The View From My Feet

The Times, They Are A-Changin'

2011-05-23T07:38:00.002-04:00

Friday marked the end of my last week as a member of the Computer Science Department. For over 15 years I worked with dedicated individuals who saw to the needs of the faculty, students and staff of the department. I was fortunate to to work around some very smart people and learned quite a bit.

Today I start a new adventure, as the manager of the Network Systems group within the Office of Information Technology. I've known the people in my group for almost all of the time I've been at the University, and look forward to working with them. The scope of my new job will be a bit more narrow than my last, but the scale will be huge. All-in-all, a fair balance, I'd say. :-)

I'm excited to see where all of this will take me.

Running Simplify Media's Software on CentOS 5

2009-10-06T19:10:00.002-04:00

I love Simplify Media's music sharing system. It lets me have access to all of the music I have on one computer from my iPhone or any other computer I use. So, I no longer need multiple copies of every song, and I can listen to the entirety of my collection from the iPhone, regardless of the amount of memory available on the phone. Now, I don't have a ton of music, but I do have over 30 GB. Clearly, that would be a bit tough to shoe-horn on to a 16 GB iPhone.

Now, in addition to the iPhone app, Simplify has software for the Mac, MS-Windows, and Ubuntu Linux. My home fileserver, where all of my music lives, is a Linux system, but for a number fo reasons I am running CentOS, not Ubuntu. Unfortunately, the Linux code provided by Simplify will not "just run" on CentOS because of a system library problem.

Simplify's Linux software includes the SimplifyMedia client and the SimplifyPeer server. These programs are dynamically linked and written in C++, and therefore require the libstdc++.so library. The latest library version available on CentOS is libstdc++.6.0.8, but the Simplify programs require libstdc++.so.6.0.9. I found all of this out when I tried to run SimplifyPeer and got this error message:

./SimplifyPeer: /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6:version `GLIBCXX_3.4.9' not found (required by ./SimplifyPeer)

Being the geek that I am, I ran the 'strings' command against the library and looked for "GLIBCXX." The highest number I found was "3.4.8," which clearly was not going to cut it. I did a number fo different Google searches, and most of the results I found spoke of replacing the libstdc++.so file, but very few of them actually told me how to go about getting a copy. I finally stumbled across a forum post on eurocardsharing.com that included a link to download a RAR file containing the libstdc++.6.0.9 library file.

Great! Now I had the library file I needed to run the program. The problem I now had was that I was a bit nervous about replacing /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6. I wasn't sure if just replacing it with a later version would break anything. So I started looking at options for the dynamic linker, starting with LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Unfortunately, none of the various permutations of LD_LIBRARY_PATH values I could think of worked. It was time to check out the ld.so man page....

In the ld.so/ld-linux.so man page on my system, the first environment variable listed is LD_LIBABRY_PATH, and the second one is LD_PRELOAD. Herein lies the required magic. Files listed in this variable are "ELF shared libraries to be loaded before all others." This allows you to "selectively override functions in other shared libraries." It turns out this was just what I needed.

The SimplifyPeer program is normally invoked by a bash script that sets a number of arguments in addition to those required from the user. Since I had unpacked the .tgz file into /usr/local, all I needed to do was put the libstdc++.so.6.0.9 file in the same directory as the program, and add this line to the bash script before the SimplifyPeer program was run:

export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/simplifymedia/libstdc++.so.6.0.9

That done, I fired up the simplifyserver.sh script with the appropriate arguments for my account, machine name and MP3 directory, and it ran! My family and I could now use Simplify Media to access all of the music on my fileserver from my laptop, the various PCs around the house and, most importantly, the short-on-memory iPhone. This will allow for more varied musical choices on those long car rides to DC when transporting my oldest to and from college.

Google Voice: First Impressions

2009-03-18T12:28:00.002-04:00

After waiting for what felt like forever, last night I finally got my invitation to upgrade from GrandCentral to Google Voice. Following are some of my first impressions....

Custom ring-back tones are gone - my British friends used to get something that sounded like home.

"Call Presentation" is now settable by group and address book entry - finally, I no longer need to press "1" to accept a call from members of my family. When I pick up the call is immediately connected. This is different form the GrandCentral call screening options. There, I could either screen everybody, screen blocked number, or screen nobody. This finer-grained control is something I (and others, I suspect) have been waiting for. There does seem to be a downside, though. If I have call presentation off (aka connect on answer), there's a chance that my home answering machine, my work voicemail, or my mobile voicemail will answer even if I don't, and then the advantage of Google Voice's voicemail is lost. I'll need to check up to 3 places if I don't pick up fast enough.

Custom greetings seem to still be available.

Voicemail messages now get transcribed to text. By default the transcribed messages is e-mailed to your GMail account. You can still also get notification of new voicemail via SMS to your cell phone, but now the SMS message has the transcribed message (at least if it's short enough). Nicely, the voicemail notification now comes from my Google Voice number, rather than some seemingly random SMS number. That allows me (at least on the iPhone) to call that number and then pick up the message, in case the entire thing didn't get sent in the SMS message or if the transcription looks strange. I've left myself a few simple voicemail messages that were not transcribed all too well.

Text messages are interesting... If somebody sends a SMS message to my Google Voice number, it shows up on my phone as coming from some number in the 406 area code. If I reply to that number, they get my reply. If somebody else sends a SMS message to that number, it is not delivered to the sender of the original message. Clearly there is some sort of mapping such that messages from me to that number get re-routed back to the originator. This mapping appears to last at least 2.5 hours - maybe it's permanent.

In addition, if I get a text message from somebody in my Google address book, their name shows up as a prefix in every message I get from them. If they aren't in my address book, then their originating phone number shows up there instead.

That's it for now. Lunch is over and I really should get back to doing what I get paid for. :-)

ETech Notes from "Refactor Your Wetware"

2009-03-10T03:46:00.004-04:00

My morning ETech 09 tutorial was "Refactor Your Wetware," presented by Andy Hunt, the author of the book "Pragmatic Thinking & Learning." Below are some notes I took during the tutorial. Perhaps they will be useful to others.

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There is a big difference between typing a note and hand-writing because of the way the brain processes during both activities.

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The Dreyfus Model:

If you force experts to follow the rules laid out for novices, you can degrade their performance signifcantly (up to 100%?).

Experts are more likely to see themselves as part of the system. Novices feel that they are outside the system.

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There is a cultural bias against intuition, which sprins from deeply ingrained knowledge. Experts operate on intuition.

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The brain can be imagined as 2 different types of "CPUs" with shared access to the memory, where only 1 CPU can access the memory at a time. CPU #1 is more "von Neumann" and linear and slower in operation. CPU #2 is more like a DSP, non-linear and fast. CPU #1 is sometimes referenced as the left brain, and CPU #2 is sometimes referenced as the right brain. We'll use L-Mode (for linear mode) and R-Mode (for rich mode).

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N. Negraponte: If you want to learn about a frog, don't disect one, build one.

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Pretty (or aesthetically pleasing) things are actually easier to use.

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When you're typing notes, L-Mode gets preference and shuts down R-Mode. You're forcing symbolic processing.

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Dream state imagery is more R-Mode, which is why a dream evaporates as you you try to explain it, which utilizes L-Mode. You can't read signs in a dream because it would require L-Mode.

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Math prodigies have better coordinated L-Mode and R-Mode processing, rather than having to switch back and forth like the rest of us.

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Check into Lozanov Séances from the 1970s. He would immerse students in a rich R-Mode experience related to a given task. They would perform better than students who did not have the R-Mode experience.

Leading with an R-Mode experience before an L-Mode "lecture" gives a context for the L-Mode staff to better stick to.

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Investigate Image Streaming and Morning Pages.

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A "whack on the side of the head" can help to clarify thinking. Looking at a problem differently, such as "in reverse" can be helpful.

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If you don't keep track of great ideas that you have, you'll stop noticing that you have them, and then you'll stop having them. Carry a notebook of some type so you can write down ideas as you have them.

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"Education" comes from "edu" and "care" which translates to "drawn forth." Dumping a load of knowledge on somebody is less educational than getting them to realize and work things out.

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Getting Things Done:

- scan a queue once and process what you can, catagorize other items
- work each pile
- don't keep mental lists, they will distract you -- write your lists
- join the "inbox 0" crowd

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SQ3R:
- survey: scan the ToC and chapter summaries for an overview
- question: note any questions you have
- read: read in its entirety
- recite: summarize, take notes, and put things in your own words
- review: reread, expand notes, and discuss with colleagues

SQ3R can help you use books more effectively

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Do Mind Maps, but do them by hand instead of using any software packages. Doing them by hand will use R-Mode, which can be more effective.

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Affinity Grouping - have your team make notes on post-its and group them on a whiteboard. Use markers to show relationships.

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Learn by Teaching - try to explain to others what you do, in terms they can understand

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Gain Experience:
(tennis example) Place a chair in a tennis court. Hit balls from the other sid, but don't try to hit the chair. Instead, just hit the ball and verbalize where it goes in relation to the chair. This sets up a feedback loop. See "The Inner Game of Tennis" and other "The Inner Game of" books.

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Prevent brain lock-up. Give your brain permission to fail. Your brain can lock-up when you arein a panic. Try to minimize deadline pressures.

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Beware of e-mail apnea. Breathe!

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Breathing:

Sit alert, with a straight back. Notice and release tension. Focus attention on just 1 thing at a time.

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Managing the information torrent:

Keep a personal wiki. (eclipse has a wiki package)

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Look into Sense Tuning

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Checking e-mail too often can drop your effictive IQ by 10 points. Smoking a joint only drops it by 4.

E-Mail checking behavior can be driven by "variable intermittant reward" motivation.

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More screen real estate can make you more productive by allowing more items to be visible, removing the need to switch applications (ALT-TAB), requiring a more overt context switch.

Use virtual desktops (eg Mac Spaces) to group related tasks, tools and applications. For example: put all the disruptive things such as e-mail and IM on their own desktop.

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When interrupted (by a phone call, an office visitor, etc), leave yourself a breadcrumb in order to get bak to the interrupted task more quickly. Otherwise, you may need to re-create state from scratch.

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New habits can take 3-4 weeks to gel.

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Belief is physical. Belief can make changes to your brain. If you believe that someting is possible, your brain re-wires itself to make it easier to do the task. If you believe something is impossible, your brain will make it so.

Shosholoza

2008-12-06T11:10:00.001-05:00

My son Eric neglected to tell me that he had a duet at last night's winter concert (his last one of high school). If I had known, I might have brought something better than my Canon PowerShot A710 to record this. Oh, Eric is the boy on the right. :-)

Cluster Node-Locking with Torque and Maui

2008-10-22T11:41:00.003-04:00

These are mostly notes to myself so that I can figure out how to do this more quickly next time...

We needed to add some nodes to a Rocks 4.1 cluster where members of a particular lab were to have exclusive use of the nodes for a period of time. So, we had to find a way to allow these folks to submit jobs that would run only on the new nodes and to also prevent anybody else from running on the nodes. We chose a belt-and-suspenders approach using features of both Torque (PBS) and Maui.

Previously, we had a single "default" queue for all users of this cluster. We added a "vision" queue for the users of the new machines so that they would be able to explicitly request that their jobs run on the new hardware. This queue specifies ACLs for the node list as well as the users allowed to submit jobs to the queue. In addition, there is a "neednodes" resource specified that gives Maui a clue as to where any jobs in this queue can be run. Here are the commands we ran to set up the queue:


qmgr -c "create queue vision queue_type=execution"
qmgr -c "set queue vision resources_default.neednodes = vision"
qmgr -c "set queue vision acl_hosts=compute-0-22+compute-0-23+compute-0-24"
qmgr -c "set queue vision acl_host_enable = false"
qmgr -c "set queue vision acl_users=user1"
qmgr -c "set queue vision acl_users+=user2"
qmgr -c "set queue vision acl_users+=user3"
qmgr -c "set queue vision acl_user_enable=true"
qmgr -c "set queue vision enabled = True"
qmgr -c "set queue vision started = True"

The acl_host_enable = false setting causes Torque to use the acl_hosts list as nodes on which jobs should be queued, rather than as nodes that can run the qsub command. Note that there does not appear to be a way to set multiple acl_users in a single command. While a "list queue" command will show the users in a comma-separated list, if you try to set the ACL that way you get a syntax error. The same can be said for the method of using a plus sign as is done for the hosts ACL.

In addition to setting up the vision queue, a change was needed for the default queue and to the Torque nodes file which, in our case, was /opt/torque/server_priv/nodes but generically would be found at $TORQUE_HOME/server_priv/nodes. We added a "neednodes" resource to the default queue as we did for the vision queue:

qmgr -c "set queue default resources_default.neednodes = general"

For each of the 3 new machines, we appended the word "vision" to the line defining the node like so:

compute-0-22.local np=4 vision

For the rest of the nodes in the file, we added the word "general" like so:

compute-0-0.local np=4 general

After restarting the pbs_server and maui daemons, the end result was that anybody could submit jobs to the default queue and they would run on any node except the 3 nodes dedicated to the vision lab. Only specific users could submit jobs to the vision queue and those jobs would only run on the 3 new machines. This is just what we were looking for. If we ever want to allow everybody to use the new nodes from the default queue, I believe that it should be as simple as appending the word "general" to the "vision" nodes in the server_prive/nodes file.

Space Shuttles and Rainbows

2008-09-22T23:15:00.004-04:00

A co-worker of mine pointed me to this picture that he saw on digg. That prompted me to go off and find the whole series, which I tagged on del.icio.us.

It's the Little Things

2008-08-20T21:35:00.003-04:00

The other day, I discovered yet another little useful thing about the iPhone 3G. I don't know if the original iPhone did this, but the new one remembers volume settings in the iPod application. I normally use a cassette adapter to listen to podcasts when I drive into work. The first time I plugged in the iPhone earbuds/mic, I lowered the volume from the "full" I needed for the cassette adapter. A little later, I tried the built-in speaker and had to adjust the volume again.

The next time I went to listen in the car, I plugged in the adapter and the volume jumped all the way to full on its own. I unplugged the adapter and the volume dropped back to the value for the built-in speaker. I then tried the earbuds and the volume slider moved again. I know this may seem like a little thing, but it's kinda nice that I don't have to muck with the volume every time I want to listen a different way....

Drinking the Kool-Aid

2008-08-20T21:20:00.002-04:00

It looks like the iPhone Kool-Aid has been flowing in my department, and it seems that everybody but my manager has imbibed. At first, it was just Steve who really wanted one. Then, I think he slipped something into my coffee one morning and I decided to give it a go as well. One-by-one, 4 more guys in the group decide to take the plunge (cue the big red pitcher saying "Oh yeah!"). Even the guy who really wanted the Blackberry Bold decided to go for it. So far, Shazam and SimplifyMedia are the hit applications....

How Not to Upgrade Your Computer Room UPS

2008-06-11T22:37:00.005-04:00

The Computer Science Department at Princeton University needed to replace its computer room UPS. The old unit was a PowerWare 9330-40, a 208V 40 kVA UPS, installed in July 2005. When this box was first installed, the load was around 60%. Over time this has crept up to over 90%, causing us to believe that an upgrade was in order.

The new UPS is a PowerWare 9390-80, a 480V 80 kVA UPS that fills two 6 foot tall racks and weighs in at something near 4000 lbs -- we needed to add additional supports under the raised floor to handle the increased weight load. The UPS and its wall-mounted bypass switch cabinet arrived a few weeks ago, were put into the computer room, and were wired together in preparation for the big day.

That day was Tuesday, June 10, when we had scheduled a full computer room downtime from 6 AM until 2 PM. We figured that this should be plenty of time to unwire the old 208V UPS, re-wire our Liebert power distribution center back to factory specs (we had to change things around in order to accommodate a 208V UPS in a room with a 480V power feed), and get the new UPS and the computers and network gear up and running. Well as they say, "Two out of three ain't bad."

We had everything in the room shut down and powered off somewhere between 6:00 and 6:30, allowing the electrician to get started re-wiring at 7 AM. The PowerWare technician arrived around 9 and started his prep and check work on the new UPS. He needed to connect all of the batteries together and test voltages, check over all of the pre-wiring work, as well as a bunch of other stuff required before the unit could be turned on.

Most of the morning, everything seemed to be going along fine. The electrician finishes ripping out the old UPS wiring hacks and gets the new UPS and bypass switched wired in the way they should be. The UPS technician does his initial power-on and starts testing the system. Some time was lost when the electrician had trouble getting lugs installed on a breaker, but that was only about a 30 minute diversion. Then the first problem hit...

There are three panel boards in the Liebert system for power distribution, each of which has a 225A main breaker. When we went to put some test load on the UPS, one of those main breakers refused to stay on. It didn't trip, the handle just slowly moved from "on" to "off" on its own. It never made that satisfying "click" when you turned it on. Since about half of our load was on that panel board, this was going to be a problem.

The electrician kept working at it, and eventually the breaker clicked into the on position and stayed there. We're planing on having it replaced the next time we take the room down, but we decided to live with it for now. If the breaker goes, we'll just be replacing it a bit sooner than we planned.

At some point, the PowerWare technician decided that he didn't like the path that some of the signal wires took between the two UPS cabinets and decided they should be re-routed. During that re-wiring process, he discovered that he could no longer get the battery breaker to turn on, rendering the UPS essentially useless. He puzzled over this for quite a while (hours, in fact) and decided that we needed a replacement circuit breaker for the battery cabinet. Since this was a new UPS start-up and not a failure situation in the eyes of the company, the earliest we could get a replacement breaker was Wednesday morning at 8:30 AM. Even getting this required quite a bit of the technician's time on the phone.

We had underestimated a little on how long the electrician would need to complete his tasks, but if that and the 225A breaker were the only issues, we would have only missed our downtime window by about an hour. However, the problems with the new UPS stretched our downtime until 6 PM, four additional hours (for 12 hours of downtime). At this point, we had to decide whether or not to bring up the computer room without a UPS. As there were thunderstorms predicted overnight, we decided to leave everything off. Considering that the lights blinked out later that night, I believe we made the correct decision.

Fast forward to Wednesday at 8:30 AM (26.5 hours of downtime). Two replacement battery cabinet circuit breakers were delivered by FedEx. The PowerWare technician arrived around 9:15 and got to work. He was not able to find the hex wrench he needed to remove the wires from the breaker, so one of us went to track one down. By the time we found a wrench, the technician had found his and got to work. The replacement breaker was installed and when the technician tried to turn it on, it didn't work either. By 11 AM (29 hours of downtime), the cause of the problem was still unknown. By 1 PM (31 hours of downtime) , after examining his schematics (which didn't appear to exactly match the UPS we had) and making a number of phone calls, the technician finally figured out that the breaker required 48V available in order to be switched on and that the fuse protecting that 48V circuit had blown. This is an $11 part that had taken, by this time, over 8 hours of effort to identify as the source of the problem. The total cost of this UPS is around $80,000.

Of course, the technician didn't have one of these fuses in his van. Two of my co-workers called around to a number of electrical houses and eventually found some. By around 3 PM (33 hours of downtime), the technician had replaced the fuse and was running his final checks. We decided to test the EPO (Emergency Power Off) switch before we put any load on the system. It did absolutely nothing. The wire from the EPO switches had never been connected to the UPS control input. Once again the UPS was opened up and the wire connected. We test again and the UPS only went into bypass, but didn't shut down. This is not exactly what we would have expected a "power off" button to do. The technician did some studying of the documentation, changed some settings and we tried again, with the same result. It turns out that we need to hold EPO switch for at least 3 seconds for the UPS to actually shut down. None of us like this, but I guess we'll have to live with it for now.

We got our operational training so that we could properly take the UPS in and out of maintenance bypass, and we started to bring up the room. It was now around 5 PM (35 hours of downtime). With everything down for so long, we decide that caution was the order of the day when we brought the world back up. What normally takes 45 minutes to an hour took 90 minutes. By 6:30 PM (36.5 hours after our adventure started), everything was back up and we were starting to receive all of the EMail that had been queued up for us around the world. All of us in the Computer Science Department are hoping that we never have to do this again.

me.com

2008-06-09T15:21:00.003-04:00

me.com
Originally uploaded by Chris Tengi

Today, Apple announced me.com, the re-branding of .mac. At least, I think that was their intent....

Back in the Sadle

2008-06-07T22:18:00.006-04:00

Yesterday, I rode my bicycle to work for the first time in about 15 years. The reason for the long hiatus was mostly inertia. It was always: "I really should try riding to work again." Now, the last time I did this, I had a front tire blow-out on the way home and went flying over the handlebars, making a perfect 3-point landing on my knee, hand and head. Fortunately I was wearing a helmet and gloves, so my knee was the only part of me that sustained any damage. I'm firmly convinced that if I hadn't been wearing a helmet, my injuries would have been far worse than a scraped up knee. This little incident is one of the reasons that I'm a strong advocate for bicycle helmets.

But back to the current ride...

Like many Americans, I don't get nearly enough exercise, so I thought that riding my bike to work a couple of times a week might be a good thing to do, now that the weather has gotten nice. At 8.6 miles each way, it's not a bad little ride. It took me about 45 minutes both ways in light traffic. Of course, it wasn't the traffic that made the ride take that long, it was just me.

In my car it takes about 20 minutes to go from home to work, so only taking a little more than twice that for a bike ride was actually pretty good. And the ride itself was very pleasant, despite the fact that most of the ride was along 8 to 12 inch shoulders. Both in the morning and the evening, drivers gave me plenty of room as they passed and it was 68F for my morning ride in and 86F for the afternoon ride home.

The forecast for Monday is 97F, so I don't think riding then will be such a good idea, but Wednesday and Friday look good, so maybe I'll get in 2 rides next week. With any luck, I'll be back in the saddle and the only thing I'll have to worry about is getting saddle sore.

Project 365 (+42)

2008-04-04T12:48:00.005-04:00

Yesterday, I finally finished up my flickr Project 365 work. I really didn't plan on it taking exactly 42 days more than the 365, but you know that 42 is the answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, so nobody should be surprised. I actually took the last picture on Feb. 14 and uploaded the last batch on April 2, but I didn't finish sending the last ones to the Project 365 Group until yesterday.

For those of you that don't know, the idea behind Project 365 is to take a new picture (or 2, or 3, or 4, or....) every day, with the goal of improving your photographic skill and technique. Over the course of a year, I've taken literally thousands of pictures (gotta love digital cameras!) . I've gotten some OK shots, some really nice ones, and some that never made it off of the camera. I got a new camera, broke the new camera, moved back to the old camera, and moved back after getting the new one repaired. Some of the shots I found easily, and some were desperation shots taken just before (or in some cases shortly after) midnight. During the last few months, I started really obsessing about getting a picture every day and my wife suggested, rightly so, that I should just quit. However, I really wanted to see this through, so I just kept at it.

So, did I get a new picture every day? No, but I did take one to be used on the days I missed. Did this project make me a better photographer? Maybe yes, maybe no. I did learn how to use some of the features of my cameras that allowed me to take pictures I would not have otherwise been able to take, so that's something gained. Would I do this again, or something like it, in the future? No, I have too many other things to do. That being said, I don't have any regrets about the project and wouldn't caution others against it. I would just suggest that they go in with their eyes open and that they not get obsessive about it. It's all just a bunch of bits anyway.

Eric's Whirlwind Spring Break College Tour

2008-03-25T21:49:00.003-04:00

It's that time of year when parents of high school juniors all across the country venture forth to visit colleges and universities. We, as you might expect, are no exception. Follow our progress at http://cjtengi.jaiku.com

I Love Planned Economy

2008-03-06T12:03:00.005-05:00

Last night at ETech 08, Comrad Nikita Chrusov held a BOF session where he told us all about the leading-edge technology used by his country. He ended his presentation with a song....

Disk Encryption May Not Protect Your Data

2008-02-21T11:18:00.005-05:00

Ed Felten and his research group have found a fairly easy way to defeat disk encryption technologies used by MS-Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It turns out that encryption keys in DRAM can be recovered fairly easily if you have physical access to a laptop either powered-on or in sleep mode.

LoC Photo Collection on Flickr

2008-02-20T14:59:00.004-05:00

I just came across this post in the flickr blog talking about "The Commons." It looks like the Library of Congress has made a chunk of their photo collection available on flickr. This is really cool. From what I've heard, the LoC has quite a collection. Not only have they made these photos available, they're encouraging flickr users to tag them, making everything searchable. And if that isn't enough, the LoC includes a "Persistent URL" in the photo description that takes you to a page where you can download a higher-res JPEG or their archival TIFF file. The 137 MB TIFF I downloaded was 1800x1800 DPI, which made zooming and panning quite a bit of fun.

Bonjour Printing to a Linux CUPS Server

2008-02-17T22:15:00.003-05:00

Bonjour (aka ZeroConf - mostly) printing looks like a great way to print from a Mac to a Bonjour-capable printer on the same IP subnet. However, on a network where the printers are not on the same subnet as the hosts that want to use them, something else needs to be done.

In our case, we use a Linux box running CUPS with the cups-lpd listener. All of the printers are on their own private subnet that can only be accessed form within the Computer Science department. All printing is intended to go through the CUPS server, which very nicely takes care of format conversions as needed. This architecture also gives us the ability to do print job accounting and to move jobs to other printers should one fail with jobs in the queue.

The problem is that anybody with a Mac or PC that wants to print something needs to add a network printer definition to their machine. Thanks to the Bonjour capabilities of the Mac, we have been able to use static DNS entries to define and advertise all of our print queues to any Mac user. Here's what we did....

For our printer advertisements we are using statically defined entries in our DNS files to enable DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD) without the need for the Multicast DNS used by Bonjour-enabled printers to advertise themselves. We start with some boilerplate resource records in our main zone file:


;; Service Browsing
b._dns-sd._udp          PTR    @
lb._dns-sd._udp         PTR    @

;; Available Services
_services._dns-sd._udp  PTR    _ipp._tcp
_services._dns-sd._udp  PTR    _printer._tcp

While we only use LPD for printing (the '_printer' record above), I've included the '_ipp' record for those who prefer a more more printing protocol.

The next thing to do is define the print queues themselves, making sure to specify the various DNS records required by Bonjour printing support. Most of the information was found in the Apple Bonjour Printing Specification, but there were a few bits here and there that I put together from various searches around the 'net. I also used a bit of tcpdump sleuthing to discover what actual Macs and printers announce when advertising Bonjour printers. With all that said, here is an example print queue entry:


_printer._tcp           PTR    hp_218._printer._tcp
hp_218._printer._tcp    SRV    0 0 515 lpdrelay.example.edu.
                TXT   "txtvers=1" \
                      "qtotl=1" \
                      "rp=hp_218" \
                      "ty=HP LaserJet 4000 Series PS" \
                      "product=(HP LaserJet 4000 Series)" \
                      "transparent=t" \
                      "copies=t" \
                      "duplex=t" \
                      "color=f" \
                      "pdl=application/pdf,application/postscript"

Please note that the "\"-escaped newlines are only included for readability. One key insight I picked up from a mailing list post was that the TXT record fields all needed to be on a single line (at least for the version of BIND I'm running). The Bonjour printing specification allows for only a single TXT record, but requires multiple attributes.

The txtvers, qtotl, transparent, copies and pdl attributes are the same for all of our printers. The rp attribute specifies the name of the print queue on the CUPS server. The ty attribute provides a "display name" for the user's printer browser and product needs to be the same value as the Product specification in the printer's PPD file. I suspect that the values for color and duplex are fairly obvious. :-)

In our DNS configuration file, we have a definition similar to the one above for every printer that our CUPS server is driving, and while we are currently using the LPD protocol, we could just as just as easily use IPP for printing. For IPP, the above example would require 2 simple changes: All instances of _printer would be replaced with _ipp and the 515 port number in the SRV record would be changed to 631. Both configurations have been tested and appear to work just fine.

If you have any interest in reading further, I have saved a number of bookmarks concerning Bonjour and DNS-SD in del.icio.us.

Computing in the Cloud: Possession and ownership of data

2008-01-14T23:50:00.000-05:00

The first panel on Monday afternoon concerned the possession and ownership of data. Moderated by Ed Felten, the panelists were:

Joel Reidenberg, (home page), Professor of Law, Fordham University
Timothy B. Lee, blogger at Technology Liberation Front and adjunct scholar, Cato Institute
Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director, Electronic Privacy Information Center

The panelists presented their positions and answered audience questions as well as responding to each other's positions. I don't feel that I can do justice to the panelists and what they said, so I'll just give a little flavor of what was said. When the video recording of the session becomes available, I'll add at the bottom of this post.

Tim Lee started things off with the position that privacy is governed by a series of trade-offs. Some data sharing is a pre-requisite for any useful online service and users are generally willing to give up some privacy in return for a valuable service. Some users will be willing to share more information for more value. Tim also spoke a bit about the history of browser cookies, GMail, and the Facebook news feed. All 3 of these things were initially looked at negatively by at least some segment of the user community. In all 3 cases, users became more accepting as they learned more about how the technologies worked, what "opt-out" options existed, and what benefits the users could derive from the technologies. A key point Tim made is that having private companies collecting data about you is less troubling than having the government doing the same. If you don't like the policies of a particular service provider, you can choose not to use that provider, as there are others around with different policies. There are no such choices available when it comes to the government.

Joel Reidenberg focused no 3 sets of implications: ownership of data, embedded values in the architecture, and irony. Data ownership is really how you get to use the bits and bytes. Fair information practice standards provide a control here. However, if data usage is based on a user consent model and the user doesn't understand, how can the model be effective? Joel also raised the question of whether data on social networking sites is public or private. Despite what many users may think, the data is generally public and can be accessed by anybody (including law enforcement). Next up, Joel talked about how privacy values are embedded in the architecture of a given technology. With the Facebook beacon fiasco, we got to see "how the data mining sausage was made" and it bothered quite a few people. We got to see what was going on behind the scenes in a way that was quite graphic when compared to GMail's ad scanning. Joel said that data privacy rules have to focus on effective transparency and proposed that a data usage rule set should travel along with data wherever it goes. Finally, he spoke of the irony that cloud computing actually opens the doors for privacy enhancement. Centralized data holders are easier to find, regulate and prosecute. However, we will need more cooperation in the future between lawmakers and standards bodies if we are to have effective data privacy standards and rules.

Marc Rotenberg gave an introduction to privacy culture. He presented the concept of fair information practices where the entity that collects data on individuals takes on obligations for security, accuracy and rights of access, among others. The custodian of the data has the responsibility to prevent "bad things" from happening to the data. Privacy people by and large believe that technology can be a solution to privacy problems, but the techniques need to be evaluated: having secure encryption keys will protect your data, but having a key escrow system will erode that protection in at least some (if not all) cases. Anonymity is critical to privacy. A person's actual identity should not be required to determine if they have the credentials to use a given service. Also, there is a paradox in that much of privacy is about transparency. Imposing obligations on custodians to be more open and accountable about the data they collect makes it easier to ensure that the data will only be used in known ways. The greater the secrecy about how data is being collected, the greater the possibility that it can be used in negative ways without people learning about it.

As I was trying to actually pay attention to what was being said as I was taking notes, I feel that I may have given short shrift to all 3 presenters and I encourage you to watch the video of the panel (once it becomes available - please check back for an update). That way you'll hear first-hand what they had to say. You'll also get to hear the lively debate that took place during the rebuttal and audience question section.

UPDATE: The video recordings from the workshop are now available at the Princeton UChannel.

Computing in the Cloud Workshop

2008-01-14T14:49:00.000-05:00

Today is day one of the Computing in the Cloud Workshop being presented by Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. After opening remarks by H. Vincent Poor, Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Ed Felten got things rolling with "Computing in the Cloud: What, How and Why."

Starting with definitions of Cloud Computing from John Markoff, Wikipedia, the MIT Technology Review and Eric Schmidt, Ed then went on to expand on them and delve into the history and some of the implications. It's all about location, but why does it matter where the data and software actually is? Possession of data implies control, and control implies power. Whomever owns the systems on which data resides has the ultimate control of how that data is retained and who has access. If, for example, all of your EMail is in your Google Mail account, how confident are you that what you delete is actually gone forever? Are you confident that your data on a third party server will not be accessible by anybody else, except as you decide? If the government presents a subpoena to the holder of your data, what, if anything, will be released?

Ed also gave a broad over of how we got here, talking about the swing back and forth between centralized computing and a more distributed model. Early on, computers were big and expensive so there was an economic incentive to have the users come to the computer. This was followed by timesharing, where users had terminals at remote locations (such as their office), but the actual computer was still in a large, air-conditioned room somewhere. In the late 1970s and early 1980s PCs and Sun Workstations (for example) were available at a low enough cost that individual users could now have local computing. This gave users more autonomy and the potential for a more rich user interface, but at the loss of the lower cost per user, expert management and higher utilization that centralized computing facilities could provide.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the client-server computing model gained popularity but was soon overtaken by the World Wide Web. This swing of the pendulum took us back to a more centralized model of computing where all of the data and manipulations took place on a remote computer and the results were displayed locally, as in early timesharing. In the early 2000s, the web browser became more like a computing device as AJAX and other programming models came into existence. More like the client-server model, some computation takes place on the remotre "back end" and some on the local computer. This brings with it all of the complexities of client-server computing along with those inherent in trying to shoe-horn a computing engine into the browser. In addition, these applications are typically written in multiple programming languages such as SQL for database access, PHP for page generation, and combinations of HTML, XML and Javascript for local processing and display.

The modern tools and infrastructure available today make many interesting "real-time" applications possible. For example, during the Iowa Caucuses, the Democratic Party was able to utilize infrastructure from Amazon to present an "Iowa Democratic Party Caucus Results" web page, that was kept updated as results came in and was not adversely effected by the amount of traffic the page received. The tools of today also allow the creation of sites such as Facebook and ebay. Sites such as these would not have been easily created in the past.

With disk storage prices dropping and as a side-effect of the AJAX-type programming model, data is continually building up in remote data centers. It is in the best interest of the data center owner to hold onto that data for as long as possible as there is probably some value that can be extracted from it along the way.

There are additional concerns and implications to having your data on somebody else's server. How portable is your data? Can you easily extract it and move it to another provider if you so choose? Does your current provider have data retention policies that meet your needs? When you access your data, how secure and private is the connection between your computer and the provider's site? If an intermediary has lots of customer data and amkes it difficult for customers to move that data, the provider gains market power.

Concerns such as those above can be addresses in a number of ways. If a cloud computing provider is a "community" then the members of that community have a say about how their data is managed. A provider may also decide that they won't "be evil" and if you trust them to follow through, you may feel more secure about your data. There are also the options of ex post regulations that would control how a provider that has already amassed data must manage the data or ex ante agreements where the provider makes promises up-front as to how they will deal with data on their servers.

A number of the above issues and concerns were addressed in the first afternoon panel discussion: "Possession and Ownership of Data."

UPDATE: The video recordings of the workshop are now available at the Princeton UChannel.

xmppid - OpenID Meets Jabber

2007-12-19T15:58:00.000-05:00

I just found this blog post while looking over the news on Planet Jabber. There is now a web page available that allows you to use your Jabber/XMPP ID (JID) for OpenID authentication. When prompted for a URL to use for OpenID, just add your JID to "http://xmppid.net/." For example, if your JID is "MYNAME@jabber.org" you would specify "http://xmppid.net/MYNAME@jabber.org" for your OpenID URL. You will receive a message with a code on that ID and your browser will be directed to a web page where you must enter the code to complete the transaction. Pretty cool stuff....

Disney World - Day 4 - Magic Kingdom

2007-11-12T14:36:00.001-05:00

4 of 5 in a series of placeholder blog posts. :-) Day 5 started with a character breakfast at the Crystal Palace. We only managed to get on a few rides during the day but went back for "extra magic hours" after spending a few hours at Downtown Disney. As with the previous posts, this will get fleshed out when I get better network access.

Disney World - Day 3 - Animal Kingdom

2007-11-11T01:15:00.003-05:00

Day 3 at WDW was spent at Disney's Animal Kingdom...

We started off on the Kali River Rapids where we all got slightly damp. The boys wanted to ride again, so Randee and I hung out near the exit and watched a few of the more local primates hang out. While everybody continued to dry out, we roamed around, learned a bit about the Komodo Dragon and headed over to the bat house. All of the bats are male, but that doesn't prevent them from "fighting," as one little girl commented. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

The boys and I had been pin trading since we arrived at WDW and our day at the Animal Kingdom presented more opportunities for trading. In fact, it presented opportunities for more than just trading. We were on our way to the 2PM Lion King show when the boys stopped to trade pins with "Joe," a cast member with a clipboard. We chatted for a while and he eventually asked us if we were planning on watching "Mickey's Jingle Jungle Parade." We said we probably would and he asked if we'd like some really good seats. That sounded good to us, so he showed us the route of the parade and said that our seats would follow the parade route. The only requirements were that we wear some minor costumes (vests and Goofy hats with antlers, as it turns out) and wave to everybody - we'd actually be in the parade! How many times does something like *this* come along? (Answer: not nearly often enough).

We went of to the Lion King show and then wandered off to the parade's starting location. We were given our costumes, put on a float, and off we went! We rode all around the park and waved and smiled at many, many people. It was really satisfying to see little kids' eyes light up when you smiled their way. It made you want to keep smiling and waving even thought your arm felt like it would fall off any minute. One amusing moment during the parade was when we looked into the sea of people and saw Mark's 3rd grade teacher waving to us. You just never know who you'l run into at Disney World.

After the parade, there was not a whole lot of time left until the park closed for the day, so we headed off to the new Expedition Everest. The boys and I had each gotten a FastPass for this one earlier in the day and we were ready to go. Randee had no interest so she cruised the gift shop while me and the guys waited on line. The ride was fun and the boys went again since the line was now pretty short. It turns out that Randee spent her time in the gift shop getting the 3 of us Expedition Everest t-shirts for Christmas. It was a nice reminder of the trip when we got them.

So day 3 didn't include too many attractions but it did include a once-in-a-lifetime thrill for all of us. I think that riding in the parade was, for all of us, the highlight of the day, and perhaps the entire trip.

UPDATED 2008/03/19: Way later than I expected.... I originally posted a day 3 (Saturday) entry from my Blackberry at 1:15 AM on Sunday (Nov. 11) using IMified, which is cool, but not great for long blog posts - especially if you want links and pictures.

Disney World - Day 2 - Epcot

2007-11-10T00:48:00.002-05:00

Today we spent a *really* long ("Extra Magic Hours") day at Epcot. We got kind of a late start and didn't actually get on a ride until around 10:45 AM. That ride was "Mission Space" where we discovered that, unlike the last time we were at WDW, there are 2 flavors of the ride: one where they spin you and one where they don't. The boys and I opted for all-spinning, all-dancing and enjoyed it quite well.

After "Mission Space" we met up with Randee's sister Merryl and her girls: Megan and Lauren. We headed for
the "Universe of Energy" where we got to see "Ellen," "Alex" and "Bill Nye The Science Guy" (Bill! Bill!). Nothing new to report here, but we always seem to enjoy this one. We went on to "The Seas" followed by "The Land" where we had lunch.

Other than "Soarin'" (which we rode later, during our Extra Magic Hours), both Land and Sea were pretty disappointing. "The Seas" now seems to be much more geared toward younger visitors (way pre-teen). I remember there being more scientific information available in the past. The boat ride in "The Land" was pretty useless. The last time we went to WDW, there was a cast member riding along with us, explaining what was what and answering questions. This time, we were on our own except for a few pre-recorded blurbs here and there.

After lunch, we headed for "Test Track" which is always fun. We rode again during the Extra Magic Hours, but I took a video clip for our first ride. On the way out, Eric found the car he wants when he turns 17 in January. If he can pay for it, he can have it!

The rest of the daylight hours were spent roaming around the World Showcase. We rode the "River of Time" (another attraction modified down to the way pre-teen level, sigh) and the Maelstrom. We saw Chinese Acrobats and found "Hidden Mickeys" and wandered around until about dinner time, when Merryl and the girls headed back to their hotel. The four of us then had dinner at the "Rose and Crown" where we had lagoon-side seats for the nightly "Illuminations" light and fireworks show. The food was great and we had a great view of the show. If you'd like to watch the show while enjoying some typical British fare, I highly recommend that you make reservations at the Rose and Crown for dinner - and be sure to tell them that you'd like outside seating to watch the fireworks.

We ended the night with a ride on Soarin' which involved almost an hour waiting on line. The wait was worth it (just like it was last time). To keep you amused while you're waiting, they have an interactive wall that allows the crowd to move various animated objects and animals back and forth across the wall. If you wave your arms to the right and your shadow moves into an object, the object moves to the right. The same goes for left, up, and down. They have a number of different games they run, alternating them such that you (hopefully) don't end up playing the same game twice while you're waiting. The ride itself is pretty spectacular. You sit in a "car" in a row of 6 or 8 seats, all facing a large curved screen. Your car gets lifted into the air so that your feet are dangling (don't wear flip-flops!) and all you can see is the screen. They then play an iMax-like movie while blowing you with a gentle breeze, appropriately scented for the area over which you are flying. You almost wish it could go on forever. This one is a definite for Fastpass. I honestly wouldn't mind riding this 2 or 3 times.

I have pictures from this trip over at flickr, with the Epcot pics starting here.

UPDATE 2008/01/04: I originally posted this from my Blackbery using IMified early morning on day 3 as a placeholder post to be fleshed out when I got a net connection better than my Blackberry (and I wasn't ready to just collapse onto the bed :-) ).

Disney World - Day 1 - MGM

2007-11-09T00:03:00.001-05:00

Last night we flew from PHL to Orlando (via Atlanta), got onto Disney's Magical Express, and arrived at the Port Orleans Riverside around 10PM. Fortunately, we had gotten some good advice about packing "first night" clothing and such in a carry-on bag, so we didn't need to wait for our luggage to catch up with us (good thing too, as it didn't get to the resort until 3AM).

Today we spent the day at Disney MGM Studios. The highlights were the new "Lights, Motors, Action" stunt show imported from Disneyland Paris, the Rockin' Roller Coaster, and Fantasmic. The stunt show was very cool (and very loud). This being a Disney attraction, it naturally had a back story: they are "filming" a number of chase sequences for an upcoming movie. Of course they're not really doing that, but it does provide for a bit of behind-the-scenes style theater. If you like fast cars, fast bikes, jumps and flames, this is a show must-see.

The last time we were at the Disney-MGM Studios, they had not yet built the Rockin' Roller Coaster. The premise is that you've been invited by Aerosmith to one of their shows, but everybody's running very late so they need to put you in a really fast limo. They shoot this limo out of the staging area at what seems like 0 to 60 MPH in about 1.5 seconds. I'm sure I have the numbers wrong, but we did get up to speed very quickly. The limo took you over the surprisingly winding and hilly LA freeways to the tune of (naturally) blaring Aerosmith music. Too bad all limo rides can't be like that.

We also tried something new (for us) this year by signing up for a dining plan. This is a really good deal. We had lunch at the ABC Commissary and dinner at Spoodles (at the Boardwalk), saved a substantial bit of money, and walked away from both meals *far* from hungry. The meal plan entitled each of us to a sit-down meal, a counter-service meal, and a snack, every day. The counter-service meal included an entree, a drink and a dessert and the full-service meal added an appetizer to that. I just have to say that the food at Spoodles was absolutely great. I would eat there again even without the meal plan, but I don't think I'd order nearly as much food.

After dinner we headed back to Disney-MGM for the evening's showing of Fantasmic. We saw the show years ago when we were last at Disney-MGM, but I don't remember enough to say if/how the show has evolved. There was lots of smoke and fireworks, as well as animations and movie clips projected on water sprays (which were pretty cool). And of course, there were plenty of Disney characters and extras. All-in-all it was a good show.

I have a bunch of pictures from this trip over at flickr.

UPDATE 2007/12/11: I originally posted this from my Blackbery using IMified. It's a great tool for quick posts, but if you want multiple paragraphs, formatting and HTTP links, you need to do a little post processing on a bigger screen.

I Have Spies Everywhere

2007-10-30T20:05:00.001-04:00

Today, Princeton University held its annual vendor fair. I asked my wife, Randee, if she was planning on attending, and she said "no." One of the vendors there was Dell and they were holding a drawing for a Latitude D630 laptop. I decided to pass, as you needed to be present to win and I wasn't planning on hanging around. -- One of Randee's co-workers had entered the drawing and gone back to the office. She was heading back to the fair, asked Randee to go with her and Randee agreed. With 10 minutes to go before the drawing, Randee decided to enter. 15 minutes later I got a message on my Blackberry from one of my co-workers telling me that Randee won the laptop. A few minutes later I received another message telling me the same thing. -- I sent Randee an EMail asking her if she had anything she wanted to tell me. I got a phone call a few minutes later asking how I knew, before she even got back to her office. I told her that "I have spies everywhere.". :-)

GMail Now Supports IMAP

2007-10-24T10:33:00.000-04:00

I'm in NYC today, attending Interop. One of the keynote speakers is Matthew Glotzbach, who is Head of Products, Google Enterprise. In his talk he announced that, as of today, GMail supports IMAP in addition to POP. Now all of us who use Thunderbird or Mail.app can access our GMail using the same interface we use for our other EMail. Woo-Hoo!

Technorati Tags: Google, GMail, IMAP

Test from IMified

2007-10-18T14:48:00.001-04:00

I just found out about IMified and decided to give it a try. The whole idea is to be able to do a bunch of different things by sending messages to a single IM buddy. You set up an account by adding imified as a buddy and then sending a message. You get a message back with a URL. Visit that page to complete your setup. You can add different widgets to you IMified menu (which is displayed in the conversation when you send IMified a message). I added the Blogger and Remember the Milk widgets to my menu, as well as one called NetLookup, which allows you to do things like ping, traceroute, and whois. Sounds pretty neat.

Google as Landlord

2007-09-20T22:31:00.000-04:00

Today I attended the first "IT Policy Lunch" of the school year. These are weekly lunch-time discussions hosted by Ed Felten, director of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. The topic on the table was "Computing in the Clouds." If you're not familiar with the concept, it is essentially computing as a service, typified by Yahoo!'s flickr and Google Mail. We were given pointers to 2 short blog posts by John Markoff of the "New York Times" for background reading that go into a bit more detail than the one-liner I wrote here.

The discussion was lively and touched on a number of topics such as the level of privacy that users of these services should expect, how difficult should it be for law enforcement to gain access to the data, and do many users even know or care that these types of issues exist? The most notable take-away for me, however, is from a comment made to Ed after the session ended by Matthew Adlai-Gail, Director of New Product Development at Kaplan Eduneering.

Matt said that these services are analogous to an apartment building, where the landlord has the keys, but each tenant has an expectation of privacy within their "space." This seemed to me to be just about right. If I live in an apartment, I can fill it up with my things. As long as I lock the door(s) and windows, I feel confident that nobody will go snooping around when I'm not there. Yes, the landlord has the keys. But between my lease and various laws, he is not likely to use them just to come in and start going through my stuff. If the police want to see what I have, they need to get a warrant from a judge.

Let's say I have a Google account and I use Google Docs to save a few spreadsheets and other random documents. If I have a reasonable password on my account and I don't explicitly share any of documents with anybody, is it more like I have them on a desk in my apartment, or have I left them lying around on the sidewalk? I'd like to think that I haven't left my documents where they can be picked up and read by anybody, and I suspect that many users of these services feel the same way. That just seems reasonable to me. I'll keep my stuff in my "apartment" and let Google be my landlord. While I'm at it, maybe I'll get a place over at the Flickr building for my pictures and let Yahoo! be my landlord over there. I might even put a bunch of pictures in the windows so that everybody can see them. :-)

So, what do you think?

Gigapixel Google Earth

2007-08-22T16:40:00.001-04:00

Apparently, the folks over at the GigaPxl Project have built a camera that can capture thousands of megapixels in a single exposure. They took it around North America and took some very detailed pictures. Then, somebody got the bright idea of integrating these pictures into Google Earth. The results are simply spectacular!

If you haven't downloaded the latest (as of today) version of Google earth, do it right now! Install it, fire it up, and check the "Gigapxl Photos" check-box under "Featured Content" in the layers panel. Then, double-click on the words "Gigapxl Photos" to see what's out there. I've only looked at a few so far, but they are truly amazing.

Navigate your way down to Florida and double-click on the "Space Shuttle Discovery" image icon. Click on the "Fly into..." link and watch the show. Once the image is displayed, you can navigate around it just as you would with Google Earth. Try double-clicking on the car just out from the right tread of the transport. If you zoom in far enough, you can actually read the license plate!

Make your way over to Arizona and double click on the icon for "Angel's Widow" in the Grand Canyon. Fly into that picture and zoom your way toward the dark spot on the top of the outcropping on the right side of the image. Zoom all the way in and be sure to notice the chain-link fence. These images are totally mind-blowing.

I expect that I'll now be ~~wasting~~ spending my entire evening looking at all of these pictures. I really like how they've been aligned with the satellite imagery. A hearty "Bravo!" to all involved.

Phantom Roads at the Big Dig

2007-07-10T18:16:00.000-04:00

I was nosing around Google Maps in Boston's North End when I came across this.

It looks like there's a bit of a problem with old images not meshing properly with new ones. Either that, or cars are driving into the Twilight Zone. While this isn't earth shattering, I did find it somewhat amusing.

Palm Tungsten Case Mod

2007-06-20T15:39:00.001-04:00

Tungsten Case

I have a Palm Tungsten E2, which comes with RealPlayer and an earphone jack. The jack works just fine until you put the Tungsten in a Palm hard case. An unmodified case will not close with a pair of earphones plugged into the Palm because there is no hole for the plug to pass through. This situation makes it a bit difficult to put the case in your pocket when your listening to tunes or a podcast.

Dremel to the rescue!

Looking at the case and the location of the jack on the Palm, I knew that it shouldn't be too difficult to modify the case for an earphone plug if I could get my hands on a Dremel. It turns out that my buddy Steve had one and was willing to lend it to me. Let the modding begin....

Marked for Cutting

I started off by marking the location of the jack on the case with a Sharpie and then making an arc for the cut-out. I used the Sharpie cap to trace out the arc. Naturally, I did this without the benefit of a clamp of any kind, trying to hold the case and the cap with one hand without slipping. I removed the Palm from the case (!) and went to work with the Dremel.

Using a 7mm cutting bit, I roughed out the opening until the Sharpie lines were gone. I then switched to the 14mm sanding drum to gently smooth things out. On my case the base of the arc is roughly flush with the plastic of the case back. When I was using the drum, I angled it down slightly toward the outer edge to remove the lip. After the Dremel, I chipped off th melted plastic that had accumulated and used some 200 grit sandpaper to smooth things out. A little polishing with 000 steel wool and I was done! (mostly)

All Done

I cleaned all of the debris from the case and put in the Palm. I then attached some earphones and closed the case. It was almost perfect -- the top of the case hit the earphone plug. So I took out the Palm and grabbed the Dremel with the sanding drum. Very gently. I placed the spinning drum in the cut-out. Making sure to touch the bottom as little as possible and trying to keep the case from sliding side-to-side, I closed the lid slowly until the drum started cutting an arc. When I thought it was big enough, I opened the case, cleaned sanded and polished and tried fitting the Palm in the case again. This time it was perfect.

Case Closed!

With a time investment of about 20 minutes, I now have a Palm Tungsten in a case that I can close while I listen to music. The case snaps shut so I don't have to worry about anything flopping around (try plugging earphones in with an unmodified case and you'll see exactly what I mean). All-in-all this was an easy project that will make my Palm a much better music player.

Ravenchase Adventures in Princeton

2007-06-18T13:07:00.000-04:00

For Father's day this year, my wife and the boys took me on a little adventure in Princeton. Around noon, Randee said to me and the boys that we needed to be out of the house by 12:30 for a little Father's Day adventure. Of course, everybody but me knew where we were going and what was going to happen when we got there, but who am I to turn down an adventure?

We drove into town and went to the Fitzrandolph Gate in front of Nassau Hall. There we met Rob and Kristine Jenner from Ravenchase Adventures. When all 3 teams had arrived, Rob and Kristine went over the rules and the goals. We were given 4 clues to solve and given an "aged" map showing 5 locations on campus. We were to use our 4 clues to find the final clue that would lead us to a restaurant in Princeton where Rob and Kristine would be waiting for us to buy the first round of drinks and award tacky prizes.

Randee and I had a bit of an advantage as we both work on campus. However, that didn't help us in finding the actual clues once we found the right locations on campus. In fact, one set of (supposedly) required clues was completely missing when we got there. In the fountain behind Robertson Hall there is a fountain/pool. In the fountain there were placed 2006 pennies. The clue here was to find a "coppered Civil War power" which was meant to be the image of Abraham Lincoln on the pennies. However, there was a kids "pool party" going on there and it seems that one or more of the kids collected the coins before any of the teams got there.

We wondered around the fountain for a while trying to find anything copper and eventually gave up (we did not know until later about the pennies). We hit all the other locations on the clue sheets we were given and, at the stadium, found a scroll that took us to the last site. There we found a lock-box that we knew contained the cryptex. The clue on the scroll said to use "Lincoln's date" to open the lock. So, not knowing anything about the pennies, we tried 212 (Feb 12 - Lincoln's birthday). That didn't work, so I looked up the date Lincoln was assassinated on my Blackberry and tried that (I know, you might call that cheating). That didn't work either.

So, I decided to try the brute force method. I set all 3 wheels of the lock to "0" and put pressure on the thumb latch. I was hoping that as I set each wheel to the correct digit of the combination that I'd be able to fel a small movement in the latch. I tried 001, 002, 003, 004, and 005 without any movement of the latch button at all. However, when I got to 006, the box popped open, to the amazement of all 4 of us. We had no idea how "006" could be Lincoln's date, at that point.

I removed the cryptex and gave it to Mark, who had asked to try it first. He spun the wheels for a bit when Eric deciphered the key from the scroll. It was an abbreviation for the name of the race -- DADDY. Mark spun it in and opened the cryptex. I removed the scroll and found the final "clue" with the name of the restaurant. At about that time, my cell phone rang. It was Rob apologizing for the missing clue at the fountain. I told him that we had just opened the cryptex and would meet him at Sotto shortly. We got there and found, to our amazement, that we had won the race! The entire time, we had been joking and mis-quoting Rowan Atkinson in "Rat Race" saying ,"It's a race. We're losing!" Boy, were we surprised.

All-in-all, we had a really fun time wandering around the campus and attempting to solve the clues. I'd recommend this for anybody who likes puzzles and the outdoors. Just remember to wear comfortable walking shoes.

Don't use Preview on the Mac to write EXIF keywords

2007-05-21T11:32:00.000-04:00

If you read this blog, you may have realized by now that I'm a fan of flickr. As I write this, I have 791 photos uploaded to flickr. One of the things I like about flickr is the ability to tag photos, and one of the features of the flickr uploadr (buy a vowel already :-) ) for the Mac is that it will use EXIF (IPTC, really) keywords as tags for uploaded photos.

I've been using Phil Harvey's excellent exiftool to do all sorts of header manipulations as well as jhead to reset the filesystem timestamp once I'm all done mucking around with the file. Not too long ago, I discovered that the Preview application on the Mac will let you set keywords as well. Even though I am a command line kind of guy, I liked the idea of setting keywords for an image while I was actually looking at it. So I went through and added keywords to about 50 pictures. I then went to reset the date using jhead, and it complained about the EXIF header directory. I used exiftool to take a look, and it told me there was a problem with the IDF0 directory. Hmmm....

I contacted Phil to ask him if he could enlighten me at all on the problem. He was kind enought to respond almost immediately with an explanation of the error, a way I could find it myself (use 'exiftool -htmldump0') and even a way to fix it! Talk about customer service. Thanks, Phil!

It turns out that in the process of writing the keywords to the .JPG file, Preview would delete the YCbCrPositioning tag from IFD0 but not update the entry count for the IFD. That would corrupt the structure for pretty much everything following the now missing entry. This turns out to be a fair amount of stuff.

Phil suggested that I open a case with Apple, so I gave them a call. After spending about 10 minutes trying to explain what an EXIF header was, why it was important, and what Preview was doing to damage it, the woman at Apple put me on hold. When she came back, she said that they did some testing and since there didn't seem to be a subsequent problem with iPhoto and iDVD, there was nothing she could do for me. Grrrr....

I spent a few more minutes trying to explain why having an Apple application corrupt their users' data was a bad thing. She finally gave in and transferred me to an application specialist. I had to spend some time with him explaining the whole problem again, including the bit about my disappointment with the original "it works for us" response I received. I then remembered that Aperture was an Apple product that might actually care about the contents of the EXIF header and mentioned this to him. I was told to call back in a few days to see if he was able to find out anything useful for me.

I called back today and spoke to the specialist. He said that he had discussed the problem with the product engineers and that they knew about it. They told him that there are no plans to fix the problem at this time and the work-around is to not use Preview to set keywords in photos. As you might imagine, this was not exactly the response I was hoping for. However, in light of the initial response I got when reporting the problem, I probably should have expected it. Sigh....

If you want to try this at home, here's what to do. First, make a copy of the photo you want to work on. Open the copy in Preview and type <APPLE>-I (type 'i' while holding down the "Apple" key). A window will pop up with 3 tabs, the third of which is "Keywords." Click on that tab and then the "Add" button in the bottom of the window. Do this as many times as you want and then exit Preview. You will be prompted to save you changes, which you should do.

Now, open up a Terminal window and 'cd' to the directory where the photo files reside. Run 'exiftool -htmldump0' against the original photo and redirect the output to something ending in ".html." Do the same thing with the modified photo, using a different filename for the output, of course. Back in the GUI, double-click on the 2 ".html" files and compare the output. Scan down the right side of the pages looking for "IDF0-" entries. You should see "invalid IFD entry" listed for the modified photo. If you look at the page for the non-modified photo, you should see a whole bunch of information about your photo that is now lost in the modified image. It is possible to update the "IFD0 entries" field to get back most of the missing information, but it is not for those uncomfortable with the command line....

Backing up your Google Calendar(s)

2007-05-10T12:35:00.000-04:00

I've been mucking about lately with ways to synchronize my various Google Calendars with iCal on my MacBook. The latest method I've been working with is gSync, which seems to now work almost just the way I want. Of course, when you're playing around with your all-important calendar data, you want to make sure that you have a backup (or 2 or 3) in a safe place. To that end, I wrote a quick hack of a csh script to slurp my Google Calendar data to a safe place. The script will keep up to 8 versions of the calendar data for a given day, in case you tend to experiment a bit too much.

I include the script below for any of you who may wish to do the same type of thing (that's all of you, right? - you know what happens when you don't back up your data!). Replace the ALL_CAPS stuff with values that are appropriate for your situation. I hope this helps!


#!/bin/csh

cd DIRECTORY_PATH_FOR_BACKUP_FILES

set today=`date +%Y%m%d`

foreach i (GCAL_1 GCAL_2 GCAL_3 GCAL_4)
     foreach j (7 6 5 4 3 2)
             set current=`expr $j - 1`
             if (-f gc-${i}-${today}.ics.${current}) then
                     mv gc-${i}-${today}.ics.${current} gc-${i}-${today}.ics.${j}
             endif
     end
     if (-f gc-${i}-${today}.ics) then
             mv gc-${i}-${today}.ics gc-${i}-${today}.ics.1
     endif
end

set verbose
curl -o gc-GCAL_1-${today}.ics 'GCAL_1_PRIVATE_ICS_URL'

curl -o gc-GCAL_2-${today}.ics 'GCAL_2_PRIVATE_ICS_URL'

curl -o gc-GCAL_3-${today}.ics 'GCAL_3_PRIVATE_ICS_URL'

curl -o gc-GCAL_4-${today}.ics 'GCAL_4_PRIVATE_ICS_URL'

unset verbose

Arizona Day 4 - Biosphere 2 and the Trip to Mesa

2007-04-23T21:31:00.000-04:00

Saturday morning we left the Westward Look and headed of toward Mesa, to visit with my Aunt and cousin for a few days. However, before we checked out we took a walk on the "Saguaro Nature Trail" on the resort grounds. We took a few pictures and set a geocache. It was really just a plastic food container with a small pad of paper for a log book, but it was our first one, so we didn't want to go overboard.

We then checked out of the Westward Look and headed off toward Mesa. Our plans for the day included a visit to Biosphere 2, which was very cool indeed.

It was a nice drive to Biosphere 2 and we arrived around 11:45, in plenty of time to make the noon tour which began with a short lecture about the history and current status of the facility. Then came the good stuff....

Our tour first took us to the ocean environment where they have a one million gallon simulated ocean, complete with gentle waves on the shoreline. From the ocean we moved into the desert environment where I managed to get a picture of a bird in flight.

After the desert came the "behind the scenes" part. We walked down a stairway from the desert section and through a hallway that doubled as ductwork for the ventilation system (it was a bit windy in there :-) ). The tour guide led us to a room beneath the desert that contained large water storage tanks and this sign. Now that's something you don't see every day. We followed the sign to the South Lung, passing down a long tunnel that ended in a triangular shaped connector tunnel.

The lung consisted of a large curved metal plate attached to what looked like a donut. When Biosphere 2 was a sealed environment, the South and West Lungs were used as air reservoirs. In the heat of the day, air inside the biosphere would expand, rush down the tunnels to the lungs, and lift the metal plates. If not for the expansion capability of the lungs, the glass panels would have been blown out by the increased pressure of the heated air inside.

We exited the lung and were shown a few more features of Biosphere 2 before our guide left us to roam about on our own. We looked about a little, going down to the ocean viewing room to see what we could see, and then headed off to my Aunt Betty's place.

My Aunt Betty lives in Mesa, Arizona, on the outskirts of Phoenix. It took us around two hours to get there from Biosphere 2, taking the various "86" roads instead of the Interstate. After we got settled in and caught up for a bit, we headed over to my cousin Jim's place, visited there for a bit and headed out to dinner at Caffé Portobello where a good time was had by all. We went back to Aunt Betty's place and crashed.

12345!

2007-04-20T00:02:00.000-04:00

My son Mark told me the other day that my blog was nearing 12,345 hits. Well, not that anybody other than he and I really care, but it happened late (EDT) on Thursday. The lucky winner came from California State University, Northridge. The host was s175n172.csun.edu, which seems to have a DNS 'PTR' record but no 'A' record so I couldn't do a traceroute to it. Whomever you are, thanks for getting me to my next numeric milestone.

Nor' Easter

2007-04-16T10:52:00.000-04:00

As you may know, New Jersey and a number of other eastern states are currently dealing with a Nor' Easter. There's a fair amount of flooding in Mercer County, where I live, and I've put up a small set of pictures on flickr showing some of what's out there.

UPDATE: More Nor' Easter pics available from jcrouthamel, woodcreeper and Cavalier92.

Arizona Day 3 - Sabino Canyon

2007-04-12T00:06:00.000-04:00

Friday brought us to Sabino Canyon. When we arrived at the parking lot and paid our parking fee, we were given a bright green flyer warning us about mountain lions. "Maintain eye contact." "Do not run." "Make yourself big." "Pick up small children, but do not bend down." That certainly set our minds at ease.

We bought our tram tickets for the ride into the canyon. We were warned that the tram was only running to stop 4 (instead of 9) because the road beyond that was severely damaged by a 1000-year flood last July 31. We were told that the stream flowing through the canyon was the only running water in Tucson.

The tram ride was a 45 minute round trip to stop 4 and back, driving along the two-lane road punctuated by several one-lane bridges. These bridges all had pipes to allow water to flow beneath them, but many of the pipes were blocked (probably due to the flood) and the water flowed over the bridges like waterfalls.

So, we got off at stop 4 and walked further up the road. It was a beautiful day and we walked around for about an hour. We walked along the road and through the stream and took a bunch of pictures. There was quite a bit of mica in the sand in and along the stream, looking kind of like the "gold" we had panned for the day before at the Old Tucson Studios.

On the way back to the visitor's center, the tram driver told us a little bit about the flood and pointed out the debris line on a tree (which was about 6 feet high) and a picnic table that was buried in the sand. We got a five minute stop at the Sabino Canyon dam, which was built in the 1920s to create a lake for boaters. These days, there is no longer any boating in the canyon.

After visiting the canyon, we headed over to the University of Arizona, where Eric had a 2PM tour scheduled (along with about 80 other kids and parents). While Randee and Eric took the tour, Mark and I headed over to the Flandrau Science Center to see what they had to offer.

The Flandrau center has a number of exhibits. Mark and I took advantage of the hands-on physics exhibit where we examined (played around with) light and motion. We also took a quick look at the rocks and minerals exhibit in the basement, which had some interesting specimens. Unfortunately, we got kicked out when they closed at 3PM so we wandered around campus a bit until we met up with Randee and Eric at the end of their tour.

We went back to the hotel for a while and then had dinner at a restaurant around the corner. Then back to the hotel for a little TV before we crashed. Another fun vacation day in Arizona!

Arizona Day 2 - The View from 6875 Feet

2007-04-07T01:36:00.000-04:00

To start off our second day in Arizona we took a trip to the Kitt Peak National Observatory. You can probably tell how high above sea level the observatory is from the title of this entry.

We arrived shortly before the 10:00 AM tour of the Solar Telescope, which started in the visitor's center with a brief history of the observatory. The land on which the observatory sits is leased from the Tohono O'odham people. The conditions of the lease require that only astronomical research be done on the site, with no military or commercial ventures (such as a snack bar). The only exception is the gift shop, which is also an outlet for craft items produced by the Tohono O'odham.

The Solar Telescope is built into the top of the mountain at an angle of 32°, which is the latitude of the location. At night, the telescope points directly at the north star. During the day, there is a heliostat at the top of the telescope which tracks the sun and sends its light deep into the mountain where it is reflected by a pair of mirrors into the observation room. The body of the telescope is sheathed in copper with system of tubing filled with ethylene glycol and used to keep all of the air inside the telescope at the same temperature. This keeps the air from moving within the telescope which keeps the image from getting distorted.

Our tour guide told us that there are about 26 telescopes on the site. Among these are the 2.1m reflector pictured here and a 12m radio telescope dish. The guide only gave us an approximate number for the telescope count because different groups are always bringing in new instruments or taking out old ones.

On the way up to the observatory, we saw a man riding a bicycle up the long twisty road. As we were getting ready to leave we saw him and I asked him how long it took to do the climb. He told me that it took him 2:45, but that he used to be able to do it in 2:13. He left shortly before we did and we didn't see him until we were back on the highway. He must have gone down hill a bit faster than the 35 MPH speed limit.

After leaving Kitt Peak, we headed over to the Old Tucson Studios - the home of many American westerns including "Arizona," "Rio Bravo," "The Outlaw Josie Wales" and "Tombstone."

Randee's theory is that Old Tucson Studios used to be just a working studio site but that when the western became less popular the decision was made to turn it into a tourist attraction as well. Now, they seem to have the best of both worlds. It is still a working studio site and it is open daily for visitors. As an added bonus, if you happen to be there on a day that they're filming, you can watch the action or maybe even be pulled in as an extra.

We took a walking tour at the studios and our guide knew quite a bit about the history of the studios and the movies that were made there. He told us about which actor stood where and did what during what movie. Unfortunately, as I write this a few days have passed and I remember almost nothing of what he said. That's what I get for packing so much into a vacation that I have almost no time to write about it. :-)

After the tour, we took in the wild west shoot-out show (Eric took some video) and then roamed around for a few hours. It was a pretty neat place and even the boys had a good time. If you're in the are and have any interest at all in movies, you should check it out.

Arizona Vacation: Day 1

2007-04-06T21:22:00.000-04:00

Wednesday started very early for us as we prepared to head to Arizona for a few days of vacation. The alarm went off at 3:00 AM and we all stumbled out of bed, more or less. Everyone got dressed and we packed our luggage into the van. The drive to Philadelphia was uneventful and we made it to the car dealer/off-site parking place in plenty of time. We were dropped off at the airport, got our luggage checked and headed off to the TSA screening line.

It was then that we realized we had contraband - four 6 oz. containers of yogurt! We knew that we'd have to eat it quickly and toss the evidence before we got to the x-ray machines. Of course when we got there there were no trash cans, and the lady running the machine was not pleased that we were handing her our trash. Oh well....

Our first flight left Philly at around 5:40 AM, headed for Houston. I watched the movie ("Dream Girls") while Randee and the boys slept. After that, I listened to some music on my Palm Tungsten E2 for a while. When they made the announcement that all electronic gear needed to be turned off, I put the Palm in my backpack and prepared for landing.

We had hit headwinds on the way to Houston, so our plane landed late, closer to 8:45 AM than our scheduled time of 8:07 AM. We hustled off the plane and headed for our next flight. Along the way we grabbed some food from one of the "restaurants" in the airport to eat on the plane. We got on the plane, settled into our seats and chowed down. While the plane was taxiing out to the runway, I reached into my backpack to get out my Palm. It wasn't there. It wasn't anywhere. Apparently, when I was putting it into the backpack, I missed and the Palm fell silently to the floor. Sigh....

Once I convinced myself that I shouldn't let this ruin my vacation, I asked Mark (who had the window seat) if he wanted to try tracking our flight with my Garmin eTrex GPS. He thought it would be neat, and once we got a fix he clipped the Garmin to the window shade, where it pretty much stayed until we got to the gate in Tucson. We took a few pictures along the way like the one on the left. We didn't start tracking until a little after take-off, and there were some drop-outs, but we managed to track most of the path from Houston to Tucson.

At the Tucson airport we picked up our baggage, got our rental car, and headed off to the Westward Look Resort. The Westward Look seems to be one of the few resorts in the area that doesn't have a golf course. However, it certainly does have a nice view to the west.

We relaxed by the pool for a bit, and then we decided to take a trek out to Mt. Lemmon, attempting some geocaching along the way. We didn't find the cache, but we did take in some nice scenic vistas on the way up the mountain. The road was very twisty, but nothing to worry about if you stayed at or below the posted speed limit (which was 35 MPH for most of the route). After driving up the mountain for about an hour (and hitting 9000 feet elevation) we decided to head back.

Randee and I had dinner at the resort's restaurant while Eric and Mark had cheesburgers in the room. This was about 9:00 PM local time, which was midnight for us. Quite a long day considering we started at 3:00 AM. Needless to say, the boys were a bit frazzled at this point and were quite happy to eat dinner while vegetating in front of the TV. We ended the day all watching "Whose Line is it Anyway" (the US version) and pretty much passed out by 10:30 PM. All-in-all, it was a pretty good day.

For anybody who likes to look at other people's vacations pictures, they are living over at flickr.

The Firestorm is Over, Let the Forensics Begin

2007-04-03T10:04:00.000-04:00

So, it looks like the firestorm over the threats received by Kathy Sierra may be over. I admit that I have not done extensive reading on this since looking at Kathy's first post, but her latest blog entry as well as the joint statement with Chris Locke seems to address a fair portion of the problem. Early on, I saw a post on the Doc Searls Weblog concerning Allen Herrell, who was also seemingly invloved in this whole sorry situation.

It seems that the root cause of the current situation may have been Internet Identity Theft. We all know about identity theft in the real world. What many people probably don't realize is that it can also happen in the virtual world of the Internet. Many bloggers out there have built a reputation for themselves as respected writers and thinkers. When one respected blogger appears to be making threats against another, it's a big deal in the blogosphere. That the identity of a well known blogger or two may have been hijacked is something that should not be completely unexpected, but should be thoroughly investigated. Destroying someone's credibility on the Internet can and does have real-world consequences. We all need to strive to keep our 'net identities intact and do what we can to help others do the same. Let the forensics begin!

This is insane!

2007-03-26T18:05:00.000-04:00

Kathy Sierra was supposed to be presenting a tutorial and keynote at this year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference. When we got here, there was a notice that her tutorial was cancelled. She spells out the reasons in this blog entry (*not* kid-safe!):

Creating Passionate Users: Death threats against bloggers are NOT "protected speech" (why I cancelled my ETech presentations)

The type of behavior Kathy talks about is disturbing, to say the least. While I believe in the freedom of speech, I personally don't include this type of threating speech among that which deserves to be protected. I wish Kathy well, and I hope that she can some day once again feel safe enough to appear in public.

spurgeonblog: Wichita Lineman

2007-03-19T12:48:00.000-04:00

Going through my Google Reader feeds today, I came across spurgeonblog: Wichita Lineman. This seemed like a pretty interesting to do, particularly with the song Wichata Lineman. I actually used to like that song, back in its day but haven't thought about it for years. I wonder what ELP's Karn Evil 9 would look like....

On a side note, I met Chris Spurgeon at O'Reilly's ETech 2005 conference, after having heard his name for years on my local public radio station. He always has something interesting to talk about, whether in person or in his blog.

Spanning Sync

2007-03-13T12:06:00.000-04:00

My buddy mojo pointed me to a really cool application for that Mac that keeps iCal in sync with your Google Calendar. I've been playing with the beta and I really like it. There have been a few problems, but it's mostly done what I needed it to do.

Well, today when I tried to sync my calendars, it didn't work. When I opened the preferences panel I found that there was a new, 1.0 version available. So, I cruised over to the Spanning Sync blog to see what was up and found prices that astounded me: You can either pay $25/year or a one-time purchase price of $65.

While I enjoyed the convenience of having my calendars in sync, this is way too pricey for me. I was planning on getting my wife and kids to use this to keep their calendars in sync. I even recommended it to members of our Boy Scout troop. However, at these prices, I think I will be forced to look elsewhere. Buying 2 or 3 copies of this software is not cost-efective for me.

I applaud the developers and wish them well in their business, but for the time being, I'm going to give gSync a try.

Project 365

2007-03-09T00:07:00.001-05:00

Cry, Cry, Cry
Originally uploaded by Chris Tengi.

I'm one of a whole bunch of people on flickr who are trying to take a new picture each day. Of the 22 I've taken so far (I started on my birthday, rather than January 1), this is my favorite. Head on over to flickr to see my Project 365 pictures as well as everybody else's.

If you prefer viewing self-portraits, check out The 365 Days Pool.

Making it Easy to Bookmark Your Blogger Post

2007-03-07T21:24:00.000-05:00

My buddy mojo recently started adding a cute little row of buttons to his blog entries that allow readers to post links to an entry on various social bookmarking sites. He tells me that he's doing it with a Firefox bookmarklet. I'm too lazy to be bothered with all that work every time I post to my blog, so I decided to add some boilerplate to my Blogger template.

Now, being that I'm an old skool kinda guy, I never converted my template to the latest-and-greatest drag-and-drop style that blogger makes available now. I have a number of customizations that I've not yet figured out how to "objectify" so I'll probably be staying with my current template editing mode for a while. The disadvantage, of course, is that I need to figure out exactly what should go where in the template. The advantage is that if I can write it in HTML, I can add it to the template.

If you have a Blogger Powered blog and would like to add these buttons to your entries, put the following HTML code in your template after the "<$BlogItemBody$>" line:


<div style="padding:0px;margin:0px;color:#444444;">
Bookmark this post:
<a href="http://blogmarks.net/my/new.php?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://blogmarks.net/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="blogmarks" title="blogmarks" /></a>
<a href="http://bluedot.us/Authoring.aspx?u=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;t=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://bluedot.us/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="bluedot" title="bluedot" /></a>
<a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://del.icio.us/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="del.icio.us" title="del.icio.us"  /></a>
<a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&amp;url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://digg.com/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="digg" title="digg" /></a>
<a href="http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/edit.pl?new_url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://www.fark.com/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="fark" title="fark" /></a>
<a href="http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?u=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;t=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://www.furl.net/i/lil_furl_butt.gif" border="0" alt="furl" title="furl" /></a>
<a href="http://ma.gnolia.com/beta/bookmarklet/add?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://ma.gnolia.com/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="ma.gnolia" title="ma.gnolia" /></a>
<a href="http://www.newsvine.com/_tools/seed&amp;save?u=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;headline=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://www.newsvine.com/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="newsvine" title="newsvine" /></a>
<a href="http://reddit.com/submit?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://reddit.com/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="reddit" title="reddit" /></a>
<a href="http://www.spurl.net/spurl.php?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://www.spurl.net/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="spurl" title="spurl" /></a>
<a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&amp;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="stumbleupon" title="stumbleupon" /></a>
<a href="http://tailrank.com/share/?link_href=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>"><img src="http://tailrank.com/favicon.ico" border="0" alt="tailrank" title="tailrank" /></a>
</div><br />

Note that there was a "<br />" tag in my template after the "<$BlogItemBody$>" tag that I chose to move to the end of my alterations. I also borrowed and modified the style information used for the "byline" for this div. Alter it to taste or remove it entirely if you like. Experiment with changing the font size by adding "font-size:80%;" after the "#444444" above and changing the "80" to whatever gives you the desired result.

There are a number of other social bookmarking sites out there that could be added to this list. These are the ones I've found by doing a (very) little research. If you come up with template lines for any others, please post a comment here to keep me updated.

SolarSpeeder

2007-02-24T23:48:00.001-05:00

SolarSpeeder
Originally uploaded by Chris Tengi.

Volume 6 of Make Magazine had articles on the theory behind and the construction of BEAM robots. My wife thought that her boys would enjoy building some beambots, so she bought us all some kits from Solarbotics. Pictured here is the kit that Mark built (with my direction and assistance).

This particular beambot is a solarroller. Place it under a bright light source (like the sun) and wait a little while. Eventually, the solar cell will charge a large capacitor (located under the PC board) and the BEAM circuit will dump the charge to the motor. This little guy is quite zippy when it takes off!

This was Mark's first soldering job, and I think he did pretty darn well.

You Gotta Pay Attention

2007-02-22T13:17:00.000-05:00

I've written here before about dealing with calendars. For the moment, I'm still using my Palm Tungsten E2 as my primary calendar and sync'ing it with iCal on my MacBook Pro. I try to keep everything up-to-date (so to speak), and I'm usually pretty good about that. However, the problem isn't always with data entry...

The University offers a number of courses and seminars to staff members, on a variety of topics. There are courses on management techniques, dealing with elder parents, personal finance, dealing with co-workers, and all sorts of other things. I've signed up for, and attended, a number of these classes and they've all been pretty good. One that looked particularly interesting was entitled "Setting and Keeping Goals." I signed up for it about a month ago and dutifully entered the date and time into my Palm's calendar along with a number of other classes.

Tuesday night, I made an entry into my Palm calendar to remind me to send em EMail message to somebody first thing in the morning. On Wednesday morning, my Palm started beeping and I remembered that I had to send the message. Now, I had earphones plugged into the Palm as it lay on my desk as I had been listening to a few podcasts, so the beeping wasn't too loud. In fact, it was quiet enough for me to easily ignore it as the Palm continued to beep at me all morning. I would sort of hear it and remind myself that I'd already sent the EMail I needed to send. Not once did I even consider openning the case to clear the task.

Around 1:40 PM yesterday, I logged in to my MacBook, where I was greeted by a pop-up from iCal. It turns out that my Palm wasn't beeping because I needed to send an EMail. As you've probably guessed it by now, by ignoring that beeping I had managed to miss my class on Setting and Keeping Goals. You gotta pay attention.....

A Walk in the Woods

2007-02-06T23:25:00.001-05:00

Trees
Originally uploaded by Chris Tengi.

Over the weekend, Boy Scout Troop 44 took a trip to Nuangola, PA where they had the opportunity to stay at a house on Nuangola Lake. The troop has been making this pilgrimage for 13 years but this was my first chance to join them for the trip.

One of the highlights of the trip is the annual hike. This year we hiked a bit over 4.5 miles around and across the lake. The temperature was in the mid-20s (F) and the wind came and went — it was a beautiful day for a walk through the trees. We were a group of 21 scouts and 6 adult walking along trails through the trees.

During one of our stops I looked to the west and saw this image. My photo-gray glasses had gone almost black so I couldn't see the display on my camera, but I managed to set the Canon A70 to F8 and take this shot. I had no idea how it would come out, but I think it's OK.

My thanks to the Coats family, who have been kind enough to let the troop use their summer house for our annual winter trip for so many years.

Building the World - in Dubai

2007-01-24T13:41:00.001-05:00

dubai-island-building.jpg
Originally uploaded by Chris Tengi.

Last week, a co-worker of mine clued me in to a link he found on reddit. Actually, he sent an IM saying "Check out Google Earth GPS coords 25.221996 55.162076." I did so and found an image of a ship building an island. You can see it on Google Maps as well.

The reddit link pointed to an article at Architecture Portal News talking about the project. It turns out that, if you have enough ready cash, you can actually buy a home there as well. If only...

10,000 Hits!

2007-01-23T13:33:00.000-05:00

I've been writing in this blog, on and off, since October 2005. Shortly after I started blogging, I decided that I just had to have a hit counter. I looked around and found a bunch of them. Unfortunately, many of them required that they be installed on the hosting server. Now, since my blog is hosted at blogspot.com none of these were going to work. Of those that didn't need to be on the hosting server, I decided on BS Counter by Brian Stanback. It was written in perl (which I understood) and was relatively easy to customize.

By default BS Counter would either count every hit from every source address or only count unique addresses once, ever. Well, I wanted something a little different — I wanted to count unique addresses by day. So, if you checked out my blog once, twice or even 30 times on a single day (based on US Eastern Time, GMT-5 or GMT-4 in the summer) it would show up as one hit. If you came back from the same host the next day, you'd get counted again. This seemed reasonable to me, but of course your milage may vary.

So, given how I count hits it's taken me a while to get to that elusive 10,000 mark. But it happened this morning from the host user-38q40ms.cable.mindspring.com. I have no idea who you are, but it looks like you are an EarthLink subscriber, possibly a former subscriber of "The Grid" which appears to be based in Atlanta, Georgia. Whoever you are, thanks for taking my blog "over the top."

Smelling Fire in a Crowded Theater

2007-01-04T23:06:00.000-05:00

I'm sure that many of you have heard the cautions about yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, but nobody talks about smelling fire in a crowded theater. At least nobody has until now....

On December 29, my wife and I took the boys into New York to see Monty Python's SPAMALOT at the Shubert Theater. The show was great, especially if you've seen the movie. However, the Friday matinee preformance that we attended ran a bit later than most.

About 15 minutes before the end of the first act, I started smelling smoke from my seat in the balcony. As time went on, the smell got stronger. After about 10 minutes (during the "Trojan Rabbit" scene), the director walked out on stage and the actors stopped performing. Some people in the audience thought that this might be part of the show (it was Monty Python, after all), but that was not the case. Shortly after the director came out, a woman on the public address system asked the actors to leave the stage. The actors and the director did so, and a moment later the woman asked the audience to leave the theater by the nearest exit. They managed to clear a packed house in about 3 minutes. That was pretty impressive!

As we made our way out to the street, we overheard some workers talking about what happened. Apparently, somebody had dropped a lit cigarette into a ventilation grate where it caught some debris on fire. That small fire was near the house ventilation intake, so the smell of burning paper was able to fill the theater. The worker talking about the source of the fire said that it was out, but they don't take chances about that in New York City.

We were outside for only about 5 minutes before the first fire truck arrived. Pretty much every camera phone came out to take pictures. A few minutes later, the second fire truck arrived. Then the third. Then the fourth. Then the fifth! I told you that they don't take chances.

All in all, we were outside the theater for about 25 minutes. We got the "all clear" from the staff and returned to our seats. A man came onto the public address system and announced that they would "rewind" the play a few minutes, finish the first act, and then have a 15 minutes intermission. At that, the audience groaned, until he told us that drinks would be free, at which we cheered (big surprise, right?). The show resumed in the middle of the Trojan Rabbit scene. We were then treated to one of three ad-libs they threw into the show. When the three frenchmen poked their heads around the castle door, one of them said to the others (in a really bad French accent), "How many times have I told you not to cook liver in zee dressing room?" The audience (and the other actors) chuckled.

The second ad-lib came in Arthur's song at the end of the first act. Arthur sang to us: "Have some drinks, they're for free, We'll be back for act three!" (Yes, Patsy then corrected him with "Two, sir.") I subsequently learned that the only change to the song was that normally the "they're for free" line is a suggestion to take care of a common bodily function. I suppose I should have expected that.

The final ad-lib (at least I think it was an ad-lib) took place during second the "Knights of Ni" scene. At one point, the Knights of Ni broke into a little dance and chanted "The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire, We don't need no water let the mother-WHOOP burn." I suspect that this doesn't normally appear in the show. :-)

Even with 25 minute break in the show, I believe that a good time was had by all. If you're a Monty Python fan, go to see this show. Just try to avoid smelling fire in a crowded theater.

ADVENTUREs in Writing

2006-12-14T14:30:00.000-05:00

One of my co-workers sent me a link to this page and I found it quite amusing. Way back in the day, I used to play adventure (I believe that the command was actually advent because the name was limited to 6 characters by TOPS-20 - but I could be mis-remembering) and then zork. Reading this brought me back and I found myself chuckling more and more as I read. I was just waiting for a hollow voice to say "plugh."

About half way through, I sent the link to my wife Randee, who told me that this was her third reference to adventure in an hour. She had been discussing the game with her office-mate (who is way to young to have ever played the original FORTRAN version) and shortly thereafter discovered an emacs version under tools->games in the menu. Then comes the link from me. I guess sometimes things do come in threes.

DRM: Depressing Right Management

2006-11-29T13:27:00.000-05:00

I just attended a depressing lunch-time talk by Doug Dixon. Doug is independent technology consultant, author, and speaker specializing in digital media who runs the Manifest Technology web site (where many of his talks and articles are archived). The talk covered some of the history of DRM and where the content industry wants to take it in the future.

I guess the thing that depressed me the most is where the content industry is headed with respect to DRM. Specifically, I'm talking about the content management features of AACS (the Advanced Access Content System). All HD DVD and Blu-ray discs will use AACS to control access to the contents of the disc. So, once you decide to take the plunge and go for one of these high definition formats, you will be at the mercy of AACS. Why do I say "at the mercy of" you might ask? Well, once you buy a player that supports AACS, you will have little control over how (or even if) your shiny new discs will be played. In addition, you will also loose control over how your old DVD discs are played as well (more on that later).

I won't go into all of the details from the talk here, but you can download the PDF of Doug's slides if you want more information. Here are some of the key points that bothered me:

All high definition content is protected by keys
Keys can be revoked at any time
You (a given content provider) don't have to own the key you're revoking
All players must "phone home" regularly in order to continue playing content
AACS-enabled players must stop providing analog high definition output as of 12/2011
AACS-enabled players must stop providing any analog output as of 12/2013

That last one is the real kicker for me. It means that as of 12/2013, I will no longer be allowed to play my old DVD discs on TVs with NTSC Composite (the yellow plug), S-Video, or Component Video inputs unless I keep an old DVD player around. I will only be allowed to play them over a HDMI link. "So what?" I hear you say, "All of your A/V gear will have HDMI by then." Well, maybe it will and maybe it won't. That's not the point. The point is that I don't think anybody should have the right to tell me how I can or can't enjoy video (or audio) content that I already own. Maybe that makes me a dinosaur, but that's the way it is.

So, how can this type of enforced restriction be prevented? Unfortunately, in the USA at least, it probably can't. The regulators are pretty much in the pockets of the industry, and American consumers are sheep. Show us the new shiny thing and we (almost) all go along because it's cool. When it comes to digital media, the only ways to prevent further erosion of our rights is to either get the laws changed (that may be possible with the Democrats coming into power, but don't hold your breath) or to not buy these products (see my previous comment about sheep). Maybe the EFF can help, or maybe enough people will read Ed Felten's Freedom to Tinker blog and decide to do something about, or maybe not.

Sigh... This is all so depressing....

The Wingles and the Wangles in the Land of Wonks (A Political Fable)

2006-11-09T10:01:00.000-05:00

Last year, during the Frist Filibuster at Princeton University, Rush Holt came to speak and inspired me to write something. I don't claim to be a gifted writer, nor had I ever tried my had at fables before, but the following is what I came up with (mostly while I was mowing the lawn one day :-) ).

With the changing winds in Washington it may not be quite accurate any more, but I thought that I'd dust it off and trot it out anyway....

In a place not far from here, the land of Wonks was ruled by a representative form of government, not unlike our own. It had multiple branches with a system of checks and balances to keep any one group from gaining too much power, again, not unlike our own.

For quite some time, two political parties had run the government, with first one holding the majority and then the other. Naturally, the party that was in power wanted to remain in power for as long as they could, but those pesky checks and balances prevented any one party from taking complete and permanent control. Over time, power would swing back and forth, from one party to the other and back again. Their system of government had worked very well like this for hundreds of years.

Now, this being the land of Wonks, everybody had an opinion on how the government should be run and of those who ran it. Many Wonks thought that the Wangles were just a bit more clever than the Wingles, and, believe it or not, in this case the Wonks got it right!

Not so long ago, when those clever Wangles power was on the up-swing, they figured out how they could start making minor changes to the rules of government in order to further consolidate their control. Slowly, over a number of years, they would make one minor change after another, always making it sound like the change at hand could only improve the running of the government.

As I said before, in the land of Wonks, everybody had an opinion on running the government, but not many people did anything about it. One day, a small group of Wonks got together and decided that they would do something about it. They formed a new political party called the Bunglers, and despite their name, they were quite a clever bunch of smooth talkers.

In fact, the Bunglers were even a bit more clever than the Wangles, and had figured out how to take advantage of all the rule changes that the Wangles had been making. The party started out quite small, but soon grew in size and power. This being the land of Wonks, there were quite a few potential Bunglers out there.

Eventually, the Bunglers gained control of all the branches of the government, and managed to change the rules to their advantage in such a way that neither the Wingles nor the Wangles were ever able to regain control.

The moral of this story is: When things are going well, don't try to wangle yourself a better deal, or you just might bungle it.

When Geek Conversation Go Bad

2006-11-09T09:48:00.000-05:00

My buddy m0j0 wrote an amusing piece about the tendancy of geek conversation to go downhill, once the old timers (like me, I guess) get involved....

Reagan Had It Right

2006-10-30T22:52:00.000-05:00

Tonight, while driving home from work, I heard a story on NPR about a new two-volume anthology of American Speeches. The first volume covers "Public Oratory from the Revolution to the Civil War" and the second "from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton." In the story, they played audio from a speech given by Ronald Reagan (then a Democrat) entitled "A Time for Choosing." It was given on October 27, 1964 in support of Barry Goldwater (a Republican).

Although the speech was given over 40 years ago, the portion that NPR played for their story was extremely relevant today:

You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down -- [up] man's old -- old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

That last line is the one that got me. I was only 5 years old when Reagan gave that speech, so I wasn't paying too much attention to politics or the state of the nation at the time. I'm a bit older now, and I am paying attention. I think that anybody who is paying attention will realize that, at least with the statements quoted above, Reagan had it right.

Technorati Tags: Politics, Reagan, Oratory

"Man of the Year" - Art Imitates Life

2006-10-13T23:34:00.000-04:00

SPOILER WARNING!!! -- Plot element revealed

Tonight, my family went to see the new Robin Williams movie, "Man of the Year." As some of you may know, an electronic voting machine company plays a major role in the plot of the movie. The Delacroy corporation has won the contract to provide electronic voting machines nation-wide. A few weeks before the presidential election, one of the Delacroy programmers decides to run tests on the system software, and discovers that every time she runs a test the same candidate always wins, no matter how many votes she enters for the other candidate. This plays a pivotal role in Williams' character being elected president.

The problem that the programmer discovers in the Delacroy machine immediately brought to mind the problem that was discovered by Ed Felten, Ari Feldman and Alex Halderman. You can read more about Ed's research in his blog. It almost makes you wonder if the writers might have been involved in the research as well. :-)

As for the rest of the movie, my family found it to be quite entertaining. If you like Robin Williams' style of comedy (you know, off-the-wall-stream-of-conciousness), you'll probably enjoy this movie. There was quite a bit of out-loud laughter coming from the audience. So, if you want to laugh and worry about our next election at the same time, I highly recommend this movie.

Technorati Tags: Voting, Diebold, Comedy, Movies

Simply del.icio.us

2006-10-08T22:18:00.000-04:00

This was originally sent in an EMail message to my seventh grader's teachers...

By now, I'm sure that you've all used Google to search for various bits of information on the Internet. I expect that you've found a few interesting tidbits as well. So, once you've found something, what do you do? Do you add it to your browser Favorites or Bookmarks? What if you found it at home but need it at school? What about the reverse situation? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to get to all of your bookmarks from anywhere? Well, you can. All you need is an account on del.icio.us and you're good to go. First, point your browser at http://del.icio.us/ and then click on the "get started" link near the top of the page. Once you have your account set up, click on the "login" link (if you're not automagically logged in after verifying your account) and the the "help" link in the upper right corner.

Now you can start saving your bookmarks in one place, and get to them from any place. There is one very important thing to note, however. Don't put anything sensitive or personal in del.icio.us. There is no privacy on del.icio.us, but as you'll see in a moment, that's the beauty of it.

So, now there are lots and lots of people saving bookmarks to del.icio.us. However, they're not just saving their bookmarks, they are tagging them with one or more single word tags. These tags make it possible for anybody to use del.icio.us to find bookmarks for sites on any variety of topics. This goes Google one better because you're not just looking up sites based on words on the page. You're finding sites that people have seen and determined to be related to a given topic. Of course, not everyone will agree that a given site is relevant to a particular topic, but odds are pretty good that you'll find something good. The question I hear you asking now is, "So, how can I do this?" It's actually pretty simple...

Let's say that you want to find all of the bookmarks that everybody has tagged with the word "education." Just surf on over to this URL:


http://del.icio.us/tag/education

This should return a page with a number of bookmarks along with a link to more pages of the same (you can see the bookmarks I tagged with education by going to http://del.icio.us/cjtengi/education or http://del.icio.us/cjtengi/teaching). If you want to find bookmarks tagged with more than one tag, such as education and geography, use this URL:


http://del.icio.us/tag/education+geography

By using a simple "+" character, it is possible to string together any number of tags. "Cool!" I hear you say. "But what if I want to be updated when somebody tags something new?" That's actually pretty easy if you use an RSS reader. Just build a URL like the ones above with one simple change - put "rss/" in front of the word "tag," like this:


http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/education

and subscribe to it in your RSS reader. Then, whenever there is a new bookmark tagged with "education" you'll get a message in your RSS reader. Of course, you can string together tags for the RSS feed the same way that we did with the multi-tag URL above. Pretty neat, isn't it? Oh, by the way, you don't need a del.icio.us account to search it or get a feed, only to save your own bookmarks there.

Another interesting, and potentially useful, phenomenon on the Internet is the proliferation of blogs (weB LOGS). There's quite a number of people out there writing about all manner of topics. Some of what's out there might be useless drivel, but there's a whole lot of useful information out there as well. However, Google is not always well suited to searching for information in the blogosphere. For that we have Technorati - a blog-specific search engine.

With Technorati, you can search blogs in 3 different ways. You can search for any word that appears in a blog post, just like Google can be used to search for words in web pages. It is also possible for blog writers to tag their posts with keywords, just like the people who tag del.icio.us bookmarks can. Technorati allows you to search these tags as well. To give it a try, go to:


http://technorati.com/

and have a look around. Note that not every blog on the Internet is listed in Technorati - the blog owner needs to register his blog in order for it to be searchable. When a blog is registered, the owner can specify tags that generally apply to the blog. The third type of search allows you to search for these tags in Technorati's blog directory. If you search for the right things, you should be able to find this blog or one that belongs to Ed Felten, a Princeton Computer Science professor (http://freedom-to-tinker.com/). I've always found Ed's blog to be quite interesting, and if you are at all interested in Information Technology policy, you might like it too....

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, Technorati, Tutorial, Education

On the Cover of the "Rolling Stone"

2006-09-22T10:48:00.000-04:00

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has written an article for the October 5th, 2006 issue of "Rolling Stone" magazine, entitled "Will The Next Election Be Hacked?" In the article, he tells the story of Chris Hood, a former Diebold consultant who, along with other Diebold workers, installed a last minute patch before the 2002 election in Georgia. Here's an interesting quote:

Then, one muggy day in mid-August, Hood was surprised to see the president of Diebold's election unit, Bob Urosevich, arrive in Georgia from his headquarters in Texas. With the primaries looming, Urosevich was personally distributing a "patch," a little piece of software designed to correct glitches in the computer program. "We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn't do," Hood says. "The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done."

While Hood's story is the most detailed account of problems with electronic voting machines, there is some scary stuff about machines from the other 3 voting machine vendors and the companies' political ties. RFK, Jr.'s article puts together a number of frightening pieces to the current puzzle that is electronic voting in the United States. The only "good" thing I saw in the whole article was a reference to Ed Felten's recent work:

In a study released on September 13th, computer scientists at Princeton University created vote-stealing software that can be injected into a Diebold machine in as little as a minute, obscuring all evidence of its presence. They also created a virus that can "infect" other units in a voting system, committing "widespread fraud" from a single machine. Within sixty seconds, a lone hacker can own an election.

You can read more about Felten's work on this as well as other interesting stuff on electronic voting in his Freedom To Tinker blog.

In my opinion, the "Rolling Stone" article brings to light a number of things that every US citizen should be concerned about. Unfortunately, I feel that the reality of the situation is that only people with certain political leanings will take the article to heart. The rest of the nation won't be concerned until somebody from the "other side of the aisle" either writes a similar article or starts pushing legislation to fix this mess.

Technorati Tags: Voting, Fraud, Diebold, Politics

Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine

2006-09-13T09:58:00.000-04:00

Ed Felten (author of the Freedom To Tinker blog, among other things) has released an analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine. Here's a short quote from the abstract:

This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks.

UPDATE: I thought it might be nice to tell Rush Holt, my congressional representative, about this, just in case he doesn't get the Freedom To Tinker RSS feed. :-) I found the timing interesting when I saw that yesterday he had released a statement about the Maryland and D. C. elections. Don't they use Diebold machines?

Technorati Tags: Voting, Diebold, Security, Felten

Weather on Your Calendar

2006-09-11T16:25:00.000-04:00

My office-mate just turned me on to something that I find has been available at least since June 2006 (from what I've seen in a few blog posts).

If you've ever wanted to know what the weather was going to be like when you were scheduling an event, it's actually very easy. Just go to the Weather Underground page and enter your ZIP code, Airport code, or some other such identifying information in the search box in the upper-left corner of the page and hit ENTER. On the right side of the page, across from the locality name, is a button labelled "ICS." Copy the link location for that button, and use it as the URL for a remote calendar.

If you are using iCal, go to Calendar->Subscribe... in the menu bar and paste in the URL in the dialog box that pops up. If you are using Google Calendar, go to "Manage Calendars" and select "Add calendar" in the Other Calendars section. Select "Public Calendar Address," paste the URL into the box, and click on "Add."

As an example, here is the URL I got from the Weather Underground for Pennington, NJ:


http://ical.wunderground.com/auto/ical/NJ/Pennington.ics?units=both

This worked just fine for me in iCal but, unfortunately, when I tried it in Google Calendar, Google was unable to import the calendar info. Sigh.... Of course, YMMV!

Technorati Tags: Weather, iCal, Google Calendar

Geocaching: First Time Out

2006-09-05T23:13:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, Randee, Mark, and I tried our hands at geocaching. We set up an account at geocaching.com and then did a search for caches in our area. Surprisingly, we found quite a few, 4 of which were in fairly easy walking distance. We chose one in the center of town, put the leash on the dog, grabbed the GPS and headed off. The particular cache we were headed for was "The Redcoats Were Here, The Redcoats Were Here!!" This multi-cache required us to first find a plaque and then use information from the plaque to derive the location of the actual cache.

It took us about 10 minutes to walk from our house to the plaque. As instructed, we did a little math and figured out where we needed to go next. We went there and started nosing around where we knew the cache had to be. It turns out the we all pretty much looked right at it a few times without actually seeing it. Finally, Mark found the cache (a small brown bottle) and we opened it up to take a look at the log inside. There was a list of dates and names, most of which we didn't recognize. However, Mark recognized the names of a few of his school-mates, which was pretty cool. We added the date and our name to the log and put the cache back in its hiding place.

After our success with the first cache, Mark and I decided to try finding a second cache in town. Unfortunately, we weren't quite as successful with this one. After we got home, I realized that the name, "Base-ic Instinct" was the clue we actually needed to find the cache. Mark wanted to go out today to find it, but it rained all day, so we're hoping to give it a go tomorrow....

Technorati Tags: Geocaching, GPS

3, 2, 1, Liftoff!

2006-06-23T00:55:00.000-04:00

My son Mark and I recently built a water-powered rocket from plans in volume 5 of Make Magazine. We had fun building it, and Mark thought it would be a great idea to share it with rest of the kids on his 6th grade team at the Timberlane Middle School. He spoke to his science teacher and it was decided that we'd set up for a launch at the end of the day on the last day of school.

I set up the launch stand in the middle of a couple of soccer fields behind the school, leaving plenty of room in case the wind decided to take the rocket for a ride. Once the kids got out to the field, I spent a little time explaining how we built the rocket and how it worked. Then it was time to put some water in the bottle, pump it up to pressure, and see how far it would fly.

The launch and recovery were beautiful, despite the fact that the rocket lost 2 of its 3 fins (that's what we get for using 1/16" balsa wood instead of 1/8")! Fortunately, we had built a second lower (engine) stage using thicker wood for the fins. Based on the launch of that bottle, I suspect that we'll be able to use it for many flights to come.

My thanks to Mark's science teacher, Mrs. Martin-Kochis, and the rest of the teachers on the Mercury team for allowing us to bring the rocket in to demonstrate. I think that I had as much fun as the kids did. If you'd like to see a video of the first flight, you can check it out on Google Video.

Technorati Tags: Make, rocket, DIY, project

Let Me Check My Calendar

2006-06-02T23:34:00.000-04:00

I need a calendar. Actually, I have a calendar, and I really do need it. My personal choice for a calendar is my Palm Tungsten E2. I do my best to keep all of my appointments on it, as well as those of my family. I really like the UI, and being able to have my calendar in my pocket has been extremely useful. Having an alarm go off before I need to be somewhere is also a good thing - I'm just not the kind of person who will remember to check my appointments on paper (or even online).

A Palm device is not the calendar for everyone. Some people use wall calendars, some use pocket date books. Many people use Microsoft Outlook (with or without a mobile unit such as a Blackberry). A sysadmin I know has decided to go for a personal analog assistant to deal with his schedule.

One of the new kids on the block is the Google Calendar. This is the one that my wife has recently switched to, and I'm hoping that it will (eventually) help me keep my Tungsten much more up-to-date. Google Calendar can provide an iCalendar file to applications such as Mozilla Sunbird or Apple's iCal. In fact, it is this feature that I've just started using to keep my calendar current.

My wife has created and shared a number of calendars amongst all of our family's GMail accounts, and I have subscribed to a few of them from iCal on my Apple PowerBook. I then sync iCal with my Palm Tungsten using Missing Sync from mark/space (I like it much more than Palm's original hotsync implementation). This program uses the calendar name in iCal to set a calendar category on the Palm. This makes things much more colorful (and useful!).

Once I had my family's calendars in my pocket, I needed to do something about keeping track of all the various Boy Scout meetings and events that my boys and I attend. In fact, my intention was to set up a calendar that the entire Troop could use. The choice I made was to set up the Cosmo calendar server from the Open Software Application Foundation.

Cosmo is written in Java and seems to be pretty useful for a 0.3 release. Users create accounts on the server through a web page and can then publish calendars to their directory on the server. For each calendar you publish, you can create one or more tickets that can be used by others to subscribe to your calendars. Tickets can be read-only or read-write, and can last anywhere from seconds to forever. Once they add the ability to put comments on a ticket (like why you added it in the first place), I think they'll provide an extremely flexible way to manage calendar access by others.

So, today I can download my family's calendars to my Palm Tungsten from Google Calendar as well as publish my own calendars from the Palm using Cosmo. I'm guessing that Google is heading in the direction of allowing users to publish calendars remotely using their private URL scheme. Once that's in place, I'll be able to check, and update, all my calendars from the Palm of my hand.

Technorati Tags: Calendar, Cosmo, iCal, Google Calendar, Palm Pilot

Springtime in Princeton

2006-04-06T09:57:00.000-04:00

Springtime in Princeton
Originally uploaded by Chris Tengi.

The weather in Princeton was lovely yesterday, wouldn't you agree?

ETech: Final Notes to Myself

2006-03-15T21:17:00.000-05:00

The theme for this year's ETech was "The Attention Economy." The amount of information available to people on the Internet today can be completely overwhelming. We need to divide our attention economically so that everything we need to (or want to) know about can be processed. A number of projects, products, and tools were presented to assist someone who is trying to deal with today's info-glut. There were also a number of talks discussing how we tend to focus or divide our attention, and what we might do better. Below are some notes to myself about what I saw, so that when I inevitably do forget, I'll have a place to look up this stuff.

Monday:
I attended a tutorial called "Scaling Fast and Cheap - How We Built Flickr" given by Cal Henderson. Flickr started out as part of an online game to be called "Game Neverending" (GNE), being developed by Ludicorp in Vancouver. It was originally implemented in Flash, which prevented it from scaling very far. I tried out the Flash version at ETech 04 and found it to be interesting but a bit slow. The current implementation seems fast enough to me and obviously scales, as there are over 2 million users and over 100 million pictures in Flickr today.

Cal covered quite a bit of ground over the course of the day.... Flickr was originally implemented using commodity (white box) hardware. They originally tried customizing the kernel and various other bits of software but found that the extra work involved was not justified by the small performance gains achieved. Cal had a great quote from Donald Knuth: "We should forget about small efficiencies, about 97% of the time." Here's a very small sample of the stuff we learned in the tutorial, some of which seemed like common sense but much of which could only be learned through experience:

Make sure you have enough rack space. Make sure you have enough power and networking in each rack. When you buy spares, ensure that you get identical spares for things such as disks, and not just equivalent sizes. This can be crucial when you need to replace a disk in a RAID set. If you must use a data center on the 24th floor, make sure that any equipment you buy (such as additional UPS systems to increase capacity) can actually fit in the elevator. Otherwise it might take a while to disassemble, move, and reassemble the equipment. Have as much redundancy as you can afford (hot spares, cold spares, spare disks, spare network gear, etc). 100M ethernet is probably fast enough for most applications. Software architecture is like a trifle (an English trifle, not a Canadian trifle). The 3 rules of enterprise system development: use source control; have a one step build; use a bug tracker. Filtering (X)HTML input in order to prevent cross-site-scripting attacks can be a royal pain. There are so many ways an attacker can format (eg random white-space or newlines between "java" and "script" in the word "javascript") or encode things (eg "j", j, j, j, %6A) that you need to be extremely clever if you're filtering with regular expressions.

If you want to know more, you'll need to buy Cal's book which is due out from O'Reilly, probably in the first half of 2006. I'm not sore what the title will be, but it will be authored by Cal Henderson and will be something about web applications.

Monday Evening:

For me, the highlight of the Monday evening keynotes was Bruce Sterling's "The Internet of Things." He packed alot of words and imagery into a fairly short talk. You can get a taste of what we heard in an available podcast. Unfortunately, a talk of this type would have been better earlier in the day. 8:30 PM was a bit late to get started.

Tuesday:

In the morning we were treated to a number of keynote talks. The 3 I found most interesting were Ray Ozzie's "Simple Bridge-building," Dick Hardt's "Who Is the Dick on My Site," and Linda Stone's "Attention: The 'Real' Aphrodisiac." Ozzie spoke about Microsoft's web "clipboard" technology, which looked very interesting. Hardt did one of his "Identity 2.0" talks, which are always entertaining. He shares a rapid-fire slide presentation style with Larry Lessig. Stone's talk was all the more interesting because a large percentage of the audience appeared to be paying more attention to their laptop screens than to the speaker. More information about all of these talks can be found by looking for ETech at Technorati.

Foldera Unveiled...

playsh...

Building More Useful Mashups...

Sigh....

This entry was started on March 15, 2006. It is now May 22, and I have unfortunately forgotten the rest of what I was going to write. I guess that if I'm going to be serious about blogging, I'll need to start setting aside time each week to do it.

Technorati Tags: ETech, ETech 06

ETech: Roomba Cockfighting

2006-03-09T01:34:00.000-05:00

Those of you who read Make Magazine know that Phil Torrone has been working on remote-controlled Roomba vacuum cleaners. Well, tonight at ETech, Phil and Jeff Han got to test their mettle battling their Roombas in a Roomba cockfight. I took a few pictures and put them up on flickr. I also took 2 video clips of a short battle and a slightly longer battle. After a few more rounds of fighting, I suggested to Phil that we could mount my digital camera to the top of one of the Roombas to create the RoombaCam. The result is 5 video clips in RoombaVision™. They are round n-4, round n-3, round n-2, round n-1, and the final round.

Technorati Tags: ETech, ETech 06, Roomba, Roomba Cockfighting

ETech: Trusted Computing

2006-03-08T16:46:00.000-05:00

Trusted Computing
Originally uploaded by Chris Tengi.

The idea of Trusted Computing is alive and well here at ETech. However, it's probably not the Trusted Computing you're thinking of. The ETech version is shown in this picture....

Technorati Tags: ETech, ETech 06, Trusted Computing

Multi-touch User Interface

2006-03-07T12:58:00.000-05:00

I just saw the most incredible demo here at ETech 06. Jeff Han from NYU showed their multi-touch user interface, "and the crowd went wild." The interface consists of an angled acrylic panel with a projector beneath it. There are LEDs shining light into the sides of the panel and when you touch the panel, your finger (or whatever you touch it with) scatters the internally reflected light which is then picked up by sensors beneath the panel. Their technique allows you to touch the panel at many points simultaneously, enabling a very complex yet intuitive user interface.

As you might imagine, it is possible for multiple people to use the interface at the same time, allowing new methods of collaboration and interaction. One of the demo applications was a game where the object is to move around nodes on a graph in order to eliminate crossed connection lines. Jeff had 2 game boards on the screen at the same time, allowing 2 people to play against each other (modulo enough processor power underneath to do all the math and re-drawing work).

Another demo app. was a type of photo album that allowed you to move images around, resize them by pinching or spreading your fingers, and rotate them by moving putting down 2 fingers and making a circular motion. Jeff them demonstrated the same type of application displaying live video streams (somewhere over 100 streams!). That one looked like a great way to watch everything on TV at once. :-)

Jeff also showed a drawing/animation application that allowed you to draw closed-loop shapes and then animate them by simply wiggling 1 or 2 fingers within the boundary of the shape.

The really cool application was a type of "Google Earth on steroids." Imagine everything you can do with Google Earth, but doing it by touching a screen with particular gestures. As Jeff "drilled down" on the image of the globe, the satellite imagery seamlessly gave way to detailed street maps with buttons allowing you to bring up additional information about the area you were looking at. Words really fail me at this point. If I've whetted your appetite, go to Jeff's page and look at the demo reel (MPEG or QuickTime).

Technorati Tags: GUI, multi-touch, User Interface, ETech, ETech06

Views From the Air

2006-03-06T10:24:00.000-05:00

IMG_4762.JPG
Originally uploaded by Chris Tengi.

On my flight from New Jersey to California, I decided to try out my GPS. To my surprise, it was able to see between 3 and 6 satellites even if I left it on the tray-table. So, I decided to take some pictures and (later) tag them with GPSPhotoLinker. This photo is the first of a set on flickr showing the result.

Technorati Tags: Flickr

GPSPhotoLinker

2006-03-02T23:05:00.000-05:00

While surfing around the net a while back, I came across a neat little application named GPSPhotoLinker. It is a Mac application that will take information from a GPS track file and merge the location information into the EXIF headers of selected JPEG files. Of course, in order to merge track information into a photo, you need to generate a track file. This is easily done with modern handheld GPS units such as the Garmin eTrex Legend. In mid-February I acquired just such a device. With my eTrex in hand and my Canon Powershot A70 camera, I was ready to start using hardware to add location information to my pictures, rather than doing it manually after finding the locations with Google Earth.

For a first test, I took a few pictures just outside of my office like the one at the left. First, I made sure that the eTrex had found enough satellites to display my location and that the time zone was configured correctly. Second, I made sure that the clock on my camera was right. Then I walked around a bit and took some pictures.

The eTrex logs its current location at regular intervals and timestamps each entry. My camera logs the time that each picture is taken in the EXIF header of the JPEG file. It is these two timestamps that GPSPhotoLinker uses to put the right location information into each picture.

Once I had taken the pictures, it was time to download everything to my PowerBook and see what the program could do. Now, I don't use iPhoto when downloading pictures as I have a number of command line tools (based on Phil Harvey's excellent exiftool) that I use to set different EXIF and IPTC fields such as copyright and keywords. Instead of using iPhoto, I simply copy the JPEG files into a folder on my Desktop, open the folder, and fire up Terminal. I 'cd' to the folder and use some of my tools to add copyright, keywords, and whatever else I might want. I also run a script that adds a "GPS template" to every image I want to GPS tag. I'll explain why a bit later.

With the images prepared, I connect the eTrex to a USB-to-serial adapter, launch GPSPhotoLinker, and use its "Download Tracks" function to download the track log to my Documents folder. The next step is to load the photos into GPSPhotoLinker. Once the photos are loaded, it is now possible to add the GPS location information to each image file. The program allows you to "link" photos individually or in a batch. The "standard" mode displays 3 possible options for location values to use on your picture. Based on the timestamp in the image you will see the track point immediately preceding the photo time, the the track point immediately following, and a time-weighted average location. All three options have a "View on map" button and a "Save to photo" button. These buttons do just what you think they do. Choose the track point that most closely represents the location at which the photo was taken and click on the "Save to photo" button.

If you're trying to save coordinates to multiple photos, you can use GPSPhotoLinker's batch mode. Here you have a number of options. You can have the program select the nearest recorded point or a time-weighted average of points that are within a specified number of seconds, a specified number of meters, or a combination of the two. All-in-all, this is a very flexible program.

I said earlier that I needed to add a GPS template to the photos before I could run GPSPhotoLinker against them. Without a template, every time I added GPS information to a photo, the "maker notes" section of the EXIF header would be corrupted (I found this when I later tried to change another EXIF header value with exiftool). The corruption was verified using exiv2, on which GPSPhotoLinker is based. However, between the time I started writing this post (Thursday night) and now (Friday night) a new version of GPSPhotoLinker (1.3.5), based on a newer version of exiv2, was made available to me. This version does not corrupt the maker notes in the EXIF header, so I no longer need to pre-process the files before running GPSPhotoLinker.

On Sunday I leave for the O'Reilly ETech conference in San Diego, where I plan on taking a bunch of pictures and geocode them using GPSPhotoLinker. To see the result, take a look at my flickr photos tagged with etech06.

Technorati Tags: GPS, EXIF, Flickr, ETech, Tutorial

2006-02-17T18:00:00.000-05:00

Seasonal Vegetables

2006-02-17T14:57:00.000-05:00

Seasonal Vegetables
Originally uploaded by Chris Tengi.

According to the US Government, ketchup is a vegetable. Here's some of the winter crop.

Technorati Tags: Flickr

Google Maps and Google Earth Street Maps for Torino Italy

2006-02-03T10:37:00.000-05:00

Google Maps (aka Google Local) now has street-level maps of Torino, Italy. Google Earth's roads layer also shows the streets. So, who will be the first one out of the gate with mashups showing all of the Olympic venues?

This has also been blogged over at Google Maps Mania.

UPDATE: This post in the Official Google Blog tells of more enhancements for our Googley Olympics Experience, including a KMZ file showing the Olympic venues in Google Earth.

Technorati Tags: Google Maps, Google Earth, Olympics, Torino, Italy

MAKE: Blog: DIY Headcam...

2006-02-02T17:39:00.000-05:00

I don't read a whole slew of blogs (who has the time?), but of the dozen or so I do read, I think I enjoy the Make blog the most. There are people all over the world fabricating really cool things all the time, and this blog touches on a number of them. For example, some folks needed a way to shoot video while hiking and decided to build their own headcam. This looks like a fun toy to me, even though I have no serious use for such a device.

Technorati Tags: Make Magazine, DIY, video camera

Google Talk is Now Reachable

2006-01-18T10:12:00.000-05:00

As detailed in this post on the official Google Blog, Google Talk is now reachable from any jabber server around the world. As you might have guessed from my previous blog entry, I've been tracking this pretty much since Google Talk went online. Yesterday morning (on the east coast), I found that the service was almost open and updated my entry. Unfortunately for me, I wasn't online when they decided on the west coast to make the final change that got everything working. The announcement from the engineer who actually got to enable this can be found here. So much for getting the scoop....

I haven't yet read any of the other posts linked to the official announcement, but I did do some testing this morning and found that both presence messages and IMs appear to be going through nicely. I guess that now I can stop logging into both Google Talk and my local jabber server and cross-polinate my contact lists. That way, it won't matter which service I use, I'll still be able to get to everybody. Just the way it should work....

Technorati Tags: Google Talk, Jabber, XMPP, Federation

Gtalk Online Status Display

2006-01-16T17:58:00.000-05:00

Jon Burrows has written a Gtalk Online Status Display 'bot that you can use to show your current presence status on a web page. Just add gtalkonlinestatus@gmail.com to your contacts and then add an IMG tag to your web page with a SRC of

http://www.jonburrows.co.uk/gtalkstatus.aspx?User=???

where "???" is replaced by your Google Talk ID.

Technorati Tags: Google Talk, Jabber, XMPP

The Jeff Pulver Blog: Sunrise over Waikiki Beach, Hawaii

2006-01-15T20:19:00.000-05:00

Jeff Pulver blogged some very nice pictures of
sunrise over Waikiki Beach, Hawaii as well as some from Oahu.

Google Talk is Almost Reachable

2006-01-13T16:35:00.000-05:00

As of a few months ago, there were no DNS SRV records for XMPP server-to-server connections to the gmail.com domain. Then there was one pointing to TCP port 5269 on talk.google.com. Unfortunately, that port was unreachable. Then, a few weeks ago (I think) SRV records were added for 2 more servers, but all three were still unreachable. Yesterday I checked again, and all three servers were still unreachable. Today, I decided to write a little perl script to more easily check the status of server-to-server reachability for JID domains. Naturally, the first one I wanted to check was gmail.com. I almost fell out of my chair when I saw that all three servers were reachable on port 5269! It turns out that you get an immediate disconnect when you do try to connect, but there is definitely something listening today that wasn't there yesterday.

What this means is that Google Talk users are one step closer to being reachable by people using other jabber servers out on the greater Internet. Goole Talkers will no longer be trapped in their current walled garden. Instant Messaging for the masses is getting closer and closer to the EMail model, where it doesn't matter who your provider is - you can still communicate with everybody else.

You can bet that I'll be checking this at least daily to see when they go live with server-to-server connectivity. I'll also be watching the IM Federation's networks page to see when Google Talk gets out of the "Pending" column.

This is going to be fun!

UPDATE: As of around 10:30 AM EST (UTC -05:00) on 17 Jan, all 3 of the servers advertised in gmail.com's SRV records are (apparently) running web servers that send out "302" messages re-directing you to http://www.google.com/talk/ when you connect to port 5269. However, it's actually not just a web server running there. Whatever is running there does seem to understand XML streams. It just doesn't currently support urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-streams stanzas, so messages and presence information don't currently make it from my jabber server into theirs. However, the initial server-to-server connection does appear to come up. It looks like we're one step closer!

UPDATE: As everybody knows by now from this post and this post (and this post ;-) ), Google Talk users can now "jabber" with the rest of the world. Note that this update is mostly a shameless act of self-promotion, wherein I'm attempting to show that I was there, trying to make it work, just before it went live.

Technorati Tags: Google Talk, Jabber, XMPP

Google Local and Talk for the Blackberry

2006-01-12T23:44:00.000-05:00

On the Google Blog today the announced: Google Talkabout: YT?...Google Talk for BlackBerry which, unfortunately, won't really be available until the spring, according to the press release on the RIM site. What I did find out about there, but hadn't heard about before, was the availability of Google Local for the Blackberry. Just browse over to www.google.com/glm from your Blackberry and download it.

I had a little time to play around with this, and I'm impressed. Even with the relatively low rate data connection I get from Cingular, the maps loaded, panned, and zoomed at a pretty reasonable speed. However, while it's a cool that you can switch to the satellite view, don't bother unless you feel like waiting (and waiting, and waiting...).

The program starts up with the pointer in the middle of a US map. Click on the wheel to bring up a menu. From here, you can search for a location, get directions, move the map to one of your recently visited places, clear the map, or learn how to pan and zoom. As for the latter 2 items, the clickwheel can be used to pan up and down, and if you hold down the "moon" key, the wheel will pan left and right as well. For the clickwheel-impaired, "u" and "j" move you up and down, and "h" and "k" go left and right. Oh, and you use "i" to zoom in and (you guessed it) "o" to zoom out.

Search strings are the same as for the Google Local web site (as you would expect), but you use numeric keys to bring the various hits to the front. Fortunately, you don't need to use the moon key to get the numbers - the app is smart enough to know that "w" is 1, "e" is 2, etc. I'll need to play around with this a bit more to see if there are any shortcut keys available (or I could always read the help screen).

All-in-all, this looks like a nice little application, especially when you need that pizza fix when you're on the road.

Technorati Tags: Google Talk, Blackberry, Google Local

Google Earth for the Mac!

2006-01-11T16:52:00.000-05:00

According to this article on the Official Google Blog, Google Earth is now available for the Mac. Also, the PC version has finally come out of beta. I just downloaded the official Mac version and will probably be wasting quite a bit of time with it this evening.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Earth, Mapping

Migrating Yourself (and your friends) Away From AIM/MSN/Yahoo!/etc

2006-01-04T20:30:00.000-05:00

Are you tired of "AIM Today" popping onto your screen every time you get onto the computer, in spite of your preference settings? Or, how about random movie ads playing through your speakers with a little postage-stamp size image in your IM client window? Would you like to be able to treat IM addresses more like EMail addresses? Would you like to play with cool 'net toys that use your presence information to put images on maps (see my earlier post)? Me too!

So, here's the deal: There are other applications available on the Internet that will speak multiple proprietary IM protocols, such as those used by AIM and MSN, as well as a newer, non-proprietary protocol known as XMPP. This is the protocol known popularly as Jabber (which was its name before it was formalized in RFCs and recognized by the IETF).

For MS-Windows and Linux I use a program known as gaim. For the Mac, I prefer adium. Both programs support AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Jabber, and a few others. So, if you have accounts on any of those proprietary systems, you can now run just one program and chat with all of your "buddies." You can also add new friends on Google Talk as well as any public Jabber server anywhere in the world.

If you're a Linux or MS-Windows user, go get the latest version of gaim, install it, and fire it up. You'll be greeted by a 'Login' window and the 'Accounts' window. Bring the Accounts window to the front and click on the 'Add' button. Pick a protocol and type in your screen name and password. Check the 'Remember password' and 'Auto-login' boxes and click on 'Save' button Then, in the Accounts window, check the 'Online' box. Once your buddy list comes up, you can close the Accounts window. Next time you start gaim, you'll be logged in automatically.

Now, if you have a GMail account, you can use gaim for that as well. Click on the 'Tools' menu bar entry and then click on the 'Accounts' entry. In the Accounts window, click on the 'Add' button and select Jabber as the protocol. Enter your GMail username as the Screen Name and "gmail.com" as the server. Enter your GMail password in the appropriate place and check the 'Remember password' and 'Auto-login' boxes. Now, click on the '+' next to 'Show More Options.' Enter "talk.google.com" in the 'Connect server' box and click on 'Save.' Back in the Accounts window, check the 'Online' box for the new account and then close the Accounts window.

A neat feature of gaim is the ability to group buddies. So, if you have a friend who has multiple IM accounts, you can group all of them under one entry in your buddy list. Find the entry you want to be the top of the group and right-click on it. Select "expand" from the menu and then drag the other buddy entries for this person under the expanded entry. You can arrange the grouped buddy entries in any order you want. Click on the minus sign to collapse the list. Normally, hovering over a "grouped" buddy will expand the list temporarily, so you can select which entry to IM. Or, you can just double click on the group entry which will send a message to (I believe) the top online address in the group.

Adium is a somewhat different beast. First off, it is a native Mac OSX application, and is nicely integrated with the Mac Address Book application. Second, it understands Apple's Bonjour protocols, so you can easily find other Mac users on your local network who might be interested in chatting, whether they are running adium or iChat.

The first time you start Adium, you will be greeted by the 'Preferences' window, ready for you to set up an account. Click on the '+' sign and then on the protocol you wish to configure. What you do next depends on the protocol you've chosen. If you've chosen "AOL Instant Messenger" then all you need to do is enter your Screen Name, your Password, and then check the 'Automatically connect on launch' box before you click on the 'OK' button.

Let's say that you're going to add your Google Talk account, so you selected the Jabber protocol. Enter your GMail address as the 'Jabber ID' and your GMail password as the Password. Click on 'Options' in the top of the window and enter "talk.google.com" as the 'Connect Server.' Then check the 'Use TLS...' and 'Automatically connect...' check boxes and click on the 'OK' button.

Provided that you got the Screen Name (/Jabber ID) and the Password correct, you will now be connected to the IM server for the protocol you've just configured. Since the 'Preferences : Accounts' window is still open, you can add any other accounts you might have. Note that for Bonjour, you can put pretty much whatever you want in for the 'User Name' and the program won't care. You're probably best off putting your name, if you want your friends to be able to find you.

That ought to be enough to get you started. Now you can get your friends to switch over too, and you'll all be well on your way to leaving the proprietary IM systems behind. If you don't have a GMail/Google Talk account, get one! Pretty soon, Google should be allowing connections from other Jabber servers on the Internet, opening up literally a whole world of people for you to chat with.

Technorati Tags: Jabber, xmpp, gaim, adium, tutorial

Google Holiday Logos

2005-12-23T12:58:00.000-05:00

The folks at Google are at it again with this year's Google Holiday Logos. Over the past few years they've occasionally replaced their search page logo with a series of logos that tell a story or celebrate an event. Here are the ones they've done so far:

The first one

July 4th

Sydney Summer Olympics

Keep checking back at this year's doodle page to see how the cat and mouse do....

Technorati Tags: Google

This Year's Gingerbread House

2005-12-18T19:47:00.000-05:00

Front View

Rear View
Originally uploaded by Chris Tengi.

The boys spent a few hours on this last weekend, and their effort shows. Eric did the side of the roof visible in the front view and Mark did the side of the roof visible in the rear image (the one with the covered porch).

Technorati Tags: flickr

XBOX Mania

2005-12-17T18:06:00.000-05:00

I just walked past the local Best Buy and saw a whole bunch of people sitting along the wall on camp chairs and benches. I overheard somebody ask one of them if they were sleeping here and he said "yes." At the time I had no idea what they were all waiting for....

My son and I went into the store and started our shopping. We saw one of his friends who asked us if we saw all the people waiting for the XBOX 360. Apparently, this Best Buy store is expecting 44 of this year's ultimate stocking stuffer and it looks like these winter campers are waiting out the delivery truck.

While I know my boys wouldn't mind finding Microsoft's latest under the tree, I feel fortunate to know that they would never expect me to sleep overnight outside a store just to get one. I guess that we're raising them right.

--------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

Google Talk Maps

2005-12-15T17:34:00.000-05:00

Google Talk Maps is another cool, interesting (and potentially useful) thing you can do with Google Maps. If you're a Google Talk user, add "map.bot@gmail.com" to your Friends. If you use a jabber server other than Google Talk, you can add "map.bot@jabber.org" to your contacts or "buddies" list. If you use one of those non-XMPP instant messaging systems, you're out of luck....

Take a look at the bottom of this blog's sidebar and you'll see another feature of Google Talk Maps -- a map thumbnail showing you whether or not I'm available on Google Talk, and where I am. Pretty cool, eh?

Technorati Tags: Google Talk, Maps, XMPP

Love Your Smoke Detector

2005-11-28T21:03:00.000-05:00

Prior to 24 November 2005, the only time I ever heard anything from
any of my smoke detectors was when their batteries were running low
and needed to be replaced. All of that changed after our
Thanksgiving dinner this year.

To quote Arlo Guthrie, we had "a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be
beat" and then spread through the house to do various different
things. The kids were watching TV with their grandfather, my wife
was helping my mom with some web-shopping, and I was showing my
mother-in-law how to use some of the features of her new digital camera.

About 10 minutes into my camera tutorial, one of our smoke detectors
went off. Neither seeing nor smelling smoke, I walked over to the
detector to check it out. When I got there, I was shocked to see 1-
foot high flames dancing on my dining room table. Yikes! I yelled
"FIRE!" and ran to the table to try to put it out.

A few napkins had been tossed on the table and had landed too close
to a "tea candle." While not covering the candle, apparently part of
a napkin was close enough to catch fire. When I got to the table, I
started smothering the flames using un-burnt napkin and table cloth
while my 14-year-old son ran in and doused the pile of cloth with
some water. The combined effort quickly put out the flames.

If the smoke detector had not gone off, the fire could have easily
spread over the rest of the table cloth and onto the rug under the
table. At that point, our only option would have been to leave the
house and call 911 (in that order!).

As a reward for its selfless devotion to my safety, I'm going to give
my smoke detector and its brethren new batteries. I love my smoke
detector(s)....

2005-11-15T00:13:00.000-05:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Data Points

2005-10-31T20:38:00.000-05:00

Well, maybe more like a few dozen.

By now, we've all looked at digital photographs. We see them on the web, on our home computers, on PDAs and cell phones, and even on iPods. However, what you see isn't the entire story. Most JPEG photos you see today have more information encoded in them, in the form of EXIF and IPTC headers. The information in these headers can be viewed by many photo viewing applications, such as iPhoto and Preview on the Mac and Google's picasa, Stuffware's Photo Studio and Microsoft's Picture and Fax Viewer on MS-Windows.

Much of this data is put there by the digital camera but there are tools that you can use to add or change the information in these headers, as well as view them in more detail than is generally possible with photo viewing applications. Doing a search for EXIF on del.icio.us or Google will yield pointers to a number of different tools and web sites. The two tools I've made the most use of are jhead and ExifTool. The former is written in C and the latter in Perl. They both run under Linux, Mac-OS and MS-Windows.

Both of these tools can be used to display and modify the meta-information present in JPEG photos, but each one can make some changes that the other cannot. For example, jhead is only able to modify the "Comment" field present in JPEG photos that is outside of the EXIF headers, while ExifTool is only able to modify comment fields within the headers. Take a look around the web pages for each tool to see its particular strengths.

One of my favorite uses for jhead is to set the file creation date to the time stamp present inside the file (put there by the camera when the picture was taken). Another use is to correct both the internal time stamp and the file creation date if I've forgotten to change the clock on the camera when changing between Standard Time and Daylight Savings Time. Oh, and don't forget about those pictures you've taken in another time zone, before you remembered to fix the camera's date and time. :-)

Lately, I've been using ExifTool for geocoding. If you click on the image of Notre-Dame you will be taken (in another window) to its Flickr page.

Beneath the picture, you will see two links: "Fly to this location" and "geotagged." The former will cause Google Earth to fly you to France. If you don't have Google Earth installed, you can click on the "geotagged" link to be shown the picture's location via geobloggers. Note that Firefox on the Mac does not display the map image on geobloggers. Firefox on other platforms works just fine, as does Safari on the Mac. It is a well known problem with Firefox, but only on the Mac.

If you look near the lower-right corner of the Flickr photo page, under "Additional Information" you will see a "More properties" link. This will display all of the EXIF information contained within the photo.

Unfortunately, the digital camera I used to take this picture doesn't have the ability to tag photos with GPS information. Fortunately, ExifTool does. Here is the command I used to tag the image with GPS and IPTC location information:


exiftool -GPSLatitude = "48 deg 51' 11.00"       -GPSLatitudeRef = "north"       -GPSLongitude = "2 deg 20' 58.50"
      -GPSLongitudeRef = "east"       -IPTC:Country-PrimaryLocationCode="FRA"       -IPTC:Country-PrimaryLocationName="France"       -IPTC:City="Paris" IMG_3968.JPG

Another feature present in many modern digital cameras, but again lacking in mine, is the ability to tag the picture with the orientation of the camera when the picture was taken. Once again, it's ExifTool to the rescue! Here's a command to "rotate" the picture 90 degrees counter-clockwise:


exiftool -n -Orientation=6 IMG_1234.JPG

Unlike many photo viewing and editing tools, this command doesn't change the image information in the JPEG file, but merely changes the EXIF Orientation tag.

More information on these tags and others can be found in the EXIF and IPTC references above as well as numerous other sites reachable by a web search or a multi-tag del.icio.us query. Explore! See what you can find!

Oh, one more thing.... If you're going to be publishing your photos on the web, you may want to add a copyright notice inside the file. With the obvious command line changes, this can be easily done with:


exiftool -Copyright="Copyright 2005 YOUR_NAME_HERE" *.JPG

Will this stuff change the world? Probably not. Is it fun to play with? Well, a whole bunch of people have spent (wasted?) many hours tagging photographs and/or writing software to display them in interesting and unusual ways. Personally, I find it quite enjoyable to tag my photos and then see what's out there to let me use all of that information.

Technorati Tags: exif, jpeg, perl, gps, iptc, flickr, tutorial

Bread Crumbs and Threads

2005-10-19T12:51:00.000-04:00

There are many cool web sites out on the 'net that let you do fun, interesting and useful things - for free! Among them are Flickr, del.icio.us, and Google Mail. There are many people around the world using these services every day. They post photos to Flickr, they list sites of interest in their del.icio.us bookmarks and they send and receive EMail using Google Mail. And of course, there are blogging sites just about everywhere.

Using these services is like leaving bread crumbs around the 'net leading right back to you. For some, this is the whole reason to use the service. For others, it's just a by-product that they don't care about. For everyone, these bread crumbs define the public persona of the user.

For those of us who are lazy and have the same username on any of the various services we use, it's fairly easy to find threads that tie the bread crumbs together. Even if you use different usernames, many times you want to tie your various sites together. Why wouldn't you want to use some of your Flickr photos in your blog, or at least put a pointer to them in a post? When a reader follows the link, they can see not only what photos you've posted, but any others that you've marked as favorites. It's the same for your del.icio.us bookmarks. You have no reason to save links that you don't find interesting or useful, so the links you do post are clearly of interest to you. What you blog about and how you write about it also tell others about you.

When all of the threads are followed and all of the bread crumbs are collected, an image of the poster begins to appear. Depending on what's out there, the image may be more or less complete and more or less accurate (in real life). However, no matter how accurate, this is your public persona. It follows you around the 'net wherever you go. Am I personally concerned about this? No, not really. Should you be? Perhaps - it all depends on what you say and do (just like in real life). You just need to remember one thing: On the 'net, you are what you post.

Technorati Tags: Privacy, Identity, Google Mail, del.icio.us, flickr