Alston Grove

Chris DiBona has an entertaining and informative article over at LinuxJournal called ASK Me No Questions, I’ll Tell You No Lies. With an inbox receiving 500 spam emails/day, he’s obviously in need of an industrial-strength solution. So he’s resorting to ASK (Active Spam Killer), a kind of challenge-response filter that requires unknown senders to reply to a confirmation message. It’s a nice Python proggie that you add to your procmail run-command file.

It reminds me of the SBC Privacy Guard service on your phone that screens unknown calls. Except this is a bit harsher. Some people will send you an e-mail, and then be asked to confirm their e-mail address before the first e-mail they sent will be allowed to reach you. This only happens the first time someone new e-mails you, but it might put off some people. Still, I’m becoming pretty desperate myself, and I’m considering installing it.

I’ve been thinking about what language, platform, and tools I would choose if I were writing a commercial desktop application. Here are my 7 requirements:

1. The application should be cross-platform.
2. UI should be rapidly developed with a tool.
3. Layout should be done with managers and containers.
4. The UI toolkit should adopt its look and behavior from the platform.
5. Application logic should be written in a high-level, object-oriented language.
6. Process-intensive tasks should be optimized later.
7. Software licensing should be GPL-compatible.

Click through to read my explanation of the requirements and my conclusion on which language and tools I chose.

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If you’ve got a cellphone and you want to masquerade your location, you might want to check out SoundCover. This little program runs on your phone and will play background sounds during your call to make it sound like you are in a different environment.

Did you wake up late for work and you want your boss to think you’re caught in traffic? Select the Traffic Jam background and give him a call from your bedroom. Is one of your mates a chronic talker that just doesn’t know when to stop? Use the Phone Ring 15s background and your friend will hear a phone ring 6 times, 15 seconds into the call. Tell him that your other phone is ringing and that you have to go.

Considering the bad sound quality over a cell phone, someone might just be fooled by this thing. The Circus Parade is hilarious — complete with whips cracking during a trained animal performance. How often would you need to fake being at a circus?

So what’s next? A program that alters your voice as you speak? Maybe it changes the pitch or adds sounds effects like echo and reverb. I want the sound effect that makes me sound like a speech synthesizer. “Do you feel like we do?” I couldn’t resist.

I read an article by Tim O’Reilly who has some interesting thoughts about the information age and publishing books on free/libre, open-source software.

He says that Larry Wall (father of Perl) has something in common with Bill Gates (father of Microsoft). They both want their software to be valuable. But one releases the software for free and the other restricts access to it to create value.

I think it’s worth making the point that open-source software is also valuable because it’s good software, not just because it’s usually cheap. If Perl were buggy, unstable, and lacked useful features, nobody would use.

Another point is that open-source software does not necessarily come without a price! It just means that when you obtain the software, you are entitled to the source code as well — and most importantly — you are given the right to modify and distribute changes. But to obtain the software, you could have very likely paid for it (like ActiveState Perl).

Information wants to be free because the Internet makes it so cheap to distribute, copy, and modify. Information wants to be expensive because the right information at the right time is valuable to the recipient. Like so many things in nature, information is a dichotomy. The tension between the two divisions has lead to copyright and intellectual property laws that are endlessly debated.

The tipping point is when information costs so little that you won’t bother obtaining it through other (dishonest) means. Some information will always be quite valuable, such as software that runs businesses. The cost of other information will eventually be driven down by this cheap distribution system we call the Internet. Now, if someone would just get a micro-payments scheme working and adopted …

Do you remember LinuxToday.com from 5 years ago before they were bought by Internet.com? Remember 2 years ago when you could read the latest Linux Weekly News without paying for a subscription? Do you know what these news sites had in common?

Dave Whitinger. Last month Dave started another news service, called LXer, and it’s turning out to be pretty good. Go check it out.

I was reading the About Us page where he says “January, 2004 marks an important milestone in my history with Linux news, and this is the month that I have been planning my re-entry into this field.” I wonder if he was bound to an 18-month non-competition agreement that kept him from the Linux news biz? Don’t get me started on NCs …

If you’ve never read Joel’s 12 Steps to Better Code, you should have a look at this classic Joel On Software article. Some of these may seem trivial to some managers, like “Do programmers have quiet working conditions?” But I think it should be expanded to also include, “Do programmers have spacious work areas?” Since noise is directly proportional to density, it should seem obvious that you need more space to have more peace, but sometimes you have to point out the obvious.

In Peopleware, the authors discuss their Coding War Games study where pairs of programmers from dozens of organizations completed coding and testing tasks while recording their time. The best people in the study outperformed the worst by 10:1. At the end, the programmers filled out a questionaire about their physical quarters. Here are some of the results:

You can’t tell if it’s the spacious, quiet work area that leads to productivity, or if the best people are simply drawn to organizations with those environments. In the end, if you’re a manager, does it matter which one it is?

Unfortunately, while I’ve experienced every one of Joel’s principles at different clients, I’ve never seen all of them consistently at one place. However, when I think about the best projects I’ve been on, they rate high on Joel’s test. How does your workplace add up?

I read the book

Java Development on PDAs
by Daryl Wilding-McBride and it’s very good. It covers J2ME on both PalmOS and PocketPC devices.

My company is doing a “Mobility Blitz” initiative where we go around town presenting and demoing J2ME, compact dot-NET, and SOA technologies. So I’m doing the J2ME presentation and demo. My demo is a MIDP application (aka MIDlet) that I run on both a Tungsten C Palm device and a mobile phone. The MIDlet uses the
kSOAP implementation of SOAP to hit a web service across the network which accesses data in a
Hypersonic Database. I run the MIDlet in the phone emulator on the screen and walk around the room with the Palm device connected over WiFi. The demo is called “SalesForce” because it lets our sales people look up consultants and projects. They can even reserve a consultant who is about to become available. Here are some screen shots:

The compact dot-NET demo is really nice too. They use the “electronic ink” handwriting recognition built-in to the TabletPC platform. But the feature they have that makes me most jealous is their remote display control. It lets them display the PocketPC device on the screen so you can see what they are doing on the device. The guy walks around the room with an iPAQ connected to WiFi and you can see what he sees. I tried to find something similar for PalmOS, like maybe a VNC server (there is a VNC client actually), but nothing like that seems to exist. Perhaps PalmOS with its PIM heritage makes it too difficult to pull a hack like that.

[Updated 12/08/04: Source code can be downloaded
here. If I remember, I developed with Sun's Wireless Toolkit, then ran into memory problems using their MIDP4Palm on the actual device. I switched to IBM's Websphere Studio Device Developer to build and run it on a Tungsten with their J9 VM. Some of the stuff I coded is probably handled better in the new MIDP APIs (I remember using threads to update an on-screen status and timeout network connections).]

Donald Norman has a new book out called Emotional Design. He has a few chapters available for free on his website. I think I might read his classic book The Design of Everyday Things first.

There’s an interesting article from Ok-Cancel that makes fun of how the HCI (human-computer interface) gurus like Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman, and Jared Spool can’t agree on things. They even have a comic strip portraying an urban-style battle between “Neilly” and “LL Spool J”.

There’s a good article on RFID at CIO Magazine. Retailers want to use radio frequency IDs to solve complex problems like loss, theft, and out-of-stock situations. They will be able to track their product through the distribution channel from manufacture to checkout and beyond (the last part worries some people). Walmart announced that its top 100 suppliers must put RFID tags on all pallets, cases, cartons, and high-end products by January 2005.

Putting some of the protests aside, implementing RFID may not be easy afterall. For one thing, most retailers’ systems have been written to hold 11-digit UPC bar codes, while RFID tags are composed of 13 digits. An initiative called Sunrise 2005 mandates that companies be capable of scanning and processing 14-digit bar codes by January 2005. Another problem is the shear amount of data generated from tracking RFIDs, especially at the product level. One idea it to distribute the intelligence and computing across a wider network called “edge computing.”

Meanwhile, RFID tags are a bit expensive at 25 to 30 cents each. But as the cost gets down to 5 cents, even that pack of gum may have an RFID tag. Big brother watching, or efficiencies towards less expensive and more available products?

Why’s everyone upset about this cute little worm? Click on the image for the full popup illustration from Reuters.

Of course I’m talking about the MyDoom worm, and there are two variations running around now, labelled MyDoom.A and MyDoom.B. MyDoom.A started attacking SCO’s website on Sunday (Feb 1), and will automatically stop on Feb 12. SCO removed their www.sco.com name record instead of trying to withstand the traffic or reroute it. They probably want to blame the worm on the Linux community, and by taking their site down intentionally, they make it appear like the worm wiped them out.

MyDoom.B was supposed to start its distributed denial of service attack on Microsoft’s website today, yet the site is up.

According to Information Week, the worm contains a message from its author who identifies himself as “andy” and says, “I’m just doing my job, nothing personal, sorry.” So was the worm written for-hire by spammers?