random($foo)

A new month, a new file. I’ll try to get back to a non-prehistoric system over winter break, although other things may take precedence.

• Fantastic Pimp Watch – “trip the light fantastic” indeed – if I didn’t just blow my wad I’d pick one up… heck maybe I will anyway
• Alphabet 26 – Bradbury Thompson’s proposal for simplifying the alphabet
• 1976design w/ the latest iteration of Nice Titles
• America Tunes In for the Money Shot – Frank Rich sums up the MJ coverage; I’m so glad I don’t watch TV
• Firebird Ext – RSS reader Panel – eh, works so so
• GNUpod – GNUpod is a collection of Perl-Scripts wich allow you to use your iPod under GNU/Linux and many other Operating Systems with a useable Version of Perl 5 (+Modules).
• PodWorks – song copier w/ GUI
• Crooked Fingers: The Sounds – really good stuff; playing w/ Azure Ray this week; Ogg Vorbis downloads, cool
• Simon on PostgreSQL 7.4

Recently it seems like everyone’s been getting in on the KnowSpam bandwagon. Somewhere down there on my todo list is getting CRM114 and TMDA all set up and doing their thing. Probably somewhere below getting all my mail piped into a single machine.

Now on how to solve spim…

• John Levine: Challenge-response systems are as harmful as spam – John is correct, C-R is useless without digitally signed envelopes. Although using a CA system could work, so could a simpler solution involving PGP/GPG signatures. PTP verification would probably be computationally prohibitive, but some sort of distributed or transitive trust model might be adequate
• Digital Sundials International – ok, this is even cooler than the Pimp Watch
• Unusable Web – D. Keith Robinson on bad web design

Outsourcing to India in Business Week and at MIT… – now this is some harsh practical education…

The more sophisticated portion of ocw.mit.edu is a 100 percent Microsoft show. A student asks the speakers why they chose Microsoft Content Management Server, expecting to hear a story about careful in-house technical evaluation done by people sort of like them. The answer: “We read a Gartner Group report that said the Microsoft system was the simplest to use among the commercial vendors and that open-source toolkits weren’t worth considering.”

Students began to wake up.

A PowerPoint slide contained the magic word “Delhi”. It turns out that most of the content editing and all of the programming work for OpenCourseware was done in India, either by Sapient, MIT’s main contractor for the project, or by a handful of Microsoft India employees who helped set up the Content Management Server.

Thus did students who are within months of graduating with their $160,000 computer science degrees learn how modern information systems are actually built, even by institutions that earn much of their revenue from educating American software developers.

• Alfarez Abdul Rahman’s Research Documents – some amazingly useful docs that I need to go back and read when I have time
• An overview of PKI trust models
• A Reputation-Based Trust Model for Peer-to-Peer eCommerce Communities
• A distributed trust model for peer-to-peer system [DOC]
• Ontologies for the Semantic Web: Can Social Network Analysis Be Used to Develop Them? [PDF]
• Trust Models for Expertise Discovery in Social Networks [PDF]
• A Distributed Trust System
• bentrott: Verifying PGP Signatures
• pb: PGP and weblog identity
• Social Protocols: Enabling Sophisticated Commerce on the Web
• Federations and Trust Transports

I’ve been working on and off over the past couple months (hmm, since SXSW – wow, I’ve been slow on this) on what I’m labeling ‘distributed social software‘, sort of redundant one might think, except that ironically, besides the original social-software catylyst (blogs) no current generation social networking systems are distributed, and even with blogs, not formally so (not necessarily a bad thing, perhaps, but that’s another argument).

Anyway, sort of surprising that a Google search turns up exactly zero matches, but I was talking to a friend who had simultaneously invented the same term for a CS paper he’s writing, so at least we’re making up terms on the same wavelength. 🙂

Issues I’m currently tackling:

• Defining complex (typed, n-way) trust relationships
• Dealing w/ trust segmentation; trust transitivity across fragmented identity
• pseudonymity and/or double-blind transactions
• not re-inventing any wheels I don’t need to
• maximum simplicity, extensibility, compatibility
• surviving last week of classes (this may be the toughest thing)

A New Website for Harper’s Magazine – Paul Ford describes launching the new Harpers.org website, talks about why it looks so similar to Ftrain, and building a Semantic Web taxonomy. Exciting stuff.

• Friendster Usability Analysis – This is a usability analysis of the Friendster Internet service, collaboratively created by the students of MIT course 6.171 in November 2003.
• Where Are The Founders Of The Dial-Up Revolution? – /. discussion on the Hayes article
• Yahoo! Photos redesign – what Ernie’s been working on the past couple of months; OK, working, just intermittent server wonkiness
• Good lord that’s a huge DSL bill – and for transferring only 24.5Gb? That’s pathetic

• TreoCentral: Hacked the Logo, Now Hacking the Rest – go go go
• Juan Cole: Bush Sneaks in and Out of Baghdad
• Well-Designed Weblogs
• Seagate Exec: Sub-$200 Terabyte Storage Two Years Off – so, maybe I don’t need to worry about more than 4 drives, I can just quadruple storage in two years by swapping my old drives out
• del.icio.us – Delicious is a social bookmarks manager; w/ REST API; brilliant (via veen, via waxy)
• Classical Madness – japanese classical music videogame
• MarrowSoft Xselerator XSLT IDE and Debugger
• NYTimes: Decoding the New Cues in Online Society
  

  Devon Lake, 25, a high school teacher, discovered that this fall when she was bombarded with requests from former students to accept them into her Friendster circle, which she uses to keep in touch with her friends from Burning Man, the annual primal gathering in the Nevada desert. The potential costs of putting one part of her network in contact with the other part were too high, so she rebuffed her students and cleaned up her profile by removing anything that could be interpreted as a reference to drugs. “I’m a young teacher, so drawing that line is already a careful balancing act,” Ms. Lake said. “It made me feel on my guard about what I posted to the site.”

• [this is dumb] – frickin awesome

Trying to figure out making QuickTime Playlists right now. There’s a free program called QT Xlist which will play text lists, however one can’t navigate sections… There’s also a program called QT Playlist Maker, but it’s $15. It looks like it’s just generating SMIL, so I’m putting together something to do just that.

• QuickTime and SMIL
• Getting Started With SMIL
• The SMIL Tutorial
• Learning SMIL with a SMIL
• Playing Shoutcast or Icecast Streams in QuickTime