The websphere forum (see below) feeds are truncated
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=266&start=0
You need to add “&Full=true” to get all the content as shown below:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/rss/rssmessages.jspa?forumID=266&Full=true
The smartest freshman I know at Stanford is my roommate. Since Stanford has a misinformed roommate assignment policy, I have to conclude that I just got incredibly lucky. It could easily have been a lot worse, I see other people’s roommates and it makes me sad. Anyway, the crucial thing is this ― if my roommate was not my roommate, I doubt I’d have ever met him and even if we had met, we wouldn’t have gotten beyond names and places.
At orientation, people ask the wrong questions (”Where are you from?” tells you next to nothing about a person but it’s always the second one in any conversation). Besides, everyone’s more interested in finding a posse than interesting people, because there’s nothing worse than not having a regular group of “friends” to hang out with post-orientation! (Sociologically, this phenomenon―the almost mad rush to find a posse―is extremely interesting). Classes seem to be a good way unless, of course, there are no freshman in most of your classes. As far as I’ve explored, student groups at Stanford are boring. Two grad students, both of whom have been at Stanford for a long time, independently agreed that there was no club for real intellectual discussions. Last week’s Stanford Happy Dev House had three attendees including me. Talks, workshops and other events are another avenue but I don’t see many freshman at most of the ones I’m interested in. After the first few weeks, it becomes awkward to sit at a new table and so, pretty much the only place where people meet new people is at parties. Of course, in this case, the word “meet” means something slightly different. Parties are loud, noisy and awful for conversation. More importantly, the people who party hard are probably not the kind I want to meet (although, I should note, I’ve met a few interesting people walking back early from parties).
So, these are the facts. I don’t know of any really smart freshmen other than my roommate. And despite Stanford’s terribly flawed admissions process, it’s hard to believe that there aren’t any others. There must be a more effective and efficient way of meeting smart people other than waiting for people to get smarter over the next 4 years, which I’m sure, a small but significant minority will become.
Addendum: It’s not my intention to define any term here. My definition of smart is, in fact, broad but also, selective. I don’t mean that smart people are the only people I want to hang out with either. I’d rather spend time with nice people (”nice”, as defined by me; to give you a sense what I mean by that, consider this – poor people are generally nicer people) than smart people. Of course, Stanford doesn’t explicitly claim to be home to nice people, whereas it does claim to have a high concentration of smart people.
We just released the latest version of Test Pilot, and a new study is coming soon!
One of the problems with the Test Pilot extension so far has been that we’ve needed to release a new version of the extension every time we wanted to add a new experiment or survey, or even in order to fix a minor bug. And every time we released a new version, users had to download it, then restart Firefox; an annoyance that we’d rather not force on people. This new release of the Test Pilot extension, version 0.3, has been rewritten from the ground up to avoid this problem.
Many pilots have asked what is the next study, and here it comes: A Week in the Life of a Browser!
For this study, which we will be launching at the beginning of December, we would like to explore what a browser does to facilitate its user using the Web through a year. We will periodically collect your usage information about the browser for a week and run the same study again every 60 days. The main goal is to explore if the browser has been used differently over time, which may help us design a better product that works adaptively.
For more detail about this release, please read the original blog post!
We’ve been hard at work over the last month on the next milestone on our path to 1.0, and we’ve just released version 0.8. In this last pre-beta release we have made a number of changes based on feedback from users around tighter integration with Firefox and Fennec, and improvements to the incremental sync behaviour introduced in 0.7.
For more details about Weave 0.8, please check out the details over at the Weave blog!
Applications usually don’t invoke a wide range of emotions other than anger and occasionally, satisfaction. For my human-computer interaction class, during the first week, we had to brainstorm ideas for apps. I focused (partially) on the subset of applications that I call “emotional apps” (”happy apps” might fit pretty well too). These are apps that you wouldn’t normally term useful, but they are worthing working on because they make people smile. The simplest example of something with indirect emotional impact would be Skype, which helps friends and family talk to each other from anywhere in the world. But I’m more interested in the small set of applications that directly evoke joy or sadness or nostalgia in people. Take a look at the “I am T-Pain” iPhone app. It transforms your voice into an auto-tuned or pitch-corrected form, which has the effect of making you sing even when you are just talking into it. So when people first use the application, they almost always laugh (as seen on this YouTube video). As a creator, there’s nothing that makes me happier than making someone smile or laugh. One comment on this story about that iPhone app expresses my thoughts well:
I really liked watching how happy everyone was when they were using the demo. They were all so immediately impressed and inspired. I think you nailed it. How rare is it that software actually makes people happy? This app is great.
The iPhone is the most beautiful device created in human history. It’s just a small slab of metal but because it has so many different sensors, it can be anything you want it to be. Unlike a laptop or desktop, you can feel the iPhone, you can blow into it and you can touch it. It’s perfect for creating the most amazing emotional apps that we want to create. Here are some of my ideas, ordered roughly by how much I like the idea:
How do we create intimacy between people despite distance? An iPhone app that would let you tap your phone every time you think of someone and then, you say what made you think of them. The other person would know immediately that you thought of them when you saw, say, “dandelions floating in the gentle breeze”. At the end of the day or week, you can recollect all the love in the world. Everyone I told this idea to (just the idea!) inevitably smiled.
How do we kiss people who are not near us? In this app, you kiss your iPod/iPhone, the exact imprint of the kiss and the sound of the kiss is then sent immediately to who you want to kiss. Scott Klemmer, the professor for the class, mentioned exactly such an prototype in a later lecture.
How do we remember all the coffee we have ever had in our lives? You take pictures of every coffee you drink. Based on the color of their coffee, the app can tell what kind of coffee it is. And there will be a coffee stats page that helps you remember your every experience of drinking coffee.
How do we overcome nervousness? The app would include a nervousness detector, which would work based on how much your hands are shaking and how hot your hands feel on the iPhone. Then, it would give out instructions for exercises such as relaxed breathing to help people calm themselves. “Take a deep breath now”.
How do we help people performs random acts of kindness every day? An app that poses interesting daily challenges such as “hug a stranger” or “pay for the car behind you at the toll booth”.
Other non-emotional ideas:
If anyone’s interested in working on any of these ideas, go ahead and do it, or email me to talk about it.
Privacy policies are long legalese documents that obfuscate meaning. Nobody reads them because they are indecipherable and obtuse. Yet, these are the documents that tell you what’s going on with your data — how, when, and by whom your information will used. To put it another way, the privacy policy lets you know if some company can make money from information (like selling you email to a spammer).
Creative Commons did an amazing thing for copyright law. It made it understandable.
Creative commons reduced the complexity of letting others use your work with a set of combinable, modular icons.
In order for privacy policies to have meaning for actual people, we need to follow in Creative Commons footsteps. We need to reduce the complexity of privacy policies to an indicator scannable in seconds. At the same time, we need a visual language for delving deeper into how our data is used—a set of icons may not be enough to paint the rich picture of where you data is going.
Understanding Data Flows
With the rise of web services, your information can end up in unexpected places. To get a better understanding of some of the complexities of data flow, we sketch out how Anti-phishing works in Firefox (with help from Oliver Reichenstein).
Here’s what that looks like as a wall of text, which is the typical privacy policy mode.
The difference in understandability is huge between the text and the schematic. In fact, while we were working on creating this infographic we found a hole in our legalese and updated it accordingly.
The idea here is that by creating a visual schematic language, it is relatively painless way for a company to convert their wall-of-text into something a bit more approachable. And that the more visualization actually shines a light into the dense tangle of words, possibly highlighting flaws or trouble spots that would have otherwise remained hidden.
The simple form
The visual schematic language is a descriptive way of explaining a privacy policy and helps us to understand what’s going on underneath the hood. It doesn’t solve the problem of being able to quickly figure out the guarantees a privacy policy is making on your data.
For that, we want to move from the descriptive to the proscriptive, to a set of legally-bindings icons like Creative Commons.
As an experiment, we tried a schematic form of icons:
The feedback that we’ve got so far is that the schematic is over-kill and that a set of icons more similar to Creative Commons’s would be easier to scan and understand. The next step is for us to come up with a set of orthogonal decisions about what compromises the most important aspects of a privacy policy. In the end, we probably shouldn’t have more than 5 icons in the interest of simplicity.
You can help us brainstorm them.
For now here are a set of axis we’ve come up with that need to be whittled down:
Is your information…
Shared with a 3rd Party? Shared internally within the company?
Anonymized/Aggregated before being stored or used?
Personally Identifiable?
Stored for more than x number of days?
Encrypted on the server?
Monetized (sold) in some way?
Usable to contact you?
Mozilla is hiring a new user interface designer for Labs. I think some of the readers of this blog might be interested in that sort of thing?
This Raindrop thing seems pretty cool. I’ll use it even if for no other reason besides its ability to separate the bac’n from the real-human-conversations-that-I-care-about email.
Unfortunately, using the current demo version requires running your own server locally, which is a high barrier to entry. But keep an eye on the evolution of this project; it might be just the thing we need to take control of our inboxes again.
(When I say “take control of our inboxes” I am thinking of my Gmail inbox which currently has over 10,000 conversations in it, a third of them unread.)
Spilling over with enthusiasm as always, Aza gave a talk to a recent web developer conference in London about how he sees the future of the web browser. He takes together several strands that Mozilla Labs has been working on and ties them together into a story about how the browser can evolve into more of an intelligent user-agent. The browser really ought to bring the mountain to Mohamed, to borrow a phrase, rather than sending Mohamed to the mountain.
I’m glad he mentions Ubiquity, but I think Aza oversells it a little bit. For example, he talks about Ubiquity collecting your contacts from Facebook in order to auto-complete emails. Getting Facebook contacts is not something we currently know how to do. So I want to clarify that when Aza talks about Ubiquity in this video, a lot of the things he mentions are aspirational — “stuff we would like it to do someday” — not things that it does right now.
Ex-Mozillanoid JWZ writes of his “ongoing Kafka-esque nightmare of dealing with Palm and their App Catalog submission process.” (Part One) (Part Two).
His story shows, by counterexample, exactly why the Open Web is important. Part of the working definition I came up with in my previous post was that on the open web, no company can get between a developer who wants to publish something and a user who wants to use it. JWZ’s story shows what happens in a non-open environment when a company, Palm in this case, does get in the way. JWZ’s applications were innocuous free software which posed no conceivable threat to Palm in any way, and he didn’t even want to charge anything for them; nevertheless, Palm’s bureaucracy prevented JWZ from giving away his own software to people who wanted it.
When this happens, developers and users both lose.
Palm is not unique in this regard. The process for getting apps approved on the iPhone is no less opaque:
We’ve been getting more and more questions from customers wondering where the heck our iPhone App is. Unfortunately, we have no idea.
…
Despite sending a steady stream of emails to Apple requesting status updates, we continue to receive generic form letters in response – frustrating, to say the least.
Say what you like about Microsoft, but they never barred independent software developers from developing and distributing Windows software, did they?
