Aaron civil disobedience might have been aimed towards open access, instead what he really shone a light on (and what chewed him up) was the maw of our “justice” system. Also, I think Kerr’s analysis highlights at least two glaring contradictionss. Kerr repeatedly argues that his values are not neutral but judged against “Democracy” (more accurately, Legalism; which at this point is barely/vaguely democratic), however by that rubric, any/all civil disobedience/injustice (from the Civil Rights movement, etc) should be 1) punished fully against the letter of the law, even if it’s wrong/ridiculous, etc and 2) that the rubric for prosecution/punishment should be based on what would be necessary for “special deterrence” – as mentioned by a commenter, by that rubric, federal prosecutors would be morally justified in arresting and holding in detention indefinitely (or, presumably killing) political dissidents. Taking a step back, to something (slightly) less absurd, as put by gnosis:

“What punishment was the minimum necessary to deter Swartz from continuing to try to use unlawful means to achieve his reform goals?”

Let’s say no punishment would deter Swartz. Would that justify a sentence of life in prison?
Aaron Swartz and the Corrupt Practice of Plea Bargaining
U.S. Attorney breaks silence, defends prosecution of Aaron Swartz – they’ll do it again (and again) and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. I think it behooves everyone to fully take into account what American Justice means.
The Prosecution of Aaron: A Response to Orin Kerr – in-depth response to Kerr’s analysis that I find a lot to agree with
After Aaron: how an antiquated law enables the government’s war on hackers, activists, and you – if you’re online and reading this, it’s unlikely you’ve never committed a felony under the CFAA. You just haven’t been charged (yet). If you read the comments, ignore the troll Modred189, who apparently has nothing better to do in life than argue for the prosecution on all the Verge’s articles on the topic.
Aaron’s Army – Carl Malamud’s fiery call to action at Aaron’s SF memorial service.
Swartz didn’t face prison until feds took over case, report says

Raw Nerve – some of Aaron’s best writing.

F2C2012: Aaron Swartz keynote – “How we stopped SOPA”

Fall 2012 Mix

Posted on October 31, 2012May 31, 2013 by lhl

It’s been a while hasn’t it? One of the nice things is that there’s a huge backlog of stuff to choose from, although that also makes things a bit harder to remember what you were diggina while ago.

A few of these tracks are from my This Is My Jam – unfortunately it doesn’t really have a history so is less than useful for actually remembering anything…

Anyway, a few tracks. Some new artists, some old. A bit of a future-groove that gets washed away w/ the tide.

New To Me: Genki Sudo

Posted on December 1, 2011November 3, 2016 by lhl

Why have I never heard of Genki Sudo before? What an interesting character. A retired MMA fighter who is an essayist, musician, and a dancer. His musical group’s music videos are completely epic (the music is pleasant, upbeat indietronica).

MasterCard SecureCode and securesuite.net

Posted on June 22, 2011June 22, 2011 by lhl

Today was my first time encountering MasterCard^®SecureCode™ when making an online order. I honestly thought I was being phished. Here’s where I got redirected to.

Going to https://www.securesuite.net/ gives you a nice blank page. And here’s the whois information:

Registrant:
      cyota
      yaron shohat
      174 Middlesex Turnpike
      Bedford, MA 01730
      US
      Phone: +1.8665606153
      Email: 

   Registrar Name....: Register.com
   Registrar Whois...: whois.register.com
   Registrar Homepage: www.register.com

   Domain Name: securesuite.net
      Created on..............: 2002-08-23
      Expires on..............: 2012-08-23

   Administrative Contact:
      RSA
      Network Operations
      174 Middlesex Turnpike
      Bedford, MA 01730
      US
      Phone: +1.8665606153
      Email: 

   Technical  Contact:
      RSA
      Network Operations
      174 Middlesex Turnpike
      Bedford, MA 01730
      US
      Phone: +1.8665606153
      Email: 

   DNS Servers:
      pdns3.ultradns.org
      pdns4.ultradns.org
      pdns2.ultradns.net
      pdns1.ultradns.net
      pdns5.ultradns.info
      pdns6.ultradns.co.uk

Who’s cyota? Who’s yaron shohat? And what fucking moron at RSA thought this was a good idea? Here’s the Google results for securesuite.net phishing. Doing a search for Securesuite.net does not return Visa or Mastercard’s official sites…

Well, it turns out securesuite.net isn’t a phishing scam, after doing some Internet searching, digging up direct links from Mastercard.com, and calling MasterCard directly to get verbal confirmation and to give them a piece of my mind. It’s not a scam, it’s just moronic and a phishing scam waiting to happen.

Tech Predictions, Five Years Later

Posted on June 14, 2011June 23, 2011 by lhl

Five years ago, inspired by a Yahoo! Answers question (their top answers), I put on my tech futurist hat and wrote up some quick prognostications about
Which products, used by few today, will be essential in five years? This was published, incidentally, on Vox (now defunct). Are you getting that mid-2006 vibe yet? Well, it’s been five years (that was quick), so maybe we should take a look.

I won’t reproduce my original article (linked above), but I’ll go through each of the predictions and make some comments:

Software as service is standard – My prediction was that social networking, media sharing, and all kinds of apps would be increasingly integrated/prepackaged OOTB. I think that this has been born out, certainly on the mobile and device front, although this year may be the inflection point for the desktop (iCloud, ChromeOS, etc). Even without that, probably the majority of consumer computing is now service/browser based. I find myself totally dependent on many cloud-based services (Evernote, Checkvist, DropBox, Google Docs, GMail/GApps, Twitter, FB, etc). Also, the majority of my small business’s software is also cloud-based.
Global digital identity / reputation / relationship system – my prediction was that online/offline personas, relationships, and physical presence would be tied together, potentially controlled by a single company. I think in mid-2006 I would have guessed Google would end up taking it all, but FB was a strong contender, and they’re on top at the moment. Still, as of mid-2011, this ball is still in play, and there are certain components (location, reputation) that are still almost complete tossups. Note: while FB has been enormously successful and will almost certainly be the first Internet company to hit 1B actives, there are some signs that it may have peaked in its developed markets, so it’s not invincible. There’s also a lot of potential left in terms of social utility that’s still completely unexplored (and only in the most superficial ways in many other cases).
Digital media – I predicted streaming/wireless syncing of media from anywhere. While iCloud was only just announced (to compete against Amazon Cloud Drive, and Google Music) and music has been lagging a bit (although celestial jukebox services like Spotify and Rdio have been hitting it out of the park, so maybe unfair to dismiss music completely), we’ve seen this come true much more for video. Maybe this is due to the competition traditional TV/Film has faced from the YouTube/Internet video juggernaut (my first YouTube video, uploaded just over 5 years ago). Netflix in particular, which not only has overtaken web traffic, but also BitTorrent. Expect the cord-cutting to accelerate. One last observation. Amazon’s current homepage menu now completely highlights digital goods:
Smart phone – I think I hit this one 100% percent. Not much to say about it. Well, one caveat is that while there were rumors of an iPhone floating around for years, it wouldn’t be announced for another 6 months. Apple gets huge props for single-handedly helping to drag the lagging handset/telecom industry into this future, as well as totally shaking things up with its App Store. I’m sure there are some charts somewhere that show recent numbers on mobile vs fixed Internet use, but if that number hasn’t been crossed, I’m sure it will be soon.
RFID – I was totally wrong. At Lensley, we’ve been doing some neat RFID integrations with clients, and RFIDs have had huge adoption in thing that touch people’s daily life, like in supply-chain and public transit (as well as less well thought out ways, like US Passports). On the whole, though, they’ve remained too expensive and too niche to get much consumer love (kits from Sparkfun notwithstanding). While NFC in Android (an RFID-compatible superset) has gotten lots of hubaloo, there’s pretty much zilch in terms of real world use, much less anything remotely spimey. We’ll have to see how mobile payments pan out over the next couple years. (2012?)
Self Monitoring – While the Quantified Self has been getting some traction (a conference! breathless writeups!) and there are a proliferation of services and devices (Runkeeper, FitBit, Gowear Fit, Zeo, Withings, etc), this is still a pretty niche/nascent movement. I have no doubt it’ll keep growing, and there are some pointers (the proliferation of Feltron-like reports for social activity, checkins) that there’s a tipping point approaching. We’ll see
Personal Aggregators – I saw the other day that Flipboard’s at 400M flips/month, and one might argue that Facebook’s news feed algorithms, modern blogs (Gawker, HuffPo, Engadget, etc), or even Twitter have stepped in to fill big roles in terms of filtering the bombardment of crap, but it seems like treading water. I would have expected some smarter/more robust attention management tools to have been developed, but maybe I’m completely wrong on how most people handle infoglut.
Shared everything – obviously wrong about fine-grained privacy. Facebook has given us a “mostly private enough sort of for now” model that’s been pretty sucessful. Certainly at moving everyone torwards the social-everything model (you win some, you lose some).

Of my long-shots (things that I thought would be awesome), we actually got one of them in a huge way. At the time I had written this, I just received my iRex Iliad ($700) after waiting for years for an honest to goodness E-Ink device. Sadly, it was a pretty useless white elephant of a device. However, the display was phenomenal, so I threw it on the list. In late 2007 Amazon released the first Kindle, and a few weeks ago, Amazon announced that it is now selling more Kindle books than print books. The Kindle 3, BTW, was the best-selling product in Amazon’s history.

3D printing/fabrication has gotten a lot more traction (even a recent Stephen Colbert interview), as has the maker movement in general. Although it’s still niche, the pricing is right. At $1300, the Thing-O-Matic is cheaper than most people’s first laser printer.

AR HUDs, are as ever, another 5 years away. (The OVF on my X100 is pretty sweet though.)

OK, that’s all well and good. But how about the things that I missed completely. Here’s a short list:

Location – while I tangentially mentioned location, I never listed LBS, mapping and other location services explicitly. Looking back, this is a 100% obvious thing, considering how much usage has exploded since. My only excuse is that being hip-deep/working for so long on local/map/mobile stuff at the time probably blinded me to how ubiquitous it wasn’t for the rest of the world while writing this. (I was working on geocoding/map/checkins at Upcoming, and from ZoneTag to Checkmates, to Yahoo! Maps, I was surrounded by all kinds of crazy LBS/geo/mobile stuff).
Twitter – I probably first saw Twitter about a month after I wrote my original post. At the time it was “twttr” was a completely different beast – very SMS focused, like group chat. I passed, and didn’t even bother signing up until a few months later when visiting with friends in the UK (it got a lot of early traction because it was cheaper than texting). It took a while (early 2007?) for me to really get to grips with Twitter (writeup here). Kudos to Jack, Noah, Ev, et al for trying out something new, and then working at it for years to refine it. It’s gone through a lot of transformations (mostly for better)…
iPad – I was a close follower of the Mobile+UMPC+Tablet industry at the time, and if you had told me that in a few years Apple would have released a friggin Dynabook with 10 finger multitouch, 10 hour battery life, amazing responsiveness, and an a complete App Ecosystem (backed by 10s of millions of sister devices), selling for $500 I would have smacked you. After which, I’d have gone out and bought a lot more Apple stock. Like the iPhone when it launched in 2007, the iPad came from a few years in the future and dragged everyone else, kicking and screaming.
Wikileaks – Even during the year of the iPad launch, however, probably the biggest and most unexpected story of 2010 was Wikileaks (some of my favorite writeups). It has literally changed the world, and the most amazing thing is that it’s been a story that’s been in the making for years, if not decades. Wikileaks and many other stories happening right now (the Arab Spring, Anonymous, LulzSec) in many ways epitomize Clay Shirky‘s postulate that “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring… It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen.”

OK, in hope of publishing soon, I’ll be wrapping up now. No 2016 predictions from me, but maybe it’ll be worth catching regardless up in a few years. For those that are really interested in the things catching my attention these days, here’s a spring graph I made early last year:

Update: An editor from the International Business Times dropped a line yesterday with a few questions. Here’s the writeup they did today in the Luxury and Brands section today: Blogger Correctly Predicted the Future in 2006 (Mostly)

Fujifilm X100 First Impression

Posted on May 18, 2011June 8, 2011 by lhl

I’ve been looking forward to the X100 for months, and have been in and out of a couple X100 forums, so it’s been interesting to finally have one in my hands now. (Actually, due to the way preorders overlapped with shipping, I’ll have two, but obviously one is going back, unless someone in LA wants to pick one up).

It’s still early days – I’ve only gone out shooting once (I’ll be heading out shooting tonight as well) and I’m still getting used to how it handles. I know it’s capable of capturing fantastic images, but coming from shooting tens of thousands of frames on Canon DSLRs over the past decade, adapting to the X100 has been a bit of a challenge so far.

The lack of rangefinder patch, focus screen or some other equivalent is killing me right now (the EVF is not my idea of a good time), but maybe that’ll pass. That being said, I’m actually looking forward to shooting the heck out of this thing. I’m sure it’ll make me a better photographer in terms of thinking about what I’m shooting, estimating distances, and thinking about DOF. It’s certainly not a P&S, and I’ll no doubt miss a lot of shots, but I plan on trying to carry it everywhere, so we’ll see how it goes. (I’ve ordered a Luma LoopIt strap.)

For those considering the X100, I’d probably have to say that this isn’t the camera you want to take with you to evening social events, not unless you really want to work for your photos. While the bright lens (F2.0) and amazing High ISO performance (totally usable at 3200) and quiet leaf shutter would seem to make it great for low-light candids, the AF seems more finicky than average, and sadly, the fly-by-wire focus ring is pretty much useless right now.

That being said, I plan on working primarily in MF mode and zoning, so we’ll see how that works.

Also, there are a lot of niggles in the firmware. On the bright side, these could all be fixed and there seems to be some noises from Fuji that they will work on the firmware. On the negative, that historically hasn’t been the case. I’ll be keeping a running list of things I’d liked fixed here:

General

Startup Times: I’ve managed to get it starting up fairly quickly (about 1s?) but out of the box it took so long that I kept thinking it was broken.
File writing: file writes seem to block operations? Is this 2011?
ISO settings don’t persist across modes
Even in full manual mode, the aperture doesn’t seem to be physically set, so there’s shutter lag. More of an annoyance than a dealbreaker
Yep, the battery goes from “low” to shutdown in < 5min; in general power usage/management seems to be rather poor. There must be a better compromise for responsiveness/power usage. Canon DSLR powerpacks are about the same capacity and last forever.

AF

My current #1 focusing issue, at the cause of most of my misfocused shots is the OVF AF parallax. The FW fix that would help this greatly would be to recompose the AF point with the focal plane (just move it along with the framelines). More discussion here.
Low light AF; is this the best it gets?
The focus-frame size can only be adjusted in AF-S; I’ve find it enormously useful if it could be adjusted in MF

Focusing

The biggest problem is the focus ring doesn’t work at all for covering distances; it’s not helped by it being incredibly laggy as well. This should be an easy fix with a better acceleration curve, and allowing that to be user adjustable/distance-dependent
In MF, since the command lever is used to enter EVF zoom mode, wouldn’t it make sense to allow the lever to be used for focusing as well? Actually would be a lot less finicky than the ring; you could also use one or the other for rough/fine focusing

Buttons

It’d be nice to reassign the RAW button (I’m always shooting JPG+RAW, I’d much rather be able to assign that to movie mode or the ND filter)
Macro should just be a toggle instead of popping up a menu – it’s either on or off! Same w/ ND – these are probably my biggest usability quibbles after the first week.
Auto ISO should be a toggle in ISO menu (so you can easily flip it on/off in the OVF fn mode); actually, for night shooting, being able to toggle Auto ISO off even easier (long-press?) is even more important; it really screws with you when the metering if off by more than the exposure compensation…

Video

Manual focusing while shooting. The AF is especially clueless when shooting video
It’d be nice to be able to set the fn button (or the RAW button) to go directly into recording

OVF

The histogram doesn’t seem to be right? It doesn’t reflect aperture or shutter speed changes?
The range scale is good, but would be nice to show the hyperfocal distance as a marking (or as others have suggested, a mode/way to jump to the hyperfocal distance like the GRD)
In the post-capture EVF review, it’d be nice to have an option to show brights/histogram; being able to have a 1s or even 0.5s preview would be nice as well

I’ll be trying to post more regularly to my flickr account.

After a couple weeks with the X100, I posted an updated list on Engadget.

SXSW 2011 Post-Mortem

Posted on March 26, 2011August 21, 2011 by lhl

(This is gonna be a long one, so if you’re sticking around, enjoy some tracks from some acts I caught; the Civil War/Revival Folk was big this year)

I was meaning to post something up sooner, but alas, crazy work deadlines and SxSARS have conspired against me this week. Miraculously, I managed to stave off sickness for all 10 days in Austin, but I ended up picking something up (I think) on my plane flight home (I’m looking at you coughy mccougherson in the next seat over). In any case, some less than organized thoughts while they’re somewhat fresh.

First, on SXSWi (Interactive), I think Gruber nailed it pretty spot on:

Used to be that SXSW[i] was an interesting conference and a great weekend experience. Now it’s a terrible conference and a good-but-crowded weekend experience.

As someone that actually lays down my own cash for SXSW, I was pretty offended by how horrible the conference setup was this year. I think Matt might have had more success with my Lanyrd than I did. This was by far my worst panel year ever (this was SXSWi #12 for me, and the past few years were fine, thank you very much), not because of the panel quality, which has continued to improve, but because the logistics have gotten precipitously worse. The panel/room scheduling was a mess (with some of the most popular sessions in the smallest rooms), and the half-assed shuttles (unmarked, not on any schedule, never there before or after sessions, taking you on a loop around town; some unlucky people apparently got shaken down by similar unmarked pay shuttles) and across-town campuses was an unmitigated disaster (the word clusterfuck is the term that comes to mind). I met some friends who had much better experiences – they did the sensible thing and just didn’t bother attending anything not in ACC/Hilton. Lesson learned.

Anyway, if I went to SXSW for the panels still, I’d be kicking and screaming for a refund. I’ll let others argue about the ethics of taking money from attendees that the conference clearly doesn’t have the capacity to support. My simple suggestions for fixing things (as there were sessions I would have love to have caught):

If you’re going to be selling Interactive Badges, where people are paying for panels, they need to be within the ACC block. Move Film panels if you need to, find some creative locations nearby (lots of boarded up stuff), or (god forbid) stop fucking selling badges if you’re over capacity, but having to choose between a 1hr roundtrip or a $12 cab ride to see a panel at the Hyatt is pretty much the definition of bullshit. (even worse were those that made a hike to find the panel they were going to was full or canceled)
Millions of dollars in badge receipts and you’re telling me you can’t UStream all the sessions and make them available in simulcast and archive form for attendees? This seems like a completely reasonable and rather simple solution. If a speaker doesn’t agree, fine, mark it on the schedule (or tell them tough noogies), but this seems like a no-brainer for most of these.
Stop being fucking babies and open up your schedule API to Lanyrd, SCHED, etc. These tools are way better than anything your team has done, and if there was less time wasted writing their own scrapers to your (not well formed) data, they would be more accurate and could coordinate better – especially for tracking attendance, demand, etc. This year, SCHED provided Foursquare with its SXSW event data. Why? Because there was an API and they had their shit together.
In an interesting regression, conference staff seems less willing to swap rooms, even when there’s an obvious mismatch (and an obvious swap candidate right next door) a half hour before the session…

OK, that’s all the indignation I can really muster up. Etsy threw a better conf down the block. That’s pretty sad yo.

Anyway, I’ve never been a fan of the “SXSW is too big” meme… but, I found that this year, much more than the past couple years even, that I had some issues for the first couple days getting into the SXSWi groove. Primarily, SXSWi is a time for me to meet up with “200 of my closest friends” – the people of my tribe that I might only see once every year or two. In the past, it was much easier to depend on serendipity (and over the past couple years, some dependable end-of-night hangouts), but I found this to be a bit harder this year. Part of it I think had to do with the aforementioned shitshow with panels – I didn’t realize how much of my dinner plans depended on the group of 5 people that I’d run into after the last panel session (of course, this was also my first year over a decade without a Break Bread w/for Brad to kick things off…).

All that being said, I ended up having a pretty good time, especially once I realized I’d have to work a bit harder at social planning, and rallied.

The Old Timers Ball was a great idea. During SXSWi, I have two rules of thumb that have served me well: 1) no waiting in line and 2) I don’t mind paying for my own drinks. (Especially during Interactive, many people seem to break #1 for #2).
I don’t believe I had a sit-down meal until my 3rd day in Austin. I did however have the pleasure of sharing and introducing fried oreos to more than a few friends. The East Side Drive-In was one of the best surprises this year. If you didn’t make it out there, you have something for your TODO list now.
Speaking of pleasant surprises, two words: CNN Grill. So good that I’m not even going to make the obvious snarky observations in relation to the quality of their reporting.
The following hashtags (on 4SQ! barely used Twitter @ SXSW) were useful: #noshitshow, #noline, #oldtimers
I mentioned this in a tweet, but despite the hype (and my own personal expectations) that GroupMe or Beluga would be useful, it turned out that 4SQ was much more useful for coordination. I ended up in 5 SXSW GroupMe groups, but it turns out that while GroupMe might be well-suited for small groups of strong-ties, it’s absolutely useless as a serendipity enabler. 4SQ wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good (more in-depth thoughts below).
Cell networks stood up much better this time around, both during Interactive and Music it seemed like. I was using Sprint, which dropped down to 1x much too often, but also had 3-4Mbps 4G available (at the cost of destroying battery life).
Interestingly, because of the huge new venues that had opened up (the Power Plant, the new ACL, the Pepsi Max Warehouse), I ended up swinging into some mega-parties during interactive that were relatively uncrowded. The night we agglomerated a gaggle of Brits into a big nerd pack, we rolled into the RedLaser Chromeo sans-line (there were maybe 500 people at a probably 2000 capacity venue?). Rolling in at the end of the 4SQ Big Boi concert, and into the Microsoft Yeasayer party were similarly pleasant experiences. Maybe all those hundreds-thousands of people standing in line at Mohawks and Stubbs is a good thing? It seems like there was definitely a big gap in terms of good real-time crowd reporting…

Which is as good a segue as any to talk about 4SQ. First of all: holy crap are these guys hitting it out of the park. Between the great 3.0 features and the crazy biz dev (AMEX, etc), it’s just great seeing 4SQ really starting to fulfill some of that LBS potential. (it’s only been a decade or so in the making, right?) Comments in particular, super useful this year. It’s with that in mind (and the fact that I actually lived up to my Super User status this year) that some constructive criticism is offered:

Two 4SQ apps, 4squareand7yearsago and flicksquare were especially nice, especially since then former had an “early adopter” edition during SXSWi that sent you a history of your checkins from 2 years ago. A nice reminder of how your checkins could be personally valuable
While I had mentioned that 4SQ was more useful than the group chats for coordination, it was still not ideal. A few thoughts in that regard:
- While the checkin is useful, two verbs that I was most missing were “heading to” and “leaving.” Being able to signal intent would be killer, especially if you were trying to catch up with someone or vice versa. This could be a picoformat in shouts (like “>” or “/l” with @names), but would be nice if it were parsed in the system
- Along those lines, it seems like something like Ditto where you could propose a meetup/location would be super useful as a 4SQ feature rather than a separate app, especially if it integrated with some realtime status
- I didn’t end up rolling this out due to some complications, but one of the things that I worked on for the SCHED map was a way of reporting realtime status (lines, crowds, lateness) to a venue. There’s no reason this couldn’t be implemented in 4SQ
- The map view was pretty useless with a lot of friends checked in. More interesting views would be heatmaps that showed say a time+density based visualization (venue trends) as well as say, relative crowdedness to people you knew. The ideal venue at SXSW is actually the least crowded venue with the highest percentage of people you know checked in!
That being said, while 4SQ was OK during Interactive, for whatever reason, it worked way better during Music. Ended up catching a bunch of bands and having a bunch people roll in to meet up based on checkins/shouts. Also super great way to ask friends what the line/crowd/lateness status was.
A heavy concentration of 4SQ users meant that you rarely had to search to find your checkin location. Which is good, because SRPs continued to be astoundingly bad. Searching for the Hilton or ACC or Convention Center would rarely turn it up in the first several screens (which would seem impossible if even the most basic popularity/activity ranking was being used). Also, this may be Android specific, or maybe based on service timeouts, but my Favorites rarely showed up at the top. Lastly, as a SU I saw things that I constantly would want to merge, but just couldn’t (unless I’m missing something in the Mobile UI)
Related to “riding” on checkins, I hope (but doubt) that 4SQ are tracking this? I (and I suspect most people) tend to pick friends checked in when hopping on their checkin locations – there’s some crazy future data-mining+awesomeness generation potential there (even beyond the current co-presence data being used).
There’s no way to unsubscribe or block a user from the app! Or the mobile site?! Or, watching kathrynyu unsuccessfully try, even via iPad. WTF?! That’s bad!
Sadly, iOS Notifications has actually caused a big regression with 4SQ this – while I didn’t notice it on my Android phone because notifications queue into the notification bar, using my iPad even for a few minutes made me realize how it sucked big time for iOS users. Basically, like the bad old days w/ Dodgeball SMS’s (the social app that punished you as your friends used it more as I liked to put it), except iOS Notifications are even worse, popping up in a constant stream in the middle of your screen. The only solution I can think of really of (besides waiting for iOS 5?) is for there to be an easier way to turn Pings Off for users or to institute internal digesting/summarizing/rate limiting against iOS notifications.
Annoying niggle only notice through mega-usage: when you successfully checkin on Android, it doesn’t update your location in your listing. This is especially annoying when you’re on a slow network since it has to poll to update. In general, having a “last updated” status would be useful. Overall 4SQ still has a ways to go to be more useful when you’re offline, even updating the time rendering at least would be a good first step.

SXSW has been “on notice” for me for the past few years (I had originally decided that 10 years running was really longer than I needed to do anything, but it’s just been too fun to stop), but this year, at the end of SXSWi, when I realized I still had 5 more days, I was pretty sure it’d be time to take a break (surely I have better things to do with $4K and 10 days). However, Music was actually a total 180: completely re-energizing in all the ways that Interactive was enervating. I had a great time.

Instead of taking video, I ended up using a combination of 4SQ and a new app called Whoa to track the bands I caught (66 rated, yeah!). This year, SCHED tracked just under 7300 events (almost 50% of the parties and music events were unofficial), with over 4500 users (tracking on average over 60 events each)… As I side-note, while I know SXSW has a sometimes rocky relationship with “unofficial” events, and heck, even with SCHED, but, it’s a big part of the reason they’ll be getting my Platinum badge money if I’m back next year, not to mention why its worthwhile for most of the bands that come. It’s the fact that bands will play multiple shows (building buzz and letting fans catch them in an otherwise impossibly packed schedule) that really distinguishes SXSW from everything else.

Interactive peeps, if I catch you in Austin next year, sadly, it’ll probably be in-spite of SXSW rather than because of it.

SCHED Mobile Maps for SXSWm

Posted on March 17, 2011March 17, 2011 by lhl

(cross-posted from the SCHED blog)

Hey SCHEDxSWers. SXSWm is in full swing, so it’s a bit of a crazy time to push out new features, but what the hell, right? In that spirit, here’s a new feature I’ve been working on that has been super-useful for helping me navigate around.

Simply put it’s a map layer that includes your SCHED as well as every other event that’s happening over the next few hours. But wait, there’s more! Since we have a few thousand people making SCHED’s this year (yeah!), we actually have some decent data on how relatively busy any specific show is going to be. When you click in, that’s represented by the length of the red bars (with longest being most busy).

I’ll be trying to add a couple more features, over the next couple days, but I think it’s pretty useful as is and we’d love to hear your feedback as we whip this into shape.

Here are directions on how to get this working on iPhone and Android (we haven’t tested anything else yet, so let us know how it works elsewhere. It’s just a KML map, so it should work anywhere that supports it).

This is the map URL, replace ‘lhl’ with your username:

http://atx.sched.org/lhl/map

On Android, all you have to do is type this in the Google Maps Search Bar. Make sure you type the whole URL with http and it’ll give you what you see in the screenshots.

On iPhone, unfortunately, you lose all the detail information with the default map, but if you go to http://maps.google.com/ in Mobile Safari and type in the Google Maps Search Bar it should work.

On iPhone, there’s a free app called My Maps Editor that you can use (it’s great, but you need to click in preferences to make it refresh), and on both, loading your map URL in Google Earth also works.

Let us know how it works for you (though it’s fresh untested code with sharp edges, so it might not!) and feel free to send bug reports to lhl@sched. If none of the directions make sense, don’t worry, we’ll push it into the main mobile site as it gets more baked soon.

SXSW Music 2011 Playlist

Posted on March 9, 2011August 21, 2011 by lhl

I haven’t been very diligent listening to the SXSW torrents this year, but my schedule is already plenty packed: my current SCHED. (My SXSWi is much less structured; primarily planning on catching up with old friends).

Anyway, before things get officially crazy this week (I head into Austin on Thursday), I made a little share a quick and dirty playlist of some of the bands I’m most excited about catching live:

Bonus Track: Not playing at SXSW, but I just stumbled on a great track that Quantic spun at his set last year:
Nicolas Jaar – Mi Mujer (Wolf + Lamb 2010) by Clown and Sunset

New Code: autotunnel

Posted on March 4, 2011March 4, 2011 by lhl

It’s been years since I wrote my original post on using SSH tunnels for SOCKS proxying, but since I’ve been meaning to dig into launchd more, I figured it was time for an upgrade.

Way too many hours later, I present autotunnel. It’s a couple configs/scripts that work together to automatically (re)create your SSH tunnels when you’re set to a Network Location that requests a SOCKS proxy. It’s now a one step process (change your Network Location in the Apple menu) to get secure.

(I also found an app that’s quite similar, sheepsafe. It’s a Ruby-based daemon that does automatic location switching based on “trusted” networks. It switches post-network connection (WatchPaths on SystemConfiguration) but I don’t know if that’s a practical concern or not.)

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Category: Personal