A German, a Brazilian and an Indian, all three student volunteers, walked towards the conference office the day before a conference. As it happened, the student volunteer chair had had some trouble reaching the venue, and there were no specific instructions for the volunteers at that time. Nobody else had any information or any plan to hand out either. (Turns out they did, but our protagonists did not know at the time.)

The German noted this and wondered how they could be so ill-prepared and without a plan just one day before the conference. The Indian remarked that they might just be running late and here’s hoping that everything would be fine and dandy by the next day, the day of the conference. The Brazilian said, oh well, if they don’t have anything for us to do, we’ll just go to the beach and have fun instead.

While this anecdote might not have had the punchline you might have been waiting for, (especially given the clichéd setup), it’s a nice illustration of how cultural upbringing shapes our thinking in the most trivial of incidences in life.

Since Facebook won’t provide you a way to opt-out of Beacon, their intrusive advertising platform, here’s how you can prevent them from harvesting data about you from other sites.

For Safari, first install the excellent PithHelmet plugin that lets you block sites, pages, cookies, and advertising with excellent granularity. It is not free, but well worth the $10. Go to PithHelmet preferences, right within Safari’s preference dialog.

In the next step, you’ll need the following Matching Pattern. Here it is for copy/paste convenience:
.*facebook\.com\/beacon.*

For Firefox, I refer you to Nate Weiner’s original post that inspired mine for Safari. He also has a detailed analysis of why Beacon is a privacy nightmare with no means for users to opt-out completely. The ‘No Thanks’ button only prevents the information from being displayed, but Facebook still logs and preserves it, and may do with it as they please (according to their terms of use).

I ask you, the blogosphere, to enlighten me on the best way to eat Pringles that does not involve a bowl. The Pringles can is one of the iconic designs of modern times — uniformly-shaped potato chips in a tube — that seems to value form over function.

Let’s admit: eating chips is a secondary task for most Americans. These are snacks people munch on when they’re doing other things. Thus, these chips should be easy to grab with one hand and have the other hand free for the television remote, steering wheel or keyboard/mouse. At the same time, it is important that chips don’t spill, or worse yet, crumble in your hand. So what’s the best way to eat them without needing a bowl? (because using a bowl would just be weaseling out of this problem into one already solved in The Textbook.)

The first few chips are easy. (Isn’t that the case with everything? ) They’re within the grasp of your fingers, so it’s no different than plucking a few chips from a bag. It’s after the top few disappear that the problem starts. Should I force my hand into the can? Should I invert the can so the chips fall out into my hand? Should I tilt the can ever so slightly and tap on the side to have the chips exit one by one instead of stampeding all over themselves?

I’ve tried to dig in with my hand to get to the next few, but my hand is too big to fit inside the can, and it’s probably not a good idea anyway. I shudder to think of the day I’m in an Emergency Room with a Pringles can wrapped around my wrist, with $200/hour doctors cutting off an embarrassing roll of cardboard from the one organ that distinguishes men from apes. No, excavating anything but the top few is a job for professional archaeologists.

I’ve tried inverting the can with the lid on, so (I hoped) the chips would all accumulate on the lid, and then I could simply open it up and eat a few. The problem is, the quantum stable state for potato chips is a pile of crumbs. Inverting the can gets all the crumbs to the bottom of the can, and when the lid is opened, that’s what comes out first.

I’ve tried tilting the can at a precise angle and knocking on the side until the top few chips make their way slowly out the door. This sometimes works, but takes a long time, and very skillful knocking/tapping/flicking to get the right number of chips out of the can. Often, you’ll spend five minutes tapping unsuccessfully, then, out of a burst of frustration, you’d tap just a little bit harder, and have Pringles rain upon you. No go.

Dear Mommy taught me to search the Web before posting random questions to total strangers, so I did my homework. Here’s an innovative method of eating Pringles, but I’m no chopsticks ninja. And eating chips with chopsticks vaguely reminds me of the Seinfeld episode with George eating Snickers with a knife. You get the point, sort of.

So my question to you is, what’s the best way you’ve found to eat Pringles out of a can without spilling any crumbs, using a minimum number of hands to do it? A second, deeper, question, from my obvious position as a design and HCI person is, why has such a design resisted change over so many years despite being so hard to eat from?

A video from Apple’s 1984 Shareholders’ Meeting seems appropriate today.

I received the following email a few minutes ago, with fake headers and the works, and is formatted exactly the same way as the regular email we get from these folks. It’s probably viral marketing for the upcoming game, Portal, releasing November 23, 2007. Lots of references to it in the text.

1. UNDERGROUND HALLOWEEN ADVENTURE
2. BOBBY FISCHER – ENDED THE SOVIET CHESS HEGEMONY
3. SELECTING YOUR CABLE COMPANY IN BLACKSBURG
4. PI EATING CONTEST
5. POSSIBLE BAG BAN
6. DONALDSON-BROWN LOCKS TO BE CHANGED
7. ODD – OPEN DOOR DAY
8. MICROSOFT VISTA SERVICE PACK DEMO
9. WEEKLY SPEAKER SERIES
10. REGISTRATION FOR DEAN’S FORUM ON HEALTH, FOOD AND NUTRITION
11. STUDY PARTICIPANTS NEEDED

1. UNDERGROUND HALLOWEEN ADVENTURE
A Halloween tour of the steam tunnels beneath campus will be offered for the first time this year to four groups of eight people on Oct. 29th and 30th. Sign-up for each of the four tours will begin on Monday, October 22nd, and continue until all places are taken. Interested parties should contact Richard McCoy at 231-3200 for more information.

2. BOBBY FISCHER – ENDED THE SOVIET CHESS HEGEMONY
Monday, Oct 22, 5:30-7:00 in Williamsburg Rm, 7:00-8:00 in Haymarket Theater in Squires Center The man who ended the Soviet chess hegemony by defeating Boris Spassky will speak at Virginia Tech. A reception will precede his presentation at 7:00pm. Robert James “Bobby” Fischer is a United States-born chess Grandmaster who in 1972 became the only US-born chess player to become the official World Chess Champion. Fischer’s victory during the Cold War caused a great interest in chess and is responsible for the swelling of members of the World Chess Federation.

3. SELECTING YOUR CABLE COMPANY IN BLACKSBURG
Sometime between Tuesday, Oct 23 08:00am and next Friday, Nov 2 7:00pm in Room C in the GLC Are you interested in purchasing a subscription package from your local cable company? Presenters from NTC Communications Comcast Digital Cable and Cox Communications will talk about the different internet, phone and cable packages available and answer questions about rates and programming.

4. PI EATING CONTEST
Tuesday, Oct 23, 7:00pm in Room F in the GLC the VT Math club is sponsoring a Pi festival. Approximately 3,141 pies will be available for sampling. They will include but are not limited to Apple, Banoffee, Banana cream, Blackberry, Blueberry, Cheesecake, Cherry, Chestnut, Cream, Custard, Grape, Lemon meringue, Peach, Pecan, Pumpkin, and Rhubarb. In addition, at 7:30 there will also be a pie eating contest. The first contestant to eat an irrational number of pies will receive a hand-carved Penrose triangle.

5. POSSIBLE BAG BAN
Due to the heightened security of many university campuses, a possible ban of all bags on campus may be implemented in the next two weeks. Backpacks, duffels, shoulder-bags, and purses may soon join the list of items prohibited on campus. This measure has been proposed since it has been pointed out that bags may be able to conceal already illegal items. An unlikely supporter of the ban is the campus Health and Safety Department as it would also alleviate the troubling phenomenon of overweight book bags that commonly lead to health problems later in life. Acceptance of the proposal will be decided by the campus Board of Directors later this week.

6. DONALDSON-BROWN LOCKS TO BE CHANGED
It has come to the attention of university security personnel that many graduate students have access to the GLC 24 hours a day. In order to remedy this threat to campus security, all doors to the GLC will have their locks changed between Monday evening and Tuesday morning. In addition, Donaldson Brown dorm rooms will also have their locks changed on a short rotation. You may need to request a new room key from your Residential Fellow.

7. ODD – OPEN DOOR DAY
To help promote social interaction amongst the graduate students, Thurs, Oct 25, will be open door day. Graduate students on campus are encouraged to keep their door open and meet their neighbors as well as their Residential Fellow if they have not done so already. We are aware that the doors in the GLC rooms close on their own, this is why you have been provided with doorstops. Use them! Hopefully open door day will become more routine and no longer considered odd.

8. MICROSOFT VISTA SERVICE PACK DEMO
Wednesday, Oct 24, 6:00-7:00pm in McBryde 666, Microsoft will be giving an exclusive preview of service pack one for Vista. In response to the massive number of problems, compatibility, and stability issues in Vista, Microsoft has spent the past year fervently addressing these issues in the much anticipated service pack 1 (SP1). Representives from Microsoft will demonstrate the features and stability changes of SP1, such as the newly bolstered DRM software. This update and others in SP1 that will be demonstrated should help provide Vista users with new enhanced reduced functionality.

9. WEEKLY SPEAKER SERIES
Friday, Oct 26, 4:00-5:00pm in Room F in the GLC Faculty speaker: Dr. Henry Warren – Physics, on Structure of the Proton. Graduate students and faculty from across the university present weekly their teaching and research passions in a casual, coffee house atmosphere. Free coffee and pastries served from 3:45pm.

10. REGISTRATION FOR DEAN’S FORUM ON HEALTH, FOOD AND NUTRITION
Registration for the Nov 5 forum is now open. This forum will showcase health, food, and nutrition efforts in research, extension/outreach, and teaching currently underway at McDonalds, Kraft Foods, Monsanto, and LuthorCorp. Register by Sunday, Oct 28 if you plan on attending the event. Sponsors will showcase the health benefits of the latest developments in GMOs, growth hormones, preservatives, artificial sweeteners, hydrogenated oils, flavoring and texturizing food additives. For more information, including registration links, and to view the Forum agenda, please visit http://www.mcvideogame.com/index-eng.html

11. STUDY PARTICIPANTS NEEDED
A graduate student researcher working on behalf of Aperture Science is seeking highly-motivated individuals in good physical condition between the ages of 18-25 for her study. Participants will be asked to perform complex tasks. The entire study should last a minimum of 3 hours and moist, delicious cake will be served upon successful completion of the test. For further information or to sign up to participate, please contact Glados, glados@aperturescience.com

I often find myself talking to people who I should know (in theory), but for some reason, in practice, my neurons refuse to make the right connections to remember these connections. Wouldn’t it be great if someone designed a heads-up display based on your social network?

This is how it would work: when I activate it, and it notices I’m talking to someone, it would do a quick scan and tell me his/her name. That would be a life-saver, and would avoid the first five minutes of the 20-Questions game I have to play every time this happens (while making sure that the other guy (or girl!) doesn’t notice I’m playing the game in my mind.)

It could also tell me how I know that person, because sometimes I remember the name, but nothing else. Wouldn’t it be helpful to know that I’m talking to John Doe, who went to the same high school as I did, and who is now President and CEO of a Fortune 100 company (note to self: graduate soon.)

Not just names, it could even tell me more about the person I didn’t already know (or, in the more likely case, I’ve forgotten.) I’d love to know that my friend John Doe is no longer with his (now ex-) girlfriend Jane, so that would cut out a lot of awkward conversation. Knowing that he just went on a cruise to Alaska would instantly give us a topic to chat about. Knowing that the lady on his arm is not his wife would probably also help. I could ask him about our common friends and if he were in touch with any of them. And then he could use his heads-up display to pull their details up and tell me what I’d already looked up, but that’s another story.

So why isn’t something like this on the market yet? I’m sure there would be throngs of people lined up outside the offices of the company that makes the first such thing. And if they try to patent it, you can cite my blog post as prior art. You’re welcome.

Update: A picture is worth a thousand words. A movie, perhaps a million?

It’s been exactly a month since my feature launched on Google Books. I went on an ego-surfing trip to see who had covered it. Here’s what I found.

• TechCrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/06/google-books-embed-book-clips-into-websites/
• CNet Australia: http://www.cnet.com.au/software/internet/0,239029524,339281859,00.htm
• Ajaxian: http://ajaxian.com/archives/google-book-search-now-with-clipping
  

  Very simple and clean.

  The words every designer loves to hear!

• TeleRead: http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=7066

  Fascinating, isn’t it, how summer interns’ work at Google can imperil whole businesses?

• Blogoscoped: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-09-06-n55.html

• WebMetrics Guru: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/2007/09/google_books_and_the_search_fo.html

  Funny, but this one new feature of Google Books, I find, is one of the most impressive things that Google has done lately…but that’s just my opinion.

• VentureBeat: http://venturebeat.com/2007/09/06/google-offers-nice-refinements-on-book-search/

• Search Engine Land: http://searchengineland.com/070906-101120.php

• WebWare: http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9772831-2.html
• MobileRead.com: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13565
• Googlified: http://googlified.com/2007google-books-my-library-and-more/
• DownloadSquad: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/09/06/more-google-books-news/
• Switched.com http://www.switched.com/2007/09/07/how-to-embed-book-snippets-in-your-site/

This article was originally written October 3, 2007 and published here before OpenSocial was announced. With this blog post, I’m moving it to my blog to avail of features such as commenting and cross-linking with other related posts. I have not edited it since the original writing; if I do, edits will appear as updates marked as such.

Social networks are currently walled gardens: you need an account on multiple social networking sites to be able to interact with all your friends. This article makes a case for opening up the core protocols that define person-to-person interaction (decentralized networks) and various aspects of your public personality (decentralized applications). It is possible to use a few well-known semantic Web protocols and microformats to break down the walls and make the Internet a true social network.

Social networking Web sites are currently walled gardens. If you’re on MySpace, you cannot communicate with Facebook users or Orkut users. Although the features provided by most sites are comparable, if not equivalent, one must have an account on each of these sites to interact with members from that community.

The Motivation

That is not how social networks work in the real world. I do not need to be a citizen of a country or a follower of a religion to converse with the members of that country or religion, respectively. OK, this is a far-fetched analogy, but consider email.

The Evolution of Email

Before email as we know it today was in wide-spread use, the earliest way to send a message to anyone using a computer was simply to drop a file in their home directory. You could thus only send a message to users of the same computer as you. Ray Tomlinson came up with the idea of addressing users using the “@” sign, so email could be sent across computers. In the opinion of Jon Postel, this was a nice hack that finally evolved to an IETF RFC.

Today, we are able to address email to anyone on any network that’s connected to the Internet. Their ISP, or operating system, or mail transmission agent (MTA) or mail user agent (MUA; commonly referred to as a mail client) has no bearing on whether they will receive our email or not. The diversity in the email ecosystem allows me to receive, download and view my email in exactly the way I want.

Fast forward to Instant Messaging

Instant messaging evolved similarly, with ICQ, AOL, Yahoo!, and Microsoft all developing their functionally-equivalent, but non-interoperable protocols for essentially the same task. You had to have an account with each of those providers to be able to talk to their users. Along came XMPP and Jabber, followed by the development of an IETF RFC for instant messaging, which has now found support in commercial products such as Google Talk. XMPP does not require users to have accounts on multiple servers; if you have an account on one XMPP server, you can chat with any user on any other XMPP network (provided other prerequisites such as authorization are met.)

Why this makes sense for Social Networking

Social networking is no longer one of the fringe activities on the Web. There are several Web sites that purportedly do the same thing (and I’m too lazy to list them all.) The point is, social networking is now becoming a conduit rather than a destination. Much of our online time is spent on social activities, and the importance of individual users and their individual contributions taken together is increasing.

So what would it look like?

A decentralized social network would let users sign up at whichever Host site they prefer (just as you can sign up with any email provider today.) They would be able to participate and interact with users of any other such Host site, with no additional signing up to do. They would be able to create a profile that best reflects their motivation in signing up: a college student may sign up at a Host that allows him to display his classes and academic interests, while a professional may choose a Host site that emphasizes her skills and experience. Applications running on any Host site will have access to the Friends List of the user account they are running under, even across Host sites. A user’s profile may even be fragmented across multiple Hosts, with each Host hosting a particular aspect, or type of content for the user.

Advantages for Users

1. You don’t have to sign up at multiple sites.
2. You can choose a Host site that best suits your personality. If you like a casual, “explosion-in-a-media-factory” look, sign up for MySpace. If you prefer a more professional look, go for Facebook. If you want to expose more professional data than personal data, Linked-In is your Host. If you would like to express your affiliation with your company or non-profit, use their Host site as your primary home.
3. If none of these suit you, just roll out your own Host site that hosts exactly one profile: yours. That won’t prevent you from being part of the larger social network.
4. Since individual Hosts manage their user’s profiles, privacy can be controlled better. You will retain the choice to pick a service that best matches your privacy expectations.

Advantages for Developers

1. When a new social networking site announces their own API and protocols, developers won’t have to scamper to port their existing app to it. They simply continue hosting it themselves, and the newcomer Host will simply talk the same language out-of-the-box.
2. Developers will also have the flexibility of tailoring their interface whichever way they want — they will not be required to adhere to the strict interface guidelines of individual sites.
3. For those that heavily rely on eye-balls and advertising, they can continue to host their own content, not subject to a third party’s terms of services.
4. Expert users may choose to develop apps for themselves. These one-offs will be easy to integrate with that particular user’s profile.

Advantages for Hosts

1. Host sites will be able to position themselves in a market better, and distinguish themselves from other offerings in a better way than existing sites can.
2. The network effect will no longer be the dominant reason for users picking one social networking site over another, and such sites will have to compete on real features and good design, rather than simply “because all my friends are here”.
3. Closer ties between users and hosts will enable them to tailor their services to the particular class of users they attract.

A Change in Philosophy

A few things will need to be re-thought, because, in a decentralized network, there are better alternatives to existing ways of doing things.

Disseminating and aggregating specialized content

We have seen specific websites and companies excelling in managing different types of data. Flickr specializes in photos, YouTube in videos, Blogger in blog posts, Twitter in one-line “twits”. All-purpose sharing websites such as Facebook also let you upload and embed all these types of content. What is the use of duplicating this content on each individual social networking site?

In a decentralized network, my blog could stay at Blogger, my photos on Flickr, and my videos on YouTube. My personal profile is simply an aggregation of these multiple aspects of my personality. What’s more, to design my own profile, I could just pick and choose the “modules” I want from a palette of available syndication options. (In fact, my own website is already designed like that: content you see here is aggregated from Twitter, Flickr, and FeedBurner, plus a few hosted pages.)

Developers can concentrate on what they do best, and outsource the rest of it to experts in individual areas. Photo album designers will not have to reinvent Flickr, and video distributors can simply leech YouTube’s bandwidth for their hosting.

Profile information can be mashed up

A user’s profile information can easily be mashed up for quick one-off applications. For example, if I need to create a list of all my friends from a particular group to print greeting cards, I do not need to write an application, submit it to Facebook and wait for their approval. I simply deploy it to my own Host’s server and get done in the time it takes to write “SELECT * FROM Friends WHERE Group = ‘christmas-cards’” (oh, and I would totally pick a host that provides a SQL interface for social data!) I can have an address book that integrates with my web-based email client, that maintains an updated list of email addresses of all my friends, of course pulled from their individual profiles.

Rethinking privacy and authorization

Authentication is easy (we’ll look at that soon.) Authorization is hard. But this is a problem that should be easy for public-key cryptography to solve. I’m not a cryptography expert, so anything I say here will be wrong. But I trust that if the experts put their mind to this, it shouldn’t be too bad to solve without having Alice, Bob and other alphabet-soup-inspired characters to make all their keys public.

Enhanced Search

To some, this may sound like a gross invasion of privacy, but in fact, deciding what information should be public, and making that publicly-accessible information searchable, are two different problems. Privacy gate-keepers at each Host will decide what content to make publicly accessible. Once that decision has been made, all the major search engines can index the public information (without having access to any of the private stuff.) Google made the Web searchable. A search engine for The One Social Network will make the world’s population searchable.

The Ground Work

A quick analysis of what’s required to make this happen makes us realize that much of the groundwork has already been laid.

Representing People and Relationships

The chief contribution of the recent boom in social networking is the recognition of the Person as a first-class entity on the Web. Earlier, the only way to represent a person on the Web was via her home-page. But that, too, was a static representation, largely disconnected from the activities and evolution of that person.

A recent push towards including semantic markup in Web pages has led to the development of microformats, a light-weight method of marking up entities within Web content in terms of loosely defined formats that do not interfere with the already-existing presentation duties of HTML. There is the hCard microformat defined for representing a person. The XHTML Friends Network establishes a format for indicating relationships among individuals on the Web. A lot of users and Host sites have made their pages XFN-Friendly, i.e., they have added semantic markup to the lists of their friends to indicate relationships.

Representing Activities

Blogs and twits have emerged as easy ways for people to broadcast their activities to whoever is ready to lend an interested ear. There already are standards that help people share these activity logs in standard formats: Atom and RSS.

Representing Personal Information

Again, microformats have been defined for such diverse things as user-posted reviews, calendar entries, résumés, addresses, geographical location information, with a whole lot of other discussions in progress. The mother of all social networking artifacts, tagging, has also been microformatized.

Communicating Across Diverse Websites

Many sites these days are opening up their APIs for external applications to access and modify users’ data over the Web. SOAP, XML-RPC and other, more formal protocols have given way to REST (Representational State Transfer) as a light-weight software architecture for distributed systems. With RESTful websites, it is easy for independent applications to modify data stored on servers: examples include Google’s GData APIs for many properties, Flickr’s API for accessing photos and metadata, Twitter’s API for posting twits, and many other services.

Distributed Authentication

Systems such as Open ID are emerging as viable standards for truly distributed authentication and identity management. There is no reason why an OpenID-based system cannot be used for the Network We Talked About. If we throw in the ability for Hosts to share authentication lists, that would make all Hosts available to all Users, and the question of having to “pick” a particular host may be moot.

What’s Missing?

Communication Protocols for Posting Messages Across Hosts

REST is here, but it only defines the transport architecture. A RESTful communication protocol will have to be developed for users to be able to post messages to other users on other Hosts. Nothing monumental, but just one thing that needs to be done.

Representing Groups Across Hosts

Groups of users will need a way to be recognized across Hosts. A simple way of doing this would be a naming scheme that stays unique across the network, much as Usenet groups have been. A lot of the lessons learned from the design of Usenet can be used here, because today’s social networks are much similar to Usenet, with a few other goodies thrown in.

Current Efforts

Although we are far from this vision, some sites (mainly Facebook) seem to have started on this path. The Facebook platform was a unique step in allowing developers to access users’ profile information. Though, Facebook still is a walled garden. In part to increase traffic, they also have taken baby steps in making users’ profiles available to search engines. MySpace profile pages are still very un-crawl-able. Flickr, Upcoming, and other Yahoo! sites use microformats extensively. Facebook provides RSS feeds of user activity.

Although these are steps in the right direction, they are not enough. Hopefully, we will reach a critical mass of social networking sites that adopt an open social network policy. Till then, you can find me at my many online haunts.

I was playing with Telekinesis on Friday, which lets you use an iPhone as a remote control for your Mac. The idea is simple: Telekinesis runs a web server on your machine, and the iPhone connects to it. It ships with a few Telekinesis Applications (or “tapps”), or you can write your own to control your own programs.

I wrote one to control Keynote presentations from your iPhone. It’s fairly simple: it shows you the current slide and the presenter’s notes for that slide, and it lets you go forward and backward through your slide deck. (No, it’s not release-quality yet, but expect it in a few days.)

So here’s the real meat of this blog post: (Warning: geeky-acronym-land ahead.)

• Being a Mac OS X app, Telekinesis’s UI is written in Objective C.
• It exposes a web server that can run PHP scripts.
• My remote application is a set of PHP scripts that sit on the Mac and run when the iPhone user launches the app.
• On the iPhone, the user makes a request to the PHP script, that generates HTML, CSS and JavaScript to format the page for the iPhone
• To capture the current slide, I use a command line program (screencapture) inside a shell script from within PHP.
• I resize the large slide for the iPhone using another shell script, and push it out to the phone as a stream of bytes, via PHP.
• To change slides, the user clicks the Next and Previous functions on the iPhone, which use AJAX (JavaScript, XML, XmlHttpRequest) to send the request to a PHP script;
• the PHP script interprets this request, and wants to use AppleScript to ask Keynote to update the current slide. But since there is no direct way to invoke AppleScript from PHP, we use the command-line tool osascript in a shell script to run our AppleScript.
• Keynote hears the call to action from our AppleScript, and changes the slide.

So, our champion team now includes the following players: Objective C, PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Shell Script, and AppleScript: all with the single goal of changing a Keynote slide.

Has anyone changed lightbulbs with an iPhone yet?

An MIT student was arrested today for carrying and displaying (what looks to me) a breadboard with some wires and a 9-volt battery. For those who are not technologists, a breadboard is a simple piece of plastic with wires underneath, neatly arranged in a grid. You can insert various electronic components into the grid of perforations on it and they will be connected by the hidden wires. It’s used for prototyping circuits before sending them for large-scale manufacturing (on printed circuit boards.)

Here’s a photo of the device she carried. Compare that to the photo of a breadboard on the Wikipedia page.

To me, what is scary isn’t that the enterprising and creative girl was arrested, but that law enforcement officials are so less technologically inclined. I wouldn’t expect everyone to know about these things, but I think a little basic technology familiarization would keep the country safer than surveillance or arrests like this.

News agencies all over have been reporting this as a ‘fake bomb’. Guys, come on. By that deduction, every cell phone contains the equivalent of a hundred fake bombs. That’s how little circuitry can physically fit onto a breadboard. Just because the contraption looks laboratory-like and it’s at an airport doesn’t mean it’s a bomb.

Two students in Nova Scotia got back at school bullies silently, yet strongly.

Two Nova Scotia students are being praised across North America for the way they turned the tide against the bullies who picked on a fellow student for wearing pink.
[...]
They went to a nearby discount store and bought 50 pink shirts, including tank tops, to wear to school the next day.
[...]
Not only were dozens of students outfitted with the discount tees, but hundreds of students showed up wearing their own pink clothes, some head-to-toe. And there’s been nary a peep from the bullies since, which Shepherd says just goes to show what a little activism will do.

This, covered at the Official Google Book Search Blog.

While it is easy to share links, photos, videos, and opinions on the Web, sharing books with your friends online used to be tough — and tougher even, to share individual clippings from a book. This summer, I worked with the Book Search team to add clip-sharing features to Google Book Search.

You can now highlight a section of text in any public domain book in Book Search, create a clip from it, and share it with the world. You can post your favorite clips to your blog along with a personal annotation, collect them in a Google Notebook, or share them with friends anywhere you decide to embed the link. Your clip looks exactly as it appears in the book, or if you prefer plain text, we have that too.

Also at the Official Google Blog, about collecting, sharing and discovering new books.

We’ve also launched a way to let users, select, copy and embed segments of public domain books (like the Newton quote) in any web page. We hope to make it as easy to blog and quote from a book as it is from any web page. Like many innovations at Google, a stellar summer intern worked on this.

Of course, no project is a single-person effort: Bill Schilit, my mentor; Nathan Naze, JavaScript God; Adam Mathes, Venu Vemula, and the rest of the Book Search team laid the foundation and were an integral part of this feature.

The company everybody loves to hate (for good reasons, mostly) is now on a shopping spree, buying Standards Organizations in various countries to get them to vote YES on a proposed vote by the International Standards Organization to accept their binary-in-XML-clothing file format as a standard.

There are numerous good reasons why MSOOXML should not be accepted as an international standard, all nicely summarized in this document from Google, expressing their opposition to the proposal in technical terms, not political.

But the only thing today that maintains Microsoft’s monopoly in the office document market is their use of proprietary locked formats, and they would hate to lose this unfair advantage. So they have been busy manipulating the voting process in Germany, Portugal, Switzerland, The Netherlands, and Sweden (also here).

These days money can buy anything. Or anyone.

And Microsoft was never big on ethics anyway. Shame on you, Microsoft.

Update: Following coverage in the Swedish media about the Microsoft payola, Microsoft admitted to an email sent to their partners assuring market benefits and reimbursement for joining fees. The Swedish standards organization has now decided to change its decision to ‘abstain’ [PDF] because of the irregularities in the process. Hungary is also set to reconsider its vote.

A complete discussion of all objections to the standardization of MSOOXML is available from GrokDoc. Especially galling is Microsoft’s insistence on declaring the 500-year old Gregorian calendar incorrect and forcing the rest of the world to consider 1900 as a leap year because of an acknowledged bug in Excel.

Public transit seems to share many of the characteristics of the third place, as Ray Oldenburg calls them in The Great, Good Place. They’re full of people from all walks of life, having random conversations, and brings several of the same people together with amazing regularity.

Sitting at a café as I write this, and having used public transit for the three months of my internship at Google, I’ve wanted to pen these thoughts down for a long time. Every morning and every evening, I used to hang out with the same set of people. Sometimes a few fresh faces would make their way onto the bus; sometimes one of the regulars would sleep in late and miss their bus.

Whenever I happened to take a later bus than usual, some time around noon, the commuter crowd would have shrunk down to a trickle, and most passengers would be headed to finish off errands, or simply out and about the Bay Area. These passengers had an even greater rapport with the bus driver: I’ve been part of thoroughly engaging conversations with these people, who I do not know the names of, and probably never will. For them, it was a natural group that had formed because of their respective travel habits.

Public transit is markedly absent in America, but it is alive and kicking in most other countries: I’ve seen it in Dublin, I’ve seen it in Montréal, I’ve seen it in Bombay. The local trains of Bombay are the lifeline of the working population. The frequency and timeliness of the trains is something to be proud of (regrettably, the same cannot be said of the rest of the population.) Thus, groups of commuters who travel by the same trains day in and day out form their own cliques. There’s even a name in the local lingo for it: “train friends.” Just as you have family friends and work colleagues, this is a part of your social life that stays with you for a significant part of your life. You don’t visit the homes of your train friends; you hardly talk shop with them; and you hardly meet them outside of the commuter context. But the place is a third place, after all.

As in all the other instances of the third place having a strong existence in Europe and all over the world, but lacking in America, the “place” of public transit exhibits similar properties. In USA, commuters are holed up in their oil-fueled cars and vans and SUVs, all the while blaming the other guy for causing all the traffic jams on the 8-lane highways. It is obvious that this causes at least a small amount of increase in stress levels of the driver (though I can’t be bothered to look up a citation for that right now.) Compare that to urban populations elsewhere that share conversations on a bus or a train.

Ray Oldenburg could probably add “keeping stress levels low” to the ways in which third places affect the daily lives of those who inhabit them.

If everyone in Virginia drove under the speed limit, the state budget would be in shambles.

I always thought that the purpose of laws was to ensure that everyone lived in a safe, secure society without intruding upon the rights of others. A society needs money, of course, so it’s fair game to have a few laws that assure the government of tax revenue.

Now, the State of Virginia is implementing laws to tap into drivers’ wallets — a minor traffic violation is seen as a major opportunity to extract cash for the state’s coffers. To be fair, we always knew traffic tickets were much less a way to keep the streets safe, and really a way to fill the state’s coffers. But now they’re going all out. If you’re speeding, you’re slapped with a bill to the tune of $1,050 for building new roads in Virginia. There seems to be no correlation between the level of “crime” and the level of fine imposed. The amount is dictated by the current deficit in the transportation budget.

You would think that being in labor might excuse you from this burdensome tax; you’d be wrong. Everybody’s doing it, even the politicians who enacted laws like this.

The Senator who pushed for these laws expects them to bring in revenue between $65m—$210m annually. So if I get this correctly, they’re enacting a budget that depends on people breaking the law. What if everyone decided to stick it to The Man and drove under the speed limit?

And to round off the absurdity, if you’re not a resident of Virginia, you do not pay these taxes. Further proof that these are taxes rather than a fine for a traffic violation. That makes them unconstitutional too.

Reuters reports that a man set for execution wants to die laughing. Then he must be told the Funniest Joke in the World, of course!

P.S. I know this is no laughing matter, but I respect a person who manages not to lose his sense of humor even under trying times.

No one can deny that good food makes you happy. For some of us, especially so. But when one refers to “food that’s good for you”, it turns out invariably to be based upon purely nutritional criteria. Why is the “goodness” of food not evaluated on how much psychological pleasure it brings to the eater?

Of course, taste forms no small part of evaluating food — ask any restaurant critic. But taste varies from palate to palate, and I’m rather referring to the hedonistic properties of food than its culinary properties. Certain foods make me happy, some make me ecstatic, and others make my day. But not all of those foods fall under the category of “food that’s good for me”. Why not? If a particular food lifts my mood up, gives me pleasure, and enhances my psychological well-being, it should be “good for me”, right?

Healthy eating is a relatively recent phenomenon. Not because our forefathers didn’t eat healthy. It’s because they didn’t have to coin a phrase to explicitly tag their diet ‘nutritious’ — it was always like that: healthy. At the same time, it was also tasty hedonistically-inclined food.

Let’s face it, food is much more than just vital life-sustaining organic material being ingested regularly. Food is a central aspect of every culture; in fact, an inseparable part of it. So much so that some cultures are best-known for their food preparation practices, often masking their other, more significant achievements and traditions. Answer this one: how much do you know about Thai culture, other than Pad Thai and Masaman curries? The Szechuan? Malvani? Cajun? Mongolian? Penang?

After such rich culinary traditions, the current century has managed to create a divide between tasty and nutritious — in response to another 21st century phenomenon, the widespread global obesity epidemic. Junk food is nutritionally, well, junk, but it has made a permanent home in some people’s lives (and in most cases, in their tummies too.) Obviously, there is something about it that makes people want to eat it. It’s no different from an addiction, really. Put in another way, the hedonistic power of food trumps its perceived nutritional value to a significant number of people.

What if they didn’t have to choose? What if they could get nutritious with tasty? Obsessed with making every food item extremely nutritious and “good for you”, we have, in the process, killed its taste. What if we could backtrack just a little bit, to the point where food used to be tasty as well as nutritious (maybe not as much as current ‘health foods’, though)? To find this middle ground, perhaps we can look at our past and derive inspiration from some of the older recipes.

After all, we are living, thinking, pleasure-loving human beings who sincerely enjoy our regular excursions to the dining table, not just disinterested ingesters of nutrients.

And you thought Monty Python were just fooling around when they crafted this scene of the Killer Rabbit in the Holy Grail movie!

Apparently, there is (technically, was) a squirrel on a similar rampage in Berlin this week.

BERLIN (Reuters) – An aggressive squirrel attacked and injured three people in a German town before a 72-year-old pensioner dispatched the rampaging animal with his crutch.

The squirrel first ran into a house in the southern town of Passau, leapt from behind on a 70-year-old woman, and sank its teeth into her hand, a local police spokesman said Thursday. With the squirrel still hanging from her hand, the woman ran onto the street in panic, where she managed to shake it off. The animal then entered a building site and jumped on a construction worker, injuring him on the hand and arm, before he managed to fight it off with a measuring pole.

“After that, the squirrel went into the 72-year-old man’s garden and massively attacked him on the arms, hand and thigh,” the spokesman said. “Then he killed it with his crutch.”

Everyone agrees meetings aren’t fun, but what if you’re discussing matters with your teammates while pedaling a 7-person bike furiously on the streets of Mountain View? Forget the discussing matters part, but the rest of it sure is a lot of fun.

Just don’t call it the party bike; it’s the “conference” bike. Google’s newest acquired toy is a 7-person bike, much like New York City’s Party Bike [link broken at the time of posting]. It can be scheduled as a conference room for holding meetings and as a team-building exercise (no pun intended).

Our team rode the bike to the nearby Shoreline Lake on a hot Friday afternoon. Just for kicks, we rode it up a hillock and let it go full speed downhill. Here’re some action shots!

It’s not often that one gets to be in a meeting with Vinton Cerf — who’s credited as the “Father of the Internet”, and holds the official job title of “Chief Internet Evangelist” at Google. (No, I’m not kidding.)

So when I was invited to a research meeting with him, my mentor Bill Schilit, and others at Google, I was totally in awe. Of course I can’t discuss what we talked, but the little kid in me was awe-struck enough to want to write a blog post simply mentioning it!

I remember having seen him first about 9 years ago. I was a sophomore at Bombay, and I heard from the ACM community that Vint Cerf was to give a talk at SNDT, Churchgate. It was examination time, and as hard as I tried, I couldn’t get anyone else enthused enough to make the hour-long journey to listen to Vint Cerf’s talk. In an engineering school with over 800 students, I had expected to find at least a few takers. None. Nada. Zilch. Everyone was too concerned about their examinations to find time to listen to the Father of the Internet. I gave up, took the train, and went to the talk, all alone. It was totally worth it, I recollect his ambitious Interplanetary Internet project back when he was at MCI.

I had never imagined that 9 years later, I would be attending a meeting with him. It’s not a dream come true, because I had never even dreamt it would be possible to share a table with Vinton Cerf.