All my blog posts and articles
I recently saw a Nova episode about Hany Farid about so called “Digital Forensics”, that is how to detect and discover photos manipulated digitally. Here are some useful links if you are interested: www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/
www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0802/digital-forensics-an-interview-with-dr-hany-farid.html
www.wired.com/gadgets/digitalcameras/news/2007/03/72883
Check ou...
How lame and do-nothing can you get when the best you can do is to set a goal to be met in 2050, when probably most of the signatories will be dead and gone? Do you think it has any effect on anything real? “RUSUTSU, Japan – The Group of Eight leading industrial nations on Tuesday endorsed halving world emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050, edging forward in the battle against global warming but stopping short of tough, nearer-term targets.” (from Associated Press)
Lame-o?
Aleksey (my colleague on BlogBridge) is planning to move from the Ukraine to Australia. Here’s a fairly fascinating account of the experience of proving that he knows enough English to be permitted to Australia. Check out this post from noizZze to read about his interesting adventure: “IELTS test is an indispensable part of the process as we have to prove our language abilities along with technical skills and other stuff when applying to the Skilled Immigration Visa. According to the requirements, I need a pretty high score (somewhere around 7 of 10) and Kate’s needs to be at least 5. One interesting fact th...
Have you noticed? How frequently I’ve been posting? I am using WordPress’s ‘post in the future’ feature so in one sitting I can rattle off 6 or 7 posts and schedule them for publication in the coming days.
Very efficient 🙂
“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood”
— the great city builder Daniel H. Burnham
If you live in the Boston area and are in the tech business you should check out the more or less monthly Web Innovators gathering sometimes referred to in shorthand as WebInno. Here is the WebInnot blog and here is the WebInno registration page and announcement of the next WebInno event. For all of y’all who suffer from the boston-isnt-as-cool-as-silicon-valley syndrome, I strongly recommend you check out the next WebInno. Here again are the coordinates:
“It’s just over two weeks away until our July 15th Web Innovators Group meeting and we’ve lined up another great set of demonstrators for the event.
As usual, the doors officially open at 6:30pm at the Grand Ballroom in the Cambridge Royal Sonesta, with the “main dish” presentations to the entire crowd starting at 7pm.” (from WebInno)
I am just finished reading Devil In The White City by Erik Larson. Loved it! This news item about the first archaeological dig at the site of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition caught my eye because that is what the book is about (also about a serial murderer, but that’s something else again.) I am only part way through the book but it’s quite good so far.
Recently three friends of mine got nice press coverage, so I thought I’d share them:
Reed Sturtevant is doing some great things at Microsoft in Boston
Paul Engiish and Kayak are showing the true prices of air travel
Ted Morgan of Skyhook are performing magic with photos and no-GPS
So in fact, there IS cool tech stuff going on in Boston 🙂
I just came across Dave Dupre’s blog. Some good reading there, for example: “[…snip] If the single test does not show a huge improvement, the project is considered a failure and scrapped. This happens all the time, and it always stifles innovation. Why propose something new if you have to be right all the time?
Innovation does not proceed on a schedule. To maintain a culture of innovation, occasional failure must be allowed – even encouraged! As long as you learn from your mistakes and move on and get better, the team and the company will be better off.” (from Fear of Failure)
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I haven’t seen anyone pointing to this article about TechCrunch and Professor Arrington, but it’s very interesting. I remember when it was first starting and how he would write an unbelievable number of interesting and useful reviews about new products. Mike Arrington was a machine! Say what you will about him, TechCrunch is the labor of some extremely hard work: “Of course, Arrington’s success is about more than partying like a frat boy and schmoozing like a Hollywood agent at a cast party. With the exception of a three-week vacation (during which he worked half-time) at the end of 2006, he says he has worked every day for t...
He’s been saying something like this since a week after 9/11. I agreed with him then, and I still agree with him: “Oil is poisoning our climate and our geopolitics, and here is how we’re going to break our addiction: We’re going to set a floor price of $4.50 a gallon for gasoline and $100 a barrel for oil. And that floor price is going to trigger massive investments in renewable energy — particularly wind, solar panels and solar thermal. And we’re also going to go on a crash program to dramatica...
I am on a Mac and I have lots of odd little things running, doing backups, syncs, who knows what. Every so often my computer goes “boink!” with no error message or display and I wonder, hmm, I wonder what just happened? I have a suspicion it’s my hourly backup which is boinking because one file couldn’t be backed up. But it might be finder saying that it was done copying all those files (oh wait, maybe that’s a “bing” not a “boing”) Or might it be something else totally?
I got the big new release of FireFox 3.0. Looks fine. Actually looks mostly the same. I am not sure what the big changes are but I am trying it out to see how it goes. I know one regular headache with FireFox for me has been that it would pin the CPU for no apparent reason. The closest I came to seeing a pattern is that it seemed to have to do with pages being opened that had Flash scripts on them. But I can’t say I ever verified that. All I know is that fairly regularly when my system got slow, I would see FireFox at the top.
If that’s all that FF3.0 fixes, that would be enough for me.
Update: I just saw this link about FireFox 3.0
I am a LifeLock customer and so I follow developments in this arena pretty closely. Check this post LifeLock and Identity Theft from Schneier on Security: LifeLock does a bunch of other clever things. They monitor the national address database, and alert you if your address changes. They look for your credit and debit card numbers on hacker and criminal websites and such, and assist you in getting a new number if they see it. They have a million-dollar service guarantee — for complicated legal reasons, they can’t call it insurance — to help you recover if your identity is ever stolen.
All in all, I probably will remain a customer. Schneier does a good job basically saying that LifeLock is clever and useful but too expensive. That’s more positive than the press they’ve been getting.
My Citibank MasterCard allows me to generate a virtual credit card number, pretty simply, using a fairly ugly web interface. But a few clicks and you get a picture of a credit card, including numbers, dates and CVC. The magic is that this credit card can be used only once so if it’s stolen you don’t run a risk. Pretty cool. I just used it to pay for some software online and it worked like a charm. Simple and useful!
This is a question I hear all the time. I thought I’d write a bit of an introduction to the topic. Check out “The difference between a web site and a blog”on Squidoo.
I just returned from RailsConf, a conference all about Ruby on Rails. Many bloggers have written about it so I won’t summarize it further. In the coming days I will be posting on various of my discoveries and contacts made. For today though I want to just direct your attention to the picture on the left. After the conference (which was in Portland Oregon) we drove to Seattle and spent one full day in ...
Sounds ominous, right? So I call them up, and I hear a serious voice telling me to please hold on, then I hear the official sounding “you are being recorded” beep beep beep. Then the voice comes on the phone and says, “Thanks for calling Discover Card. Please give me your Discover Card number.”
What would you do? I am worried about fraud on my card, right? But do I know who I am actually talking to?
There’s an amusing site called Google Sightseeing whose sole purpose is to point out cool/curious/amusing features that people can pick out from the (amazingly cool) satellite images provided by Google Maps. Inspired by the pictures in today’s feed I remembered that Target stores have a cute image on the roofs of their stores, so I went looking and found this one right in my own neighborhood!
Ever wonder what speed your internet connection really has? Try this handy-dandy little utility!