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Free information, as great as it sounds, will enslave us all – Quartz

Fri, 24 May 2013 06:27:19 -0700

Comments: "Free information, as great as it sounds, will enslave us all – Quartz"

URL: http://qz.com/87795/free-information-as-great-as-it-sounds-will-enslave-us-all/

Imagine our world later in this century, when machines have gotten better. Cars and trucks drive themselves, and there’s hardly ever an accident. Robots root through the earth for raw materials, and miners are never trapped. Robotic surgeons rarely make errors. Clothes are always brand new designs that day, and always fit perfectly, because your home fabricator makes them out of recycled clothes from the previous day. There is no laundry. I can’t tell you which of these technologies will start to work in this century for sure, and which will be derailed by glitches, but at least some of these things will come about.

Who will earn wealth? If robotic surgeons get really good, will tomorrow’s surgeons be in the same boat as today’s musicians? Or will they live gig to gig, with a token few of them winning a YouTube hit or Kickstarter success while most still have to live with their parents?

This question has to be asked. Something seems terribly askew about how technology is benefiting the world lately. How could it be that ever since the incredible efficiencies of digital networking have finally reached vast numbers of people that we aren’t seeing a broad benefit? How could it be that so far the network age seems to be a time of endless austerity, jobless recoveries, loss of social mobility, and intense wealth concentration in markets that are anemic overall?

The medicine of our time is purported to be open information. The medicine comes in many bottles: open software, free online education, European pirate parties, Wikileaks, social media, and endless variations of the above. The principle of making information free seems, at first glance, to spread the power of information out of elite bubbles to benefit everyone.

Unfortunately, although no one realized it beforehand, the medicine turns out to be poison.

* * *

While people are created equal, computers are not. When people share information freely, those who own the best computers benefit in extreme ways that are denied to everyone else. Those with the best computers can simply calculate wealth and power away from ordinary people.

It doesn’t matter if the best computers are said run schemes called high frequency trading firms, social media sites, national intelligence agencies, giant online stores, big political campaigns, insurance companies, or search engines. Leave the semantics aside and they’re all remarkably similar.

All the computers that crunch “big data” are physically similar. They are placed in obscure sites where they can radiate heat into the environment, and they are guarded like oil fields. They all offer excellent espresso to holders of PhDs in math and computer science from top schools.

The programs that the best computers are running are also similar. First comes the gathering of freely offered information from everyone else in the world. The ogling might include scanned emails or social media sharing, sightings through cloud-connected cameras, or commercial and medical dossiers; there’s no boundary to the snooping.

In order to lure people into asymmetrical information relationships, some treat is often dangled. The treat might be free internet services or music, or insanely easy to get mortgages. What is always true is that the targeted audience eventually pays for these treats through lost opportunities. Career options will eventually narrow, or credit will become insanely tight.

Ordinary people, or more precisely people with only ordinary computers, are the sole providers of the information that makes the big computers so powerful and valuable. And ordinary people do get a certain flavor of benefit for providing that value. They get the benefits of an informal economy usually associated with the developing world. The formal benefits concentrate around the biggest computers.

More and more ordinary people are thrust into a winner-take-all economy. It is a 21st century reprise of the Horatio Alger stories from the 19th century. A token few will find success on Kickstarter or YouTube, while overall wealth is ever more concentrated and social mobility rots. Social media sharers can make all the noise they want, but they forfeit the real wealth and clout needed to be politically powerful. Real wealth and clout instead concentrate ever more on the shrinking island occupied by elites who run the most powerful computers.

Once the data is gathered, statistical analysis is performed to create behavioral models. The consumer-facing giant computers like social media, search, or big online stores use models of people to optimize the options put in front of them to generate desired behaviors. The term “advertising” once meant an act of communication, the romanticizing of a product, but no more. Similarly, investing used to mean evaluating risk and reward, but now it has come to mean getting people locked into massive too-big-to-fail schemes in which only the little people absorb the risks and the best computer gathers the rewards.

Whether the activity of a giant computer is called “media,” “finance,” or something else, the end goal is to come up with schemes that transcend the usual connection between risk and reward. The operation of the best computers takes place at arm’s length, so that the owners don’t need to really understand what’s going on, and can take as little responsibility as possible. The financier, the social media site owner, or anyone else with a top computer is rarely held responsible for what goes on through that computer. All risk falls on those who are aggregated.

* * *

In most cases there was no evil plot. Many of the people who own the top computers are genuinely nice. I helped create the system, and benefit from it. But nonetheless, it is not sustainable.

The core problem starts with philosophy. The owners of the biggest computers like to think about them as big artificial brains. But actually they are simply repackaging valuable information gathered from everyone else. This is what “big data” means.

For instance, a big remote Google or Microsoft computer can translate this op-ed, more or less, from English to another language, but what is really going on is that real human translators are being made anonymous, invisible, and insecure. Real translations, made by humans, are gathered in multitudes, and pattern-matched against new texts like this one. A mashup of old translations will approximate the new translation that is needed, so long as there are many old translations to serve as sources.

As long as we keep doing things the way we are, every big computer will hide a crowd of disenfranchised people. In the case of translation, the people are translators, and in the case of surgery, someday they will be surgeons.

As it happens, the very first conception of digital networked communication foresaw a way out of this trap. I am referring to Ted Nelson’s early work, dating back to 1960. The first idea of networked digital media included a universal micropayment system, so that people would be paid when data they added to a network was used by someone else.

This idea is anathema to the current orthodoxy. If you are bristling, please give what I’m saying a chance.

Just because things have a cost does not mean they can’t be affordable. To demand that things be free is to embrace an eternal place for poverty. The problem is not cost, but poverty.

Monetizing information will bring benefits that far outweigh the inconvenience of having to adjust one’s worldview. Consider the problem of creepiness. Creepiness is when you don’t have enough influence on your information life. Government cameras track you as you walk around town, despite wars having been fought to limit the abilities of governments to do that. Aside from governments, every other owner of a big computer is doing exactly the same thing. Private cameras track you as often as government ones.

Privacy regulations attempt to keep up, but face dismal odds. Does anyone believe such regulations have a chance? But what if you were owed money for the use of information that exists because you exist? This is what accountants and lawyers are for. The government should not be able to spy on you for free any more than should the police get free guns or cars. Budgets create moderation.

If the biggest computers had to pay for information, they wouldn’t cease to exist. Instead big computers would have to earn their way by providing new kinds of value. Spying and manipulating would no longer be business plans, because the raw materials would no longer be free.

In fact, the owners of the biggest computers would do fine in a world of monetized information, because that would be a world with a growing economy. In a world of free information, the economy will start to shrink as automation rises radically, later in this century. This is because in an ultra-automated economy, there won’t be much to trade other than information.

But this is the most important thing: A monetized information economy will create a strong middle class out of information sharing—and a strong middle class must be able to outspend the elite tip of an economy for democracy to endure. While the open information ideal feels empowering, it is actually enriching those with the best computers to such an extreme that it is gradually weakening democracy.

We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

Everything I Know About Project Management, I Learned from Game of Thrones

Fri, 24 May 2013 06:03:17 -0700

Comments: "Everything I Know About Project Management, I Learned from Game of Thrones"

URL: http://blog.smartbear.com/project-management/everything-i-know-about-project-management-i-learned-from-game-of-thrones/

In George R.R. Martin’s masterful series, A Song of Ice and Fire (currently an HBO television show, Game of Thrones), many characters in the fantasy world of Westeros create goals, make plans, maneuver people and events toward the goal they want, and eventually realize their goal. It’s kind of like project management, but with more entrails.

Although a lot of the schemes these characters are based on objectives you wouldn’t normally find in an office —revenge, reprisal and retribution against an ever-increasing list of enemies — a project manager can learn a great deal from these books. They’re kind of like Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, except with less sympathy and better costumes.

So here’s what we can learn about project management from a few choice characters in Game of Thrones. (Spoilers are unavoidable.)

Theon Greyjoy: Make sure your stakeholders are on board.

In the books/series: Theon Greyjoy was the ward of Eddard Stark, given to him as a hostage when his father Balon’s uprising failed. Later, Greyjoy tried to prove himself to Balon…by seizing the Stark castle of Winterfell.

What project managers can take away from this:

Theon launched an ambitious project without ensuring his participants had the same goals in mind. While he shows great initiative in switching his original plan—Theon went from raiding fishing villages to capturing the stronghold of his father’s enemy—he fails to take into account that the Iron Islanders are experienced in sacking and pillaging strongholds. But holding and defending them? Not so much. While his men are apparently willing participants, they actually have entirely different motivations and goals from Theon’s project. As a result, it’s doomed to failure from the start.

Failing to take into account the divergent goals of his stakeholders caused Theon to make decisions that ended up torturing him for months afterwards.

And when I say “tortured,” I mean it.

Viserys Targaryen: Have a clear goal with defined milestones.

Viserys is the son of the late king, Aerys the Mad, and the heir to the throne before it was seized by Robert Baratheon. In hiding for most of his life, Viserys has become cruel, callous and impatient.

What project managers can take away from this:

Viserys has only one goal—to retake the Iron Throne of Westeros—and a vague plan on how to accomplish it.

Marry his sister Daenerys to the horselord Khal Drogo, in exchange for the use of his 40,000 riders. ??? King!

It’s a grand idea, but Viserys hasn’t thought through any of the details. The Dothraki horsemen are a formidable fighting force, but Westeros is far away across an ocean, “poison water” from which their horses do not drink, and transporting such an army by ship is a massive undertaking. Viserys’ solution (or lack thereof) to these critical project details is a clue as to why he’s still not king.

As in Westeros, project leaders who fail to provide a project plan, or clearly delegate that responsibility to an actual project planner, find their project going over time and budget. Their projects, and perhaps their careers, could ultimately be killed. Which is exactly what happened to Viserys.

In the few chapters in which he appeared in the first book/season, Viserys is also guilty of a second project management faux-pas: Daenerys later proves to be a far more versatile asset than he ever gave her credit for. By viewing her as merely a bargaining chip for Khal Drogo, Viserys failed to draw on what was actually his most talented contributor. If he’d given Daenerys more responsibility, respect, and input, his plan may have had a chance of working.

Daenerys Targaryen: Ambitious projects require leadership.

Daenerys was treated cruelly by her brother. But she was treated extremely kindly by her husband, and through their relationship, her confidence grew. After both brother and husband died, she decided to do what neither of them could: Take the Iron Throne for herself.

What project managers can take away from this:

If you have an ambitious project in your hands, with stretch goals that you know will tax your strongest contributors, you need more than a good project plan and milestones: You need your people to be inspired. Daenerys knows she lacks all the pieces for her plan to take the Iron Throne; she also knows it involves her dragons, who are currently too young to be much of a threat. But she projects both flexibility and conviction, and that’s enough to inspire her followers.

To pull this off, Daenerys is approachable and listens to her advisers. She encourages them to speak freely but then gives clear direction as to what she expects. Even when her situation looks grim—and believe me, it’s hard to fight the light side when you’re leading a band of starving people across a desert—Daenerys commands enough respect to keep her people’s morale intact.

Danerys also shows another key quality of good project management: She constantly seeks to learn, and she frequently integrates new information into her plans. That allows her to take advantage of opportunities when they arise, where an inflexible project leader (say, King Joffrey) sees only distractions.

At one point, she tells her people, “I swear to you that those who would harm you will die screaming.” Remember that loyalty to your team is important, although threatening blood and fire might not work in the boardroom.

Tyrion Lannister: Turn obstacles into opportunities.

Tyrion Lannister is the son of the richest, most powerful man in the kingdom, but as a dwarf unloved by his father, he’s learned to rely on his wits. More than anything else, Tyrion is a master of turning adversity into assets: When attacked by bandits, he converts them from would-be murderers into his own private army. Later, he feeds different information to three powerful men in order to learn which one would betray him.

What project managers can take away from this:

Every project has obstacles to overcome. Although you can plan for some, others arrive out of the blue. A good project plan has built-in resiliency in case the more unpredictable pieces don’t deliver as expected: This is of course especially true in organizations like the Small Council where politics can come into play.

Being quick on your feet is no substitute for having an actual plan, of course. But once you have a plan in place, make sure it’s flexible enough to survive a few unexpected twists, and be creative enough to find alternate ways to achieve your objectives when obstacles block your progress. Giving your contributors the ability to show initiative will greatly help, but only if you have a plan (see: Robb Stark).

Hodor: Make sure you’re using all your assets.

Hodor, a servant to House Stark, is extremely tall, strong, and loyal. He’s also completely free from the ravages of intellect. You’ve heard the expression, “a man of few words?” He’s actually a man of one word: “Hodor.”

What project managers can take away from this:

Every project of any size needs both talented individuals to drive it forward and people to support them in that endeavor. Overlooking all the assets available can leave valuable productivity on the table and may even cause it to fail. Harnessing the full value of contributors increases the project’s chances of success.

Some project managers focus on their principal contributors to the exclusion of the rest of the team. But that’s not always what those primary contributors need. Spend time harnessing the abilities of the whole team, and those principal contributors will become more productive. Although Hodor might not seem useful, he provides Bran with critical support: mobility. After Bran loses the use of his legs, Hodor carries the young man everywhere in a basket strapped to his back.

Eddard Stark: Understand the scope of a project before you execute it.

Eddard is the friend and right-hand man of Robert Baratheon, king of the Seven Kingdoms. While trying to solve the murder of the previous Hand of the King, Jon Arryn, he learns that the newly anointed King Joffrey isn’t Robert’s son after all: He’s the child of Robert’s wife Cersei and (eek) her brother Jaime.

What project managers can take away from this:

When he realizes that Joffrey isn’t Robert Baratheon’s son, Eddard Stark puts in motion a plan to prevent Joffrey from ascending to the throne. Unfortunately, he is primarily a military man and is used to uncomplicated projects (like winner-take-all swordplay) where might is the primary determinant of success. As a result, he is completely unaware of the political complexities involved in carrying out a plan in the environment of King’s Landing.

Stark needed to consider how to manage the political aspects of his project. If he’d realized the project was more extensive than a pure show of force, he would have bided his time and involved Robert’s two brothers to find a successful solution. Instead, he relied on an unreliable resource, Littlefinger (who even told him up front he was unreliable. Even the most clueless project manager should be able to spot that risk).

Eddard Stark did not understand the scope of his project well enough to execute it. As a result, it executed him.

Robb Stark: Make sure your contributors understand the context of their deliverables.

During a battle, Robb Stark has a plan to draw enemy forces into his territory, where Robb’s troops have home advantage. Unfortunately, Robb does not explain this to his uncle and commander, Edmure. As a result Edmure, on his own initiative, sees what he thinks is an opportunity and attacks.

What project managers can take away from this:

Any good leader should encourage initiative in their reports. A tactical decision in the heat of the moment can sometimes make the difference between success and failure. But Robb failed to communicate his plan, causing Edmure’s initiative to backfire. Worse, having explained the plan afterwards, Robb has now discouraged Edmure from taking any further initiative, for fear it may disrupt Robb’s plans.

Ideally, all participants in a project have access to the whole plan, even if they are only involved in delivering a piece of it: Understanding how your piece connects to others can help contributors find problems early, or help propose improvements, that would otherwise only come to light much later. In both Westeros and in the here and now, there are good reasons to avoid communicating a whole plan. But that just puts more responsibility on the project leaders to make sure the right information is communicated.

dotJS - The largest JavaScript conference in Europe

Fri, 24 May 2013 06:08:17 -0700

Comments: "dotJS - The largest JavaScript conference in Europe"

URL: http://dotjs.eu

What makes dotJS special

dotJS is a single-day, single-track event where the best JavaScript hackers in the world appear on a crazy beautiful stage.

Last year, creators of Twitter Bootstrap, CoffeeScript, Three.js, AngularJS and many others took the stage for a day that went down in history. Just look at the videos & photos to get an idea!

This year, we are going even bigger, better, stronger. Here is the diff:

We are switching to a new venue! It is absolutely beautiful, can hold up to 1000 developers in comfortable seats and has a large hall where we can all stay and chat until late in the evening.
Like last year, the lineup will feature only hackers and gurus but the talks will be slightly more technical.
Many other small and big improvements thanks to last year's feedbacks... Expect nothing but pure awesome!

Stay tuned for the first speaker announcements, until then you can grab your discounted Super Early Bird ticket!

Jony Ive’s new look for iOS 7: black, white, and flat all over | 9to5Mac

Fri, 24 May 2013 06:27:19 -0700

Comments: "Jony Ive’s new look for iOS 7: black, white, and flat all over"

URL: http://9to5mac.com/2013/05/24/jony-ives-new-look-for-ios-7-black-white-and-flat-all-over/

With the grand unveiling of Apple’s next operating system for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch approaching, sources have provided detailed descriptions of what users and developers alike could expect from the software’s fresh look.

As we reported in April, Apple Senior Vice President of Industrial Design Jony Ive has been leading a thorough overhaul for iOS 7 that focuses on the look and feel of the iOS device software rather than on several new features.

Sources have described iOS 7 as “black, white, and flat all over.” This refers to the dropping of heavy textures and the addition of several new black and white user interface elements.

Sources say that over the past few months, Apple has re-architected iOS 7′s new interface several times, so until the new software is announced at WWDC, interface elements could dramatically change from what Apple has been testing internally in recent weeks.

Nonetheless, you can find what we have been hearing about iOS 7′s new user experience below:

Ive on Heavy Textures:

In software design meetings with Apple’s iOS designers, accompanied by Apple’s Human Interface vice president Greg Christie, Ive has shared his reasoning behind his distaste for the texture-heavy (skeuomorphic) interfaces heralded by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and former iOS chief Scott Forstall.

Ive stated that software designs filled with physical metaphors do not stand the test of time, according to a person familiar with the design meetings.

According to this person, Ive also shared that because iOS’s current applications have several differing designs, Apple’s users could become confused.

For example, the current yellow notepad-inspired Notes app contrasts significantly from the silver-textured Maps, blue and white Mail, and casino-inspired Game Center apps.

But now that over half a billion devices running Jobs’ and Forstall’s iconic system have been sold, Ive has the immense challenge to make Apple’s software as clean and seamless as his glass and aluminum devices, all while making the software remain simple enough to resonate with customers.

For the upcoming operating system, which Apple says will be unveiled at its June Worldwide Developers Conference, Ive has not simply picked areas of the software design to tweak. He has essentially made his mark on every corner of the operating system, according to descriptions from sources, all while mostly keeping the essence of what has made iOS so ubiquitous.

Turning on the iPhone:

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone to the gushing crowd at his January 2007 keynote address, one of the first breakthrough moments for spectators is when Jobs took his finger to perform the slide-to-unlock gesture on the iPhone’s Lock screen. Since that day, the iPhone’s Lock screen has mostly remained the same.

With iOS 7, Apple will drop the shiny, transparent time bar on the top of the Lock screen in exchange for a shine-free, black interface. Additionally, the square-grid for entering a pin code has been replaced with round, black buttons with white text and white borders. Additionally, sources say that notifications on the Lock screen may see improved manipulability with gestures.

Overall, the Lock screen is different than what users have become accustomed to, but it functions in a similar manner.

Notifications:

Jony Ive has inspired the iOS design team to replace many of the linen and leather textures found in iOS, such as in the iPad Calendar app, with flat white and black coloring. For instance, Apple’s Notification Center drop-down panel currently has a dark linen background. In iOS 7, according to people familiar with the software, this design becomes a dark grey/black color with white text.

As we previously reported, the latest iOS 7 builds being tested include new panels for quick access to information. For example, in addition to local weather and stocks information (like as introduced in iOS 5), Apple is testing other widgets for Notification Center. Sources shared examples such as localized news feeds. Additionally, Apple is testing a dedicated, easily-accessible panel for WiFi, Airplane Mode, and Bluetooth toggles.

Home Screen:

As we previously reported, iOS 7′s Home screen design is mostly the same as the display of app icons found in iOS since the first iPhone. While the Home screen app icons lose shine, shadows and gloss, the buttons are still round and just as tappable.

Also as we previously noted, most of the Apple-bundled app icons have been redesigned with flatter, less-skeuomorphic textures. Notable app icon changes for “flatness” are present for the Camera and Photos apps, while the Game Center logo loses the green felt and chess pieces.

Additionally, panorama-like wallpapers (images that pan as Home screens are swiped) are also present. This feature makes sense in light of Apple adding panorama photography capabilities to some iOS 6 devices last year. Panorama wallpapers have existed in Google’s Android OS for several years.

Additionally, navigation and tab bars have been redesigned to remove gradient textures. Some bars in iOS 7 are also said to include a minor blurring effect. In some apps, the Status Bar is less transparent than in iOS 6. iOS 7′s system-wide keyboard is similar the keyboard in previous versions of iOS, but the design is a lighter shade of grey and does not include shadowing.

Redesigned Apps:

In addition to the Home screen buttons, most of Apple’s apps have been redesigned to fit the white, black, and flat theme of the new operating system. For example, the shredding animation for deleting virtual passes has likely been removed from Passbook.

Additionally, the iPhone’s Notes app has replaced the yellow notepad design for a flat white look. Apps such as Mail, Calendar, and Maps have also gained a more uniformed look with flat white textures. While the core elements of those apps are mostly white, each app has been given a unique button color. Essentially, each app has a white base with a respective color theme.

For example, the Calendar app could potentially have red buttons, while Messages could have green controls. While not exactly accurate, the above concept art for a “flat” iOS 7 Calendar provides a fair representation of how the aforementioned red theme could be implemented. The actual iOS 7 Calendar’s UI changes are not as ambitious as depicted in the above concept art.

While the Mail app, for example, is light on many changes, apps such as App Store, Newsstand, Game Center, Safari, Camera, and Weather have seen significant transformations.

Apple’s new Weather application is said to include slightly animated images to notate types of weather such as rain, sun, or snow. One source says that it is similar to the above design recently posted to Dribbble.

Game Center, unsurprisingly, has been stripped of green felt. Newsstand has been tweaked to remove the wood-shelf interface. It is likely that the wood will be replaced with a texture slightly reminiscent of OS X Mountain Lion’s app dock. Safari for iPhone’s design has been tweaked, particularly in the tabs view.

The App/iTunes/iBook stores will pick up a flatter, white look (as opposed to the current dark black theme). Additionally, due to confusion from users looking to FaceTime, the iPhone may now include a standalone FaceTime app like the iPad and iPod touch. In previous versions of the iPhone software, FaceTime video calling has been tucked away into the Phone application.

New Features:

While iOS 7 is heavy on design changes, the operating system also includes some various new features across the board. We previously reported that iOS 7 will likely include integration for Flickr and Vimeo in addition to improved in-car support for Maps and Siri. While the new interface will be a major change for consumers, sources say that iOS 7 is also an ambitious update for developer-focused features.

Priorities:

According to people familiar with iOS 7′s development, Apple’s designers and engineers are prioritizing an overhaul of the iPhone’s version of iOS over the iPad’s software.

Release:

It is highly likely that Apple will release iOS 7 to customers this fall alongside new hardware. We are expecting Apple to release an iPhone refresh with improved internals in the fall. Additionally, Apple seems to be prepping new versions of the iPad and iPad mini for the fall.

(Top two images created by Michael Steeber)

Layer Trees vs. Flat Drawing – Graphics Performance Across iOS Device Generations — Florian Kugler

Fri, 24 May 2013 07:39:06 -0700

Comments: "Layer Trees vs. Flat Drawing – Graphics Performance Across iOS Device Generations — Florian Kugler"

URL: http://floriankugler.com/blog/2013/5/24/layer-trees-vs-flat-drawing-graphics-performance-across-ios-device-generations

This view is 100 points in height and spanned the whole display width on the iPhone as well as on the iPad. It consists of an opaque gradient in the background, a 100x100 image on the left and two labels with a transparent background. I created three versions of this view which all produced an identical output.

The first version was constructed with several subviews. One for the gradient, an UIImageView for the image and two UILabels for the text. The second version was constructed out of several sublayers. A CAGradientLayer for the background gradient, a CALayer for the image with its contents property set to a CGImageRef and two CATextLayers. The last version was drawn as flat texture with Core Graphics.

To test how fast these views could be brought on screen, I measured the time it would take to render 5 to 30 of these views in increments of 5, taking 60 samples during each step. In order to measure how many of these views could be animated at 60 frames per second once they were on screen, I incrementally rendered more and more of these views in my test app until the frame rate dropped below 60fps when animating their position randomly.

Measuring Technique

You can find the test project I used for these benchmarks on GitHub, so I'm only going to describe the the rough outline here. For both measurements I used CADisplayLink to update the screen. The selector you specify when initializing CADisplayLink gets called 60 times per second (if what your doing doesn't take too long) and conveniently the display link object, which you get as first and only argument, has a timestamp property which tells you the timestamp associated with the last frame that was displayed.

To measure how fast new views could be brought on screen I simply removed and re-created the superview which contained a variable number of the test views.

- (void)setupDisplayLink {
 CADisplayLink* displayLink = [CADisplayLink displayLinkWithTarget:self selector:@selector(nextFrame:)];
 [displayLink addToRunLoop:[NSRunLoop currentRunLoop] forMode:NSRunLoopCommonModes];
}
- (void)nextFrame:(CADisplayLink*)displayLink {
 // ...
 [view removeFromSuperview];
 view = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, self.view.bounds.size.width, self.view.bounds.size.height)];
 for (NSUInteger i = 0; i < numberOfViews; i++) {
 // add new views ...
 } 
 [self.view addSubview:view];
}

After 60 iterations with a fixed number of views I logged the average time each cycle took, increased the number of views to be displayed by 5 and moved on to the next round.

To measure how fast the views which were already on screen could be animated, the method called by the display link was a bit different:

- (void)nextFrame:(CADisplayLink*)displayLink {
 // ...
 view.transform = CGAffineTransformMakeTranslation(self.randomNumber * 50 - 25, self.randomNumber * 50 - 25);
}

This simply sets a different, random translation transform on the container view with each display cycle. Since setting a transform like this doesn't hinder the display link from calling the method 16ms later, even if the resulting GPU operation takes longer, I measured the actual frame rate with the OpenGL ES Driver instrument and averaged the value over a couple of seconds.

Performance of first time rendering

iPhone

The following chart shows the average time it took to render one test view onto the screen on the iPhone 3G, 4, 4S and 5. The three bars in each group represent the different versions of the view: composed of subviews, composed of sublayers and plain Core Graphics drawing.

Rubber Duck [UX] Debugging — Design/UX — Medium

Fri, 24 May 2013 07:43:06 -0700

Comments: "Rubber Duck [UX] Debugging — Design/UX — Medium"

URL: https://medium.com/design-ux/b67842ec3e7f

It was on a HN comment thread where I first heard about Rubber Duck Debugging (hat tip @danielbmarkham).

The basic premis is that you debug your code by explaining it to a rubber duck, line by line, and hopefully realise where the bug lies in the process.

If you're going to be spending $75 per person on user testing, then you'll want to make sure you've spotted as many “buggy” interactions as possible before anything gets built.

As this is intended to be a practical guide, I've created a fictional mobile app to use as an example (so just squint and pretend it’s your own app).

Step 1: Define your flows with User Stories

Be clear about what your app does. For my example app, I wrote:

{name of app} is a point of sale app for iPhone that enables waiters to take a drink and food order at the table and charge customers directly.

Then, you’ll need to have at least one user story like:

As a waiter, I want to take an order of 3 green teas, 1 water and 1 sandwich so that I can charge the customer.

These user stories define the flows through the app that we’re going to be testing. If you want more information on storytelling in design, check out Braden Kowitz’s post.

Step 2: Wireframe your flows

I’d normally start this process in Omnigraffle. Maybe you prefer pen and paper or some other app like Sketch. (If you use something else, leave a comment about it here).

Taking the order of 3 green teas, I work out all the pages I’ll need to complete the transaction. I also loosely work out how they will connect to each other i.e. what order the appear in (the flow).

This gives me a todo list of pages I need to create wireframes for.

You could (and probably should) use this fidelity of wireframe to start testing, but I’m going straight for the final, eye candy version with a “here’s one I made earlier” approach.

Step 3: Prepare your fake screens

So I know which screens I’ll need and I know what data goes on each screen. Next I’ll take those wireframes and start the glossy design with shape, contrast, spacing and type (far left) before moving on to applying brand and colour. I use Silkscreen for previewing on devices as I go. Final design:

For each page, I’ll use Photoshop Layer Comps to show variations e.g. a receipt page and the same page with a “paying” popup over the top.

Step 4: Fake it ‘til you make it

Next up you’ll need Keynote and Liveview (for mac and ios).

This is the Rubber Duck Debugging part. It’s important to note that it’s not the final output that’s important here, it’s the building of fake app that will highlight interaction bugs as you go.

So let’s build that fake green tea order:

In Keynote, create a new presentation.Open the Inspector.Resize your presentation to match your phone. 640x1136 for iPhone 5 for example.

Now you’re ready to cut/paste from Photoshop to Keynote. Switching through your Layer Comps, follow the user stories and flow you defined earlier to get a list of sequential slides in your presentation.

You’ll end up with something like this. To test my “3 green teas” order, I ended up with about 15 slides. Some were almost identical with just a different total price showing so it’s not as much work as you think.

Most of the time your fake app will be linear flow. If you want to double-back through the app (re-visiting the start page for example) you can do this by using a transparent shape enabled as a hyperlink to another slide:

At this point, if you play the slideshow, you should be able to click through the app and fake taking a real order.

Congratulations! You just rubber duck debugged your flow.Hopefully by forcing yourself to mimic a real flow, you will have spotted some early UX problems. The kind of stuff you want to find before a developer spends a week putting a basic feature together.

Step 5: Take the red pill (optional)

As nice as it is to have a flow running on your screen, wouldn’t it be even nicer to actually test it on a device? As I work remotely I also film using the app to share with stakeholders so that they can view the functionality first hand.

You’ll need to modify Keynote preferences and “Allow Exposé, Dashboard and others to use screen”. This will enable you to move the LiveView capture area.

Launch LiveView both on your mac and your iPhone, set it to “High Quality” and Interactive:

Your Keynote should now be being broadcast live to your phone and it should feel as though you’re actually using the app (bonus points if you used Keynote animations to make it more iPhone-y).

As I mentioned, I also film using the app to send to my team so they can comment on functionality. My setup looks something like this:

Unfortunately, I don’t seem to be able to embed video, but you can visit this Vimeo page to see the kind of results you should expect.

To give you an idea of the kinds of bugs you might find using this method, here’s what I found when making the above point of sale app. I noticed a problem where every time I selected an item, say a tea, a coffee or sandwich I aways went back to the top level menu (rather than staying on the drinks menu for example). This is logical because you can’t infur what the next item would be.

However, this gets annoying if you want to select 3 coffees. I only noticed this when I went to add 3 green teas in a row. Once I found this UX bug, it was easy to fix, but I wouldn’t have thought this problem until much later on in the dev cycle, rather than at this early design stage.

Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more

Fri, 24 May 2013 07:53:06 -0700

Comments: "Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more"

URL: http://a.co

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sidorares/vnc-over-gif · GitHub

Fri, 24 May 2013 07:59:06 -0700

Comments: "sidorares/vnc-over-gif · GitHub"

URL: https://github.com/sidorares/vnc-over-gif

Snowfallgate and Startups :: madhatted.com

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:03:06 -0700

Comments: "Snowfallgate and Startups :: madhatted.com"

URL: http://madhatted.com/2013/5/24/snowfallgate-and-startups

A legal spat between Scrollkit, a 2 (?) year old startup, and The New York Times, a 162 year old icon of the news industry, buzzed it’s way into the startup world this week.

Last year the Times published a story titled Snow Fall. It demonstrated some new and emerging technologies on the web, and included research and media from the Times. It garnered much attention, and I think rightfully so. It was exciting to see a large traditional media company pushing forward.

The founder of Scrollkit also liked the article. As a demo, he cloned the story (using images, video, and possibly text from the original) using Scrollkit. Then he linked to it from his company’s landing page:

The Times learned about this and sent a DMCA takedown request. Cody (a Scrollkit founder) blogs the whole thing. Now everybody looks bad. Well, this is certainly unfortunate.

The responses on startup website Hacker News totally miss the point, in my opinion. They debate whether a DMCA takedown request is appropriate, if copyright applies to this situation, and a variety of other errata.

There is only one lesson to learn from this mess: Learn about your market, and act like a good citizen of that market. I think Scrollkit handled this situation pretty badly, and entirely missed the realities of what creating a business is about. Relationships.

Artsy is another New York company (just like Scrollkit and the Times) that provides a good counter-example. I have much optimism about Artsy’s potential to be a successful company in the art market- and the reason is relationships.

Artsy has created rich bonds with the existing world of art sales and commentary. They don’t compete with existing galleries. Instead they work with them to find new customers and bring great artists online.
They don’t rely on public domain images of work at a museum, or rely on their users to upload copyrighted work under the DMCA Safe Harbor provision. Instead they built a fantastic team of experienced art historians, and created relationships with hundreds of institutions in the arts. Among these are giants like The Dallas Museum of Art, SFMOMA, and The Royal Collection.
They go out of their way to make copyrighted images non-trivial to copy or download. Yes, tech-smart people can always get around this, but that isn’t the point. Artsy listened to what their market wanted and went out of their way to deliver.

Being receptive to the needs of their market does not exclude Artsy from changing that market. The art world is ripe with opportunities for disruption, and Artsy is well positioned to exercise those opportunities. Their position comes from working within their market, and with leaders in that market.

Imagine for a moment that Artsy started using user-sourced photographs from the MoMA on their site. It doesn’t matter if you think these photos are fair use, or if you think MoMA should be supporting new ways to consume art. The reality would be that MoMA stops working with Artsy, and any other institution that aspires to be like MoMA does the same. Ignoring MoMA’s content ownership concerns would be a terrible signal to the market that Artsy doesn’t understand their world.

From Scrollkit’s website:

I am not privy to any special insight about Scrollkit’s business strategy, but I imagine they want news organizations (most of whom don’t have the digital skills the Times has) to use Scrollkit for publishing engaging content. This sounds like a solid plan. I find Scrollkit’s tools pretty amazing, and I think news organizations would use them very effectively.

So why they chose to alienate the market leader in news publishing is beyond me. It doesn’t matter if Scrollkit’s clone of Snow Fall was fair use or not: They have burned an important bridge before they tried to build it.

Relationships are a keystone to a startup’s success. Understanding how players in your market perceive the world and leveraging that early is important. The New York Times is notoriously touchy about others duplicating their content. The whole news publishing world is notoriously touchy about it. If you want to have those organizations as a partner, the way to gain their trust and business is not to blatantly copy their work, then brag about it, then flame them on your blog.

I think Scrollkit has ruined any chance for a relationship with the Times, for any relationship with the individuals that built Snow Fall, and for any chance of a relationship with news organizations that admire the Times (all of them?).

I can see two ways this might have been better done. One is to copy Snow Fall, but share it directly with the Times instead and engage them in conversation. If I told the world something took me “hundreds of hours” and a startup shows me “we can do that in an hour”, I’ll sit up and listen. Then you duplicate that process with another 10 organizations (and their content). A second way out was to respond quickly and politely to the DMCA takedown, then try to directly engage the Times.

If your target customers care about content ownership, your startup needs to care about content ownership. As a small fish in any large market, you need to demonstrate that you have similar priorities, or at least an elementary understanding of the history and common practices of that market.

When you know how to code (or heck, when you hire a coder), it becomes easy to see every problem as solvable with more code. You start building without understanding who you are building for. This goes beyond product, and straight to the heart of issues like the Snow Fall clone.

In a dense city like New York, there are a multitude of opportunities to meet people you want as customers. Get outside the building, and ensure your projects aren’t tone-deaf to their worldview. Learn to be a good citizen of your market. If you don’t, you might look up to realize your company has missed the mark. And that would be unfortunate.

There are some thoughtful comments on Hacker News.

By Matthew Beale

Death to the Cult of Stealth Startups! | I am Vidar @blacktar Andersen

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:03:06 -0700

Comments: "Death to the Cult of Stealth Startups! | I am Vidar @blacktar Andersen"

URL: http://stopmebeforeiblogagain.com/death-to-the-cult-of-stealth-startups/

Let there be light!

You might already know of my startup Gauss – The People Magnet. What some of you might not know is that I teach entrepreneurial students at universities, young hopeful startups at NEXT, keynoting events and F500* corporates that as a startup entrepreneur you need to:

Talk to everybody about everything all of the time
Expose yourself and your ideas to as many people (your potential users and customers) as soon as possible
Acknowledge and understand that no smart person or company will ever copy you before you have a validated and proven business model

I have come to realize that it is about embarrassingly high time that I start practice what I preach. It’s about time to start eating my own dog food. I’m spontaneously throwing everything out there to see what happens when you shine as much light from as many sources as possible on your ideas and assumptions instead of having them worshipped inside the cult of the stealth startup. I don’t expect much and I have nothing to lose but my vanity, so here we go.

I hereby declare death to the cult of stealth startups and pledge and acknowledge that I will:

Publish and solicit feedback as broadly as possible on any and all prototypes before writing a single line of code (e.g. as features described in text, click-dummies or paper wireframes)Be ready to face any and all critique in public in any form or way, the more and more brutally honest the betterRisk the embarrassment of being ridiculed and failing spectacularly in publicRisk having my ideas stolen by competitorsOnly exercise the option to stop sharing everything in public, if and only if, I have a validated product-market fit or when I have a validated business model

As of now, I’m going to publish all prototypes instead of following the cult of the stealth startup. I LOVE your feedback going forward and you can use this form (so you can remain anonymous) or feel free to leave comments on this post in public. Be brutally honest. I’m ready to take it! :)

Here’s a scrappy video walk-through (and in no way am I apologizing for the poor quality, because I also preach it is better to have something instead of nothing!):

And here are two click dummies for you to test on your iPhone for yourself (they should sort of work on Android too, though).

The main click-dummy with core concepts. (Try this first for basic concepts and tap Robert Scoble to test features as his profile is the only interactive one)

This next click dummy will show you what happens when you get a notification from Gauss. (BTW, profiles are inactive, not tap-able in this version)

Let me know what you think. Is this a great idea or worst ever? Should we all remain loyal followers of the dark cult of the stealth startup or is it about time to let the public sunshine in? I shared this post on HN so feel free to continue the discussion there too.

*Caveat: Obviously, if you’re inside a F500 corporation, sharing within your enterprise is assumed, not necessarily with the public. That would obviously open up a can of whoop-ass from your legal department. F500 enterprises are funny that way.

Can I help you? Why retail customers always say no | Start Up Blog

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:14:06 -0700

Comments: "Can I help you? Why retail customers always say no | Start Up Blog"

URL: http://startupblog.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/can-i-help-you-why-retail-customers-always-say-no/

These are the four worst words anyone can utter to a customer in retail. We all know they answer it gets 99% of the time – because we all give it.

“No thanks – just looking”

These 4 words are revenue stoppers, barrier creators, and empathy evaporators. It just says to the potential customer – I’m too bored and uninterested to even use a sentence that isn’t expected, practiced or considerate of the fact that you are the person who pays my wage. But rather than simply pointing out that it doesn’t work, let’s discuss a couple of simple and effective alternatives. And I’ll do this by giving you an example and a retail sales person who gets it.

I was recently shopping for some new jeans in a Myer store in Melbourne. When the sales guy approached me he asked me a simple question:

“Are you after pants or tops today?”

A very smart move. Either answer starts a conversation we he can ‘be help’ instead of simply asking if I need it. If I answer ‘pants’ – we can start narrowing down the selection. Same if I answer ‘tops’. Or he might even get lucky and I say ‘both’. If I say ‘neither’ I just look like a fool, and we can both wonder why the hell I walked into the store in the first place. Needless to say, I told him and he helped me find a nice pair of jeans.

The trick is simple:

First – never ask an open ended question. They don’t solve problems or lead to results.

Second – ask two pronged choice questions for which both answers are good for the sales person.

Third – don’t feel guilty or pushy doing it. People wouldn’t (especially men) enter a store just for the sake of it, they want help.

So next time you go into a store with sales assistants, pay attention to the language they use and you’ll start to notice those who get it and those who don’t. This example might also serve as a good question or test when recruiting business development staff for your startup.

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The Future of Human Data Interaction | tomasz by Tomasz Tunguz

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:17:06 -0700

Comments: "The Future of Human Data Interaction | tomasz by Tomasz Tunguz"

URL: http://tomtunguz.com/visualization

On the day of Tableau's IPO, a company known for innovating in data visualization, I thought I would share the most impressive HCI concept I've seen in a long time.

In my view, Bret Victor is on the forefront of human computer interaction design. In the first two or three minutes of this video at Stanford, he demonstrates his home-built software that combines data analysis with visualization. It's magnificent and really hard to describe because it's so novel.

Drawing Dynamic Visualizations from Bret Victor on Vimeo.

Victor uses words to create and manipulate the drawing and it all seems so natural and fluid. The interaction with the software evokes a conversation between two designers over a piece of paper - which is exactly the kind of interaction that makes software seem human and natural. I hope we see an explosion of these types of tools in the future.

Have you seen other great examples of human computer interaction? Let me know on Twitter about them.

360 Kudos

Stop Validating Email Addresses With Your Complex Regex - davidcel.is

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:19:06 -0700

Comments: "Stop Validating Email Addresses With Your Complex Regex - davidcel.is"

URL: http://davidcel.is/blog/2012/09/06/stop-validating-email-addresses-with-regex

Just stop, guys. It’s a waste of your time and your effort. Put down your Google search for an email regular expression, take a step back, and breathe. There’s a famous quote that goes:

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think, “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.”Now they have two problems.Jamie Zawinski, regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247/…

Here’s a fairly common code sample from Rails Applications with some sort of authentication system:

1 2 3 4 5 class User < ActiveRecord::Base # This regex is from https://github.com/plataformatec/devise, the most # popular Rails authentication library validates_format_of :email, :with => /\A[^@]+@([^@\.]+\.)+[^@\.]+\z/ end

This seems fairly simple (unless you don’t know Regex), but it can get way worse…

1 2 3 class User < ActiveRecord::Base validates_format_of :email, :with => /^(|(([A-Za-z0-9]+_+)|([A-Za-z0-9]+\-+)|([A-Za-z0-9]+\.+)|([A-Za-z0-9]+\++))*[A-Za-z0-9]+@((\w+\-+)|(\w+\.))*\w{1,63}\.[a-zA-Z]{2,6})$/i end

Or even worse still…

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 class User < ActiveRecord::Base validates :email, :with => EmailAddressValidator end class EmailValidator < ActiveModel::Validator EMAIL_ADDRESS_QTEXT = Regexp.new '[^\\x0d\\x22\\x5c\\x80-\\xff]', nil, 'n' EMAIL_ADDRESS_DTEXT = Regexp.new '[^\\x0d\\x5b-\\x5d\\x80-\\xff]', nil, 'n' EMAIL_ADDRESS_ATOM = Regexp.new '[^\\x00-\\x20\\x22\\x28\\x29\\x2c\\x2e\\x3a-\\x3c\\x3e\\x40\\x5b-\\x5d\\x7f-\\xff]+', nil, 'n' EMAIL_ADDRESS_QUOTED_PAIR = Regexp.new '\\x5c[\\x00-\\x7f]', nil, 'n' EMAIL_ADDRESS_DOMAIN_LITERAL = Regexp.new "\\x5b(?:#{EMAIL_ADDRESS_DTEXT}|#{EMAIL_ADDRESS_QUOTED_PAIR})*\\x5d", nil, 'n' EMAIL_ADDRESS_QUOTED_STRING = Regexp.new "\\x22(?:#{EMAIL_ADDRESS_QTEXT}|#{EMAIL_ADDRESS_QUOTED_PAIR})*\\x22", nil, 'n' EMAIL_ADDRESS_DOMAIN_REF = EMAIL_ADDRESS_ATOM EMAIL_ADDRESS_SUB_DOMAIN = "(?:#{EMAIL_ADDRESS_DOMAIN_REF}|#{EMAIL_ADDRESS_DOMAIN_LITERAL})" EMAIL_ADDRESS_WORD = "(?:#{EMAIL_ADDRESS_ATOM}|#{EMAIL_ADDRESS_QUOTED_STRING})" EMAIL_ADDRESS_DOMAIN = "#{EMAIL_ADDRESS_SUB_DOMAIN}(?:\\x2e#{EMAIL_ADDRESS_SUB_DOMAIN})*" EMAIL_ADDRESS_LOCAL_PART = "#{EMAIL_ADDRESS_WORD}(?:\\x2e#{EMAIL_ADDRESS_WORD})*" EMAIL_ADDRESS_SPEC = "#{EMAIL_ADDRESS_LOCAL_PART}\\x40#{EMAIL_ADDRESS_DOMAIN}" EMAIL_ADDRESS_PATTERN = Regexp.new "#{EMAIL_ADDRESS_SPEC}", nil, 'n' EMAIL_ADDRESS_EXACT_PATTERN = Regexp.new "\\A#{EMAIL_ADDRESS_SPEC}\\z", nil, 'n' def validate(record) unless record.email =~ EMAIL_ADDRESS_EXACT_PATTERN record.errors[:email] << 'is invalid' end end end

Yeesh. Is something that complex really necessary? If you actually check the Google query I linked above, people have been writing (or trying to write) RFC-compliant regular expressions to parse email addresses for years. They can get ridiculously convoluted as in the case above and, according to the specification, are often too strict anyway.

Sections 3.2.4 and 3.4.1 of the RFC go into the requirements on how an email address needs to be formatted and, well, there’s not much you can’t do in your email address when quotes or backslashes are involved. The local string (the part of the email address that comes before the @) can contain the following characters:

! $ & * - = ^ ` | ~ # % ' + / ? _ { }

But guess what? You can use pretty much any character you want if you escape it by surrounding it in quotes. For example, "Look at all these spaces!"@example.com is a valid email address. Nice.

For this reason, for a time I began running any email address against the following regular expression instead:

1 2 3 class User < ActiveRecord::Base validates_format_of :email, :with => /@/ end

Simple, right? Email addresses have to have an @ symbol. This is often the most I do and, when paired with a confirmation field for the email address on your registration form, can alleviate most problems with user error. But what if I told you there were a way to determine whether or not an email is valid without resorting to regular expressions at all? It’s surprisingly easy, and you’re probably already doing it anyway.

Just send them an email already

No, I’m not joking. Just send your users an email. The activation email is a practice that’s been in use for years, but it’s often paired with complex validations that the email is formatted correctly. If you’re going to send an activation email to users, why bother using a gigantic regular expression?

Think about it this way: I register for your website under the email address qwiufaisjdbvaadsjghb@gmail.com. C’mon. That shit’s probably going to bounce off of the illustrious mail daemon, but the formatting is fine; it’s a valid email address. To fix this problem, you implement an activation system where, after registering, I am sent an email with a link I must click. This is to verify that I actually own that email address before my account is activated. At this point, why keep parsing email addresses for their format? The result of sending an email to a badly formatted email address would be the same: it’ll get bounced. If your user enters a bad email address, they won’t get the activation email and they’ll try to register again if they really care about using your site. It’s that simple.

So eschew your fancy regular expressions already. If you really want to do checking of email addresses right on the signup page, include a confirmation field so they have to type it twice. Enterprising individuals will just copy and paste, but what it comes down to is this: if your user enters a bad email address, you shouldn’t make it more of a problem for yourself than you have to. A complex regex validation on the email address doesn’t introduce an additional solution, it introduces an additional problem. If you really, really want to make sure people are typing in an actual email address, just use the /@/ regular expression and call it done. Feeling ambitious? Then check for the dot too: /.+@.+\..+/i. Anything more is overkill.

UPDATE: As several users in the comments have also pointed out, many email address regexes on the web will show tagged emails (i.e. email+tag@example.com) as invalid. Lots of people use tags in their email addresses while registering as a pair with their email service’s filtering systems. Keep that in mind if you don’t wish to heed the above advice.

Additionally, you should take commenter Travis Dahlke’s suggestion and look at Kicksend’s mail checker.

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:27:21 -0700

Comments: ""

URL: http://thedayseries.tumblr.com/post/963728807/the-day-our-investors-came-to-see-the-office

Inside Pixar’s Leadership

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:27:21 -0700

Comments: " Inside Pixar’s Leadership"

URL: http://scottberkun.com/2010/inside-pixars-leadership/

There were plenty of high profile people at the Economist event in March, but hands down the best session was a simple interview with Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar.

Martin Giles from the Economist did the interview, and did an excellent job letting Catmull cover some excellent territory.

Here’s the video, and below I transcribed my favorite quotes.

Interesting, related to the talk I gave on The Myths of Innovation at the same event, how little he used the word innovation (I don’t think he says it once).

My favorite quotes from Ed Catmull’s talk at The Economist:

On the Socratic ideal of admitting ignorance:

“We’ve got these successful things going on and we mis-perceive how we got there. Or who the influences are. And we draw these wrong ideas and we then make a series of mistakes which are not well grounded in reality. Which means the things that are happening now that are wrong at Pixar are already happening and I can’t see them. And I have to start with that premise. And through all the history.. there is something going on here and I don’t know what it is.”

On secrets and ‘the management’:

Part of the behavior is I don’t know the answers. And at first that seems a little bit glib. But after awhile people get that I really don’t know the answer to a lot of these things. So we set it up so that the management really doesn’t tell people what to do. We discuss, we debate, [but] people start to refer to ‘the management’, and I say come on guys, there’s three of us, we’re all in this together, and then we’re very open and honest about the problems. Everyone feels like they own it, secrecy is very good at Pixar, it doesn’t get out into the blogs because they all know what’s wrong and it would be an act of betrayal because they want to participate in the discussion and I want them to.

On protecting a vision:

I do believe you want a vision, so you start off with a person who has a vision for a story. And we do things to try and protect that vision and its not easy to protect it, because they feel these pressures. They also have misconceptions about the creative process sometimes. We do have these people who we give a chance to on the belief they’re right, and can rise to the occasion, and we are wrong sometimes, because we can’t see what goes on in their heads. And our measure, because we can’t see inside people’s heads, is the team. If the team is functioning well, and healthy, it will solve the problem.

The process of giving feedback:

One of the protections is the notion that they have the final say so. Now this is a very hard thing to say because we say we are filmmaker led. The reason its hard is if they can’t lead the team, we will actually remove the person from it. That’s our version of what a failure is… it’s hard because it’s a personal thing. Until you reach that breaking point, you have to do everything you can.. sometimes its adding people to the team, sometimes its removing them, but as leaders we don’t tell them what to do. We have a structure so they get their feedback from their peers… every two or three months they present *the film* to the other filmmakers… and they will go through, and they will tear the film apart. And it’s very important for that dynamic to work, because it could be a brutal process, there needs to be the feeling they are all helping each other who wants that help. In order for that to work its important that no one in the room has the authority to tell the director they have to take their notes [make changes]. So no-one is taking a list of what you have to do to fix the film. All we can do is give the feedback and he goes off with the feedback… our job as leaders is to protect the dynamic in the room so that they’re honest with each other.

The idea of honesty as an abstraction easy to ignore:

They don’t want to walk in and embarrass themselves, they don’t want to say anything stupid, they don’t want to offend anyone, so these personal pressures and responses start to emerge. So I do see it happen, and it happened fairly recently, and I walked out, and I knew they weren’t honest. So then you call them in, maybe two or three people, and say why didn’t you say what you thought. And it’s a personal thing. So we have to change the dynamic. When we have something tricky and that’s holding things back, we have to have a four person or five person meeting, where the dynamics are different. And sometimes where things are actually going pretty well, then you want to have a room of 25 people, see how it works, and let them express themselves and have them grow. But if you have 25 people in the room some of them then start to perform, rather than participate. So there is this balance, what is the state of the thing… we need to have honesty, we want to have honesty, but honest is a buzzword. Its one of these things we hear, everyone nods their head on, ‘it’s all true’, [but] the gap between the abstractions and where people actually do it is enormous. And people fill it in with all sorts of crap.

On the limits of platitudes:

I don’t like hard rules at all. I think they’re all bullshit.

Dealing with tough, competing constraints:

If I look at the range, you’ve got one [constraint] that is art school, I’m doing this for arts sake, Ratatouille and WALL-E clearly fall more on that side, the other is the purely commercial side, where you’ve got a lot of films that are made purely for following a trend, if you go entirely for the art side then eventually you fail economically. if you go purely commercially then I think you fail from a soul point of view… we’ve got these elements pulling on both sides, the art side and the commercial side… and the the trick is not to let one side win. That fundamentally successful companies are unstable. And where we have to operate is in that unstable place. And the forces of conservatism which are very strong and they want to go to a safe place. I want to go to the same place for money, I want to go and be wild and creative, or I want to have enough time for this, and each one of those guys are pulling, and if any one of them wins, we lose. And i just want to stay right there in the middle.

On firing creative geniuses:

[At Pixar] there is very high tolerance for eccentricity, very creative, and to the point where some are strange… but there are a small number of people who are socially dysfunctional [and] very creative – we get rid of them. If we don’t have a healthy group then it isn’t going to work. There is this illusion that this person is creative and has all this stuff, well the fact is there are literally thousands of ideas involved in putting something like this together. And the notion of ideas as this singular thing is a fundamental flaw. There are so many ideas that what you need is that group behaving creatively. And the person with the vision I think is unique, there are very few people who have that vision.. but if they are not drawing the best out of people then they will fail. We will support the leader for as long and as hard as we can, but the thing we can not overcome is if they have lost the crew. It’s when the crew says we are not following that person. We say we are director led, which implies they make all the final decisions, [but] what it means to us is the director has to lead.. and the way we can tell when they are not leading is if people say ‘we are not following’.

On managers self-destructive tendencies for creative work:

The notion that you’re trying to control the process and prevent error screws things up. We all know the saying it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. And everyone knows that, but I Think there is a corollary: if everyone is trying to prevent error, it screws things up. It’s better to fix problems than to prevent them. And the natural tendency for managers is to try and prevent error and over plan things.

—————-

If you liked this post, you should check out the new paperback edition of the Myths of Innovation.

Feature Column from the AMS

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:28:21 -0700

Comments: "Feature Column from the AMS"

URL: http://www.ams.org/samplings/feature-column/fcarc-india-zero

By accident, it records the oldest "0" in India for which one can assign a definite date...

Bill Casselman
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
cass at math.ubc.ca

The history of zero is a bit complicated. So is the history of "0". The scholarly literature on the subject is only tentative because much of the historical record is very sparse, whereas the popular literature is unfortunately and frequently both confident and in error.

The first problem to come along is deciding exactly what one means by "zero" or, for that matter, "0". Is it a number in the mathematical sense - that is to say, the cardinality of the empty set? The length of a point? The result of subtracting 1 from 1? I am not going to engage in such deep matters, but rather in a much more pedestrian business. The digit "0" was a basic part of decimal place value notation. There is no doubt that it was invented in India, but exactly how and for what purpose is unclear, and probably always will be.

This is not at first sight very complicated mathematics, but in truth it took far longer for humans to develop a convenient notation for calculating than it did for them to develop rigourous mathematical reasoning. The apparent simplicity of our current system is indeed a sign of its elegance. It often happens that the best mathematics, once seen, is seen to be obvious.

I'm going to cover a very small part of the story.

Mathematical tourism

The city of Gwalior in India is located on the main rail line south from Delhi, just a bit below Agra, the site of the Taj Mahal. It is in the far north of Madyha Pradesh, and lies very near where the three northern states of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh meet. It is in a region that has few hills and - for most of the year, like much of India - little water. Gwalior does not seem to be well known outside India, although it is certainly mentioned favourably in guide books. The reason for this favourable mention is that it happens to be the site of one of the most impressive of all medieval forts in a country full of impressive forts. The fort is famous inside the country not only for its size and beauty, but also for being the site of the last and futile stand of the Princess (Rani) of Jhansi during the rising of 1857-1858 against the British.

The city is now both sprawling and crowded, with a population of perhaps 2,000,000, but until recently it was relatively small, and designed to be small. The fort occupies a plateau in what is now the center of the city, but was once on its western boundary. The plateau is about 300 feet high built of basalt, rising steeply from the plain below. It is a bit less than two miles in length from north to south, maybe an average of a half mile from west to east. The site is of mathematical interest because of what is written on a tablet recording the establishment of a small 9th century Hindu temple on the eastern side of the plateau (marked by the on the nineteenth century map at the left). By accident, it records the oldest "0" in India for which one can assign a definite date.

The temple

The temple is dated to 876 A. D. and is much older than the current fort, whose construction was begun in the late 15th century, although it was built quite a while after the original one constructed on the plateau. It is, like many temples in India, monolithic - that is to say, originally carved out of one single chunk of stone. It was dedicated to Vishnu, but is no longer an active site of worship.

The temple is named Chatur-bhuja, that of the four-armed god. Who was reponsible for the (literal) defacement of the statue is not known to me.

The tablet

Just inside the inner chamber, on Vishnu's right hand side, is the dedication tablet. The tablet records the date (in the local era, which started in 57 B. C.), the dimension of a land grant to a neighbouring temple, and the size of a daily gift of flowers to be paid for from an endowment made to this temple.

... the whole town gave to the temple ... which Alla, the son of Vaillabhatta, had caused to be built ... a piece of land ... 270 hastas in length ...

What is surprising about these numbers is that they are so similar to what modern civilization uses currently. The more you learn about how our current number symbols developed - transmitted from the Hindus to the Persians, then to Mediterranean Islam, and differently in East and West - the more remarkable this appears. Here, for comparison, are some numbers from the bus system of Mumbai:

Photographs taken by Leslie Saper

Go figure.

The background

What the Gwalior tablet shows is that by 876 A. D. our current place-value system with a base of 10 had become part of popular culture in at least one region of India.

We know almost nothing of how this decimal place-value notation came about, although there are many suggestive facts. One feature of Hindu culture in the middle centuries of the first millennium was that its texts were largely in verse, and preserved through oral tradition. It is hard to fit a useful numerical notation into such a scheme, and in fact what we see is a large literature, written down only much later than it originated, with numbers - often very, very large numbers - written in a kind of decimal place-value notation, but in words instead of symbols. Furthermore, the demands of the metric of the verses required that the exact words chosen to represent a given digit might vary from one point to another, so as to scan correctly. Whether this usage overlay more convenient calculation with symbols is not known to us, although it is almost inconceivable that it did not.

Another problem is that the climate of India is harsh. Paper was introduced to India late, and until then the materials on which things were written were birch bark in the north and palm leaves in the south. These are both extremely fragile. There are many extant manuscripts written on these, but nearly all of relatively recent date.

One of the more intriguing questions about the origin of decimal place-value notation is what connection it had to a much older tradition from a nearby region. The Babylonians began writing in about 3000 B.C., and had the good fortune to write on clay tablets, which can last for a very long time. We have extensive records from several thousand years of their development. They used an extremely sophisticated place-value system, remarkably much the one we use today, from very roughly 2000 B.C. on, but with a base of 60 instead of 10, and without "0". All the evidence that I am aware of suggests that this was technology acquired only by an elite group through rigourous training. This somewhat ambiguous notation persisted to about 300 B.C. when Babylonian astronomical tables started to incorporate a symbol that to some extent performed as zero, that is to say as a sign to indicate a space between two "digits". This was adopted in modified form by Greek astronomers after the conquests of Alexander, and this science in turn was transmitted (along with astrology!) to India sometime in the first few centuries of the current era. Exactly how these transmissions occurred is lost to us.

References

Alexander Cunningham, Four reports made during the years 1862-63-64-65, Archaeological Survey of India, 1865.

Section XVI of volume II contains the only substantial history of the city and principality of Gwalior that I have been able to locate. Cunningham mentions the temple and the tablet as well as its date 933, but does not mention the other numbers.

E. Hultsch, The two inscriptions of the Vaillabhattasvamin temple at Gwalior, Epigraphia Indica I, pages 154--161.

There are two inscriptions in the temple at Gwalior, one just above the entrance in a small domed porch, and the other on the left inside wall. The first is, as Hultsch says, written in a more attractive style (and, he also says, a more stylish Sanskrit), but has no mathematical interest, contrary to what is sometimes said.

Hultsch's article contains a transcription of the tablet into modern Sanskrit script, an English translation, and a reproduction of a rubbing of the tablet. Aside from the numerals, the tablet does not seem to be of much historical interest.

George Ifrah, The universal history of numbers, Penguin, 2000.

This book is useful, perhaps even indispensable, for someone interested in the history of numbers. It is a huge compendium of material, some fascinating and much - alas - of very little interest. One problem is that the author fails to warn you when he is relying on secondary material and when on first hand. This problem actually arises in his account of the temple of Gwalior - he has apparently misread Hultsch's transliteration and thought that the numbering of the Sanskrit verses found there was part of the inscription. One very valuable feature of Ifrah's books is the extensive bibliography.

Robert Kaplan, The nothing that is, Oxford University Press, 1999.

This book mentions Gwalior, but it is an uninteresting account, and seems to be passing on only third-hand information (as I have said, a frequent phenomnon in popular accounts of the history of science). I doubt that he has bothered to read Hultsch's article. but instead seems to rely principally on Ifrah. Even taking this into account, the sketches of the numerals at Gwalior have strangely little resemblance to the originals.

Shunya's collection of photographs of Gwalior will give you a good idea of the beauty of the fort as well as a look at the rest of the town. The eastern approach to the fort is shown in the image Pedestrian entrance, and the temple is just at the bend in the road at middle left.

Acknowledgements

Dipendra Prasad of the Tata Institute in Mumbai arranged my visit to Gwalior at very short notice, and in particular arranged for me to meet Renu Jain, head of the mathematics department at Jiwaji University in Gwalior. She, at even shorter notice, gathered a small group to guide me, among them V. P. Saxena (mathematics) and A. K. Singh (archaeology). I wish that I had had more time to talk with them about the history of Gwalior.

Images

Images by the author (mostly) and Leslie Saper. Personal use of the above images is allowed. Inquiries about publication of any of the above images should be sent to the AMS Public Awareness Office paoffice@ams.org.

Bill Casselman
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
cass at math.ubc.ca

NOTE: Those who can access JSTOR can find some of the papers mentioned above there. For those with access, the American Mathematical Society's MathSciNet can be used to get additional bibliographic information and reviews of some these materials. Some of the items above can be accessed via the ACM Portal, which also provides bibliographic services.

Why Yahoo! Buying Tumblr Is Not Great For NYC's Tech Scene - Forbes

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:46:21 -0700

Comments: "Why Yahoo! Buying Tumblr Is Not Great For NYC's Tech Scene - Forbes"

URL: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2013/05/24/why-yahoo-buying-tumblr-is-not-great-for-the-nyc-tech-scene/

By Greg Gretsch, Managing Director, Sigma West, an early-stage technology VC firm in Silicon Valley.

For years we’ve been hearing about how the ascendant tech startup scene in NYC is going to rival Silicon Valley’s tech-hegemony. It’s a story the mainstream media has run with hard because, after all, NYC is the apex for the mainstream media and, who doesn’t like rooting for the home team? For those NYC cheerleaders (I’m talking to you Bloomberg and WSJ), Yahoo Yahoo‘s purchase of Tumblr was solid confirmatory evidence of the momentum-shift they’ve been trumpeting. Yet, while the acquisition was clearly a good thing for Tumblr’s founder and early backers, it was at best OK and at worst a bad thing for NYC’s quest to challenge Silicon Valley’s tech dominance.

The confluence of elements at the core of Silicon Valley’s vibrant tech scene have been long discussed – fantastic universities, access to capital, and access to a strong startup support system. NYC long had great universities and human capital (although not as much tech DNA) but, somewhat surprisingly for the financial center of the world, NYC just didn’t have a strong startup funding culture. To be clear, there is plenty of wealth to be invested in NYC; somewhat ironically there are five NY metro area hedge-fund titans who each made individually more in 2012 than the entire purchase price of Tumblr. Lots of money, just not lots of it going to tech startups. Another way to put it is that there are lots of billionaires, just no tech-billionaires. In the last 10 years, at least the money side of the equation has been looking better for NYC. According to the PWC/NVCA MoneyTree, NYC’s share of venture investment dollars grew from 5.8% of the US total in Q1 2003 to 9.8% in Q1 2013. NYC is taking venture investment share from other markets, but it is not taking it from Silicon Valley. Over that same period, Silicon Valley’s share of US venture investment dollars went from 32.5% to 37.9%.

So what is NYC missing and in what alternate universe could the Tumblr acquisition be bad for the NYC tech ecosystem? What Silicon Valley has in abundance that no other tech-center rivals is what I will refer to as the anchor-tenant companies. Anchor-tenant companies are those that become large independent and growing tech leaders. They continue to generate wealth; their alums continue to spawn new companies; and they continue to buy interesting startups fueling the cycle. There are tech giants in places other than Silicon Valley (Microsoft Microsoft, Amazon, IBM IBM), but no area rivals the valley for the sheer number of these tech titans. Silicon Valley has them in every corner of tech and continues to create them. Just since the tech bubble burst, we’ve added LinkedIn LinkedIn and Facebook (started post bubble) and Google and Salesforce (IPO post bubble) to name just a few.

This brings me back to Tumblr. A great company and a great outcome. But now that the music has stopped and Tumblr has taken a chair, the company has stopped playing for the big leagues. Tumblr may ultimately become as meaningful to Yahoo! as YouTube has become to Google, as Yahoo! CFO Ken Goldman implies, although I’m skeptical. But even if it reaches that lofty status it will be bittersweet for the NYC tech community. Because instead of having a large independent tech giant around which an ecosystem can flourish, NYC will have a large satellite division of a Silicon Valley company.

Related on Forbes:

Iffy Can: Angular service or factory?

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:49:21 -0700

Comments: "Iffy Can: Angular service or factory?"

URL: http://iffycan.blogspot.com/2013/05/angular-service-or-factory.html

tl;dr is at the end

In various AngularJS tutorials and documentation, the authors choose to use service or factory but don't explain why you would use one or the other. Few mention that value and constant are also options.

Let's see why you would use one over the other. We should also understand how providers work:

provider

Here's the source for the provider method:

function provider(name, provider_) {
if (isFunction(provider_) || isArray(provider_)) {
provider_ = providerInjector.instantiate(provider_);
}
if (!provider_.$get) {
throw Error('Provider ' + name + ' must define $get factory method.');
}
return providerCache[name + providerSuffix] = provider_;
}

name is a string. provider_ can be one of three things:

function If a function is passed in, the function is called with dependency injection and should return an object with a $get method. array An array will be treated like a function using Inline Annotation. It must also return an object with a $get method. object If an object is passed in, it is simply expected to have a $get method.

Whatever the second arg to provider is, you eventually end up with an object that has a $get method. Here's an example showing what happens:

// You can run this// Create a module
var hippo = angular.module('hippo', []);
// Register an object provider
hippo.provider('awesome', {
$get: function() {
return 'awesome data';
}
});
// Get the injector (this happens behind the scenes in angular apps)
var injector = angular.injector(['hippo', 'ng']);
// Call a function with dependency injection
injector.invoke(function(awesome) {
console.log('awesome == ' + awesome);
});

Once you understand providers you will see that factory, service, value and constant are just convenience methods for making providers.

factory

Here's the source:

function factory(name, factoryFn) {
return provider(name, { $get: factoryFn });
}

So it lets you shorten the awesome provider creation code to this:

hippo.factory('awesome', function() {
return 'awesome data';
})

service

Here's the source:

function service(name, constructor) {
return factory(name, ['$injector', function($injector) {
return $injector.instantiate(constructor);
}]);
}

So it lets you make a factory that will instantiate a "class". For example:

var gandalf = angular.module('gandalf', []);function Gandalf() {
this.color = 'grey';
}
Gandalf.prototype.comeBack = function() {
this.color = 'white';
}
gandalf.service('gandalfService', Gandalf);
var injector = angular.injector(['gandalf', 'ng']);
injector.invoke(function(gandalfService) {
console.log(gandalfService.color);
gandalfService.comeBack()
console.log(gandalfService.color);
});

The above code will instantiate Gandalf, but remember that everything that uses the service will get the same instance! (which is a good thing).

value

Here's the source:

function value(name, value) {
return factory(name, valueFn(value));
}

Using value would let you shorten the awesome provider to:

hippo.value('awesome', 'awesome data');

constant

Here's the source

function constant(name, value) {
providerCache[name] = value;
instanceCache[name] = value;
}

constant differs from value in that it's accessible during config. Here's how you use it:

var joe = angular.module('joe', []);joe.constant('bobTheConstant', 'a value');
joe.value('samTheValue', 'a different value');
joe.config(function(bobTheConstant) {
console.log(bobTheConstant);
});
joe.config(function(samTheValue) {
console.log(samTheValue);
});
// This will fail with "Error: Unknown provider: samTheValue from joe"
var injector = angular.injector(['joe', 'ng']);

Read Module Loading & Dependencies in the Modules doc for more information on usage.

In summary

If you want your function to be called like a normal function, use factory. If you want your function to be instantiated with the new operator, use service. If you don't know the difference, use factory.

This is the (great) documentation for each function in the AngularJS source:

factory A short hand for configuring services if only `$get` method is required. service A short hand for registering service of given class. value A short hand for configuring services if the `$get` method is a constant. constant A constant value, but unlike {@link AUTO.$provide#value value} it can be injected into configuration function (other modules) and it is not interceptable by {@link AUTO.$provide#decorator decorator}.

Improving the security of your SSH private key files — Martin Kleppmann’s blog

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:50:21 -0700

Comments: "Improving the security of your SSH private key files — Martin Kleppmann’s blog"

URL: http://martin.kleppmann.com/2013/05/24/improving-security-of-ssh-private-keys.html

Improving the security of your SSH private key files

Ever wondered how those key files in ~/.ssh actually work? How secure are they actually?

As you probably do too, I use ssh many times every single day — every git fetch and git push, every deploy, every login to a server. And recently I realised that to me, ssh was just some crypto voodoo that I had become accustomed to using, but I didn’t really understand. That’s a shame — I like to know how stuff works. So I went on a little journey of discovery, and here are some of the things I found.

When you start reading about “crypto stuff”, you very quickly get buried in an avalanche of acronyms. I will briefly mention the acronyms as we go along; they don’t help you understand the concepts, but they are useful in case you want to Google for further details.

Quick recap: If you’ve ever used public key authentication, you probably have a file ~/.ssh/id_rsa or ~/.ssh/id_dsa in your home directory. This is your RSA/DSA private key, and ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub or ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub is its public key counterpart. Any machine you want to log in to needs to have your public key in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on that machine. When you try to log in, your SSH client uses a digital signature to prove that you have the private key; the server checks that the signature is valid, and that the public key is authorized for your username; if all is well, you are granted access.

So what is actually inside this private key file?

The unencrypted private key format

Everyone recommends that you protect your private key with a passphrase (otherwise anybody who steals the file from you can log into everything you have access to). If you leave the passphrase blank, the key is not encrypted. Let’s look at this unencrypted format first, and consider passphrase protection later.

A ssh private key file typically looks something like this:

-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
MIIEogIBAAKCAQEArCQG213utzqE5YVjTVF5exGRCkE9OuM7LCp/FOuPdoHrFUXk
y2MQcwf29J3A4i8zxpES9RdSEU6iIEsow98wIi0x1/Lnfx6jG5Y0/iQsG1NRlNCC
aydGvGaC+PwwWiwYRc7PtBgV4KOAVXMZdMB5nFRaekQ1ksdH/360KCGgljPtzTNl
09e97QBwHFIZ3ea5Eih/HireTrRSnvF+ywmwuxX4ubDr0ZeSceuF2S5WLXH2+TV0
 ... etc ... lots of base64 blah blah ...
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

The private key is an ASN.1 data structure, serialized to a byte string using DER, and then Base64-encoded. ASN.1 is roughly comparable to JSON (it supports various data types such as integers, booleans, strings and lists/sequences that can be nested in a tree structure). It’s very widely used for cryptographic purposes, but it has somehow fallen out of fashion with the web generation (I don’t know why, it seems like a pretty decent format).

To look inside, let’s generate a fake RSA key without passphrase using ssh-keygen, and then decode it using asn1parse:

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -N '' -f test_rsa_key
$ openssl asn1parse -in test_rsa_key
 0:d=0 hl=4 l=1189 cons: SEQUENCE
 4:d=1 hl=2 l= 1 prim: INTEGER :00
 7:d=1 hl=4 l= 257 prim: INTEGER :C36EB2429D429C7768AD9D879F98C...
 268:d=1 hl=2 l= 3 prim: INTEGER :010001
 273:d=1 hl=4 l= 257 prim: INTEGER :A27759F60AEA1F4D1D56878901E27...
 534:d=1 hl=3 l= 129 prim: INTEGER :F9D23EF31A387694F03AD0D050265...
 666:d=1 hl=3 l= 129 prim: INTEGER :C84415C26A468934F1037F99B6D14...
 798:d=1 hl=3 l= 129 prim: INTEGER :D0ACED4635B5CA5FB896F88BB9177...
 930:d=1 hl=3 l= 128 prim: INTEGER :511810DF9AFD590E11126397310A6...
 1061:d=1 hl=3 l= 129 prim: INTEGER :E3A296AE14E7CAF32F7E493FDF474...

Alternatively, you can paste the Base64 string into Lapo Luchini’s excellent JavaScript ASN.1 decoder. You can see that ASN.1 structure is quite simple: a sequence of nine integers. Their meaning is defined in RFC2313. The first integer is a version number (0), and the third number is quite small (65537) – the public exponent e. The two important numbers are the 2048-bit integers that appear second and fourth in the sequence: the RSA modulus n, and the private exponent d. These numbers are used directly in the RSA algorithm. The remaining five numbers can be derived from n and d, and are only cached in the key file to speed up certain operations.

DSA keys are similar, a sequence of six integers:

$ ssh-keygen -t dsa -N '' -f test_dsa_key
$ openssl asn1parse -in test_dsa_key
 0:d=0 hl=4 l= 444 cons: SEQUENCE
 4:d=1 hl=2 l= 1 prim: INTEGER :00
 7:d=1 hl=3 l= 129 prim: INTEGER :E497DFBFB5610906D18BCFB4C3CCD...
 139:d=1 hl=2 l= 21 prim: INTEGER :CF2478A96A941FB440C38A86F22CF...
 162:d=1 hl=3 l= 129 prim: INTEGER :83218C0CA49BA8F11BE40EE1A7C72...
 294:d=1 hl=3 l= 128 prim: INTEGER :16953EA4012988E914B466B9C37CB...
 425:d=1 hl=2 l= 21 prim: INTEGER :89A356E922688EDEB1D388258C825...

Passphrase-protected keys

Next, in order to make life harder for an attacker who manages to steal your private key file, you protect it with a passphrase. How does this actually work?

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -N 'super secret passphrase' -f test_rsa_key
$ cat test_rsa_key
-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
Proc-Type: 4,ENCRYPTED
DEK-Info: AES-128-CBC,D54228DB5838E32589695E83A22595C7
3+Mz0A4wqbMuyzrvBIHx1HNc2ZUZU2cPPRagDc3M+rv+XnGJ6PpThbOeMawz4Cbu
lQX/Ahbx+UadJZOFrTx8aEWyZoI0ltBh9O5+ODov+vc25Hia3jtayE51McVWwSXg
wYeg2L6U7iZBk78yg+sIKFVijxiWnpA7W2dj2B9QV0X3ILQPxbU/cRAVTd7AVrKT
 ... etc ...
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

We’ve gained two header lines, and if you try to parse that Base64 text, you’ll find it’s no longer valid ASN.1. That’s because the entire ASN.1 structure we saw above has been encrypted, and the Base64-encoded text is the output of the encryption. The header tells us the encryption algorithm that was used: AES-128 in CBC mode. The 128-bit hex string in the DEK-Info header is the initialization vector (IV) for the cipher. This is pretty standard stuff; all common crypto libraries can handle it.

But how do you get from the passphrase to the AES encryption key? I couldn’t find it documented anywhere, so I had to dig through the OpenSSL source to find it:

Append the first 8 bytes of the IV to the passphrase, without a separator (serves as a salt). Take the MD5 hash of the resulting string (once).

That’s it. To prove it, let’s decrypt the private key manually (using the IV/salt from the DEK-Info header above):

$ tail -n +4 test_rsa_key | grep -v 'END ' | base64 -D | # get just the binary blob
 openssl aes-128-cbc -d -iv D54228DB5838E32589695E83A22595C7 -K $(
 ruby -rdigest/md5 -e 'puts Digest::MD5.hexdigest(["super secret passphrase",0xD5,0x42,0x28,0xDB,0x58,0x38,0xE3,0x25].pack("a*cccccccc"))'
 ) |
 openssl asn1parse -inform DER

…which prints out the sequence of integers from the RSA key in the clear. Of course, if you want to inspect the key, it’s much easier to do this:

$ openssl rsa -text -in test_rsa_key -passin 'pass:super secret passphrase'

but I wanted to demonstrate exactly how the AES key is derived from the password. This is important because the private key protection has two weaknesses:

The digest algorithm is hard-coded to be MD5, which means that without changing the format, it’s not possible to upgrade to another hash function (e.g. SHA-1). This could be a problem if MD5 turns out not to be good enough.
The hash function is only applied once — there is no stretching. This is a problem because MD5 and AES are both fast to compute, and thus a short passphrase is quite easy to break with brute force.

If your private SSH key ever gets into the wrong hands, e.g. because someone steals your laptop or your backup hard drive, the attacker can try a huge number of possible passphrases, even with moderate computing resources. If your passphrase is a dictionary word, it can probably be broken in a matter of seconds.

That was the bad news: the passphrase on your SSH key isn’t as useful as you thought it was. But there is good news: you can upgrade to a more secure private key format, and everything continues to work!

Better key protection with PKCS#8

What we want is to derive a symmetric encryption key from the passphrase, and we want this derivation to be slow to compute, so that an attacker needs to buy more computing time if they want to brute-force the passphrase. If you’ve seen the use bcrypt meme, this should sound very familiar.

For SSH private keys, there are a few standards with clumsy names (acronym alert!) that can help us out:

PKCS #5 (RFC 2898) defines PBKDF2 (Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2), an algorithm for deriving an encryption key from a password by applying a hash function repeatedly. PBES2 (Password-Based Encryption Scheme 2) is also defined here; it simply means using a PBKDF2-generated key with a symmetric cipher.
PKCS #8 (RFC 5208) defines a format for storing encrypted private keys that supports PBKDF2. OpenSSL transparently supports private keys in PKCS#8 format, and OpenSSH uses OpenSSL, so if you’re using OpenSSH that means you can swap your traditional SSH key files for PKCS#8 files and everything continues to work as normal!

I don’t know why ssh-keygen still generates keys in SSH’s traditional format, even though a better format has been available for years. Compatibility with servers is not a concern, because the private key never leaves your machine. Fortunately it’s easy enough to convert to PKCS#8:

$ mv test_rsa_key test_rsa_key.old
$ openssl pkcs8 -topk8 -v2 des3 \
 -in test_rsa_key.old -passin 'pass:super secret passphrase' \
 -out test_rsa_key -passout 'pass:super secret passphrase'

If you try using this new PKCS#8 file with a SSH client, you should find that it works exactly the same as the file generated by ssh-keygen. But what’s inside it?

$ cat test_rsa_key
-----BEGIN ENCRYPTED PRIVATE KEY-----
MIIFDjBABgkqhkiG9w0BBQ0wMzAbBgkqhkiG9w0BBQwwDgQIOu/S2/v547MCAggA
MBQGCCqGSIb3DQMHBAh4q+o4ELaHnwSCBMjA+ho9K816gN1h9MAof4stq0akPoO0
CNvXdtqLudIxBq0dNxX0AxvEW6exWxz45bUdLOjQ5miO6Bko0lFoNUrOeOo/Gq4H
dMyI7Ot1vL9UvZRqLNj51cj/7B/bmfa4msfJXeuFs8jMtDz9J19k6uuCLUGlJscP
 ... etc ...
-----END ENCRYPTED PRIVATE KEY-----

Notice that the header/footer lines have changed (BEGIN ENCRYPTED PRIVATE KEY instead of BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY), and the plaintext Proc-Type and DEK-Info headers have gone. In fact, the whole key file is once again a ASN.1 structure:

$ openssl asn1parse -in test_rsa_key
 0:d=0 hl=4 l=1294 cons: SEQUENCE
 4:d=1 hl=2 l= 64 cons: SEQUENCE
 6:d=2 hl=2 l= 9 prim: OBJECT :PBES2
 17:d=2 hl=2 l= 51 cons: SEQUENCE
 19:d=3 hl=2 l= 27 cons: SEQUENCE
 21:d=4 hl=2 l= 9 prim: OBJECT :PBKDF2
 32:d=4 hl=2 l= 14 cons: SEQUENCE
 34:d=5 hl=2 l= 8 prim: OCTET STRING [HEX DUMP]:3AEFD2DBFBF9E3B3
 44:d=5 hl=2 l= 2 prim: INTEGER :0800
 48:d=3 hl=2 l= 20 cons: SEQUENCE
 50:d=4 hl=2 l= 8 prim: OBJECT :des-ede3-cbc
 60:d=4 hl=2 l= 8 prim: OCTET STRING [HEX DUMP]:78ABEA3810B6879F
 70:d=1 hl=4 l=1224 prim: OCTET STRING [HEX DUMP]:C0FA1A3D2BCD7A80DD61F4C0287F8B2D...

Use Lapo Luchini’s JavaScript ASN.1 decoder to display a nice ASN.1 tree structure:

Sequence (2 elements)
|- Sequence (2 elements)
| |- Object identifier: 1.2.840.113549.1.5.13 // using PBES2 from PKCS#5
| `- Sequence (2 elements)
| |- Sequence (2 elements)
| | |- Object identifier: 1.2.840.113549.1.5.12 // using PBKDF2 -- yay! :)
| | `- Sequence (2 elements)
| | |- Byte string (8 bytes): 3AEFD2DBFBF9E3B3 // salt
| | `- Integer: 2048 // iteration count
| `- Sequence (2 elements)
| Object identifier: 1.2.840.113549.3.7 // encrypted with Triple DES, CBC
| Byte string (8 bytes): 78ABEA3810B6879F // initialization vector
`- Byte string (1224 bytes): C0FA1A3D2BCD7A80DD61F4C0287F8B2DAB46A43E... // encrypted key blob

The format uses OIDs, numeric codes allocated by a registration authority to unambiguously refer to algorithms. The OIDs in this key file tell us that the encryption scheme is pkcs5PBES2, that the key derivation function is PBKDF2, and that the encryption is performed using des-ede3-cbc. The hash function can be explicitly specified if needed; here it’s omitted, which means that it defaults to hMAC-SHA1.

The nice thing about having all those identifiers in the file is that if better algorithms are invented in future, we can upgrade the key file without having to change the container file format.

You can also see that the key derivation function uses an iteration count of 2,048. Compared to just one iteration in the traditional SSH key format, that’s good — it means that it’s much slower to brute-force the passphrase. The number 2,048 is currently hard-coded in OpenSSL; I hope that it will be configurable in future, as you could probably increase it without any noticeable slowdown on a modern computer.

Conclusion: better protection for your SSH private keys

If you already have a strong passphrase on your SSH private key, then converting it from the traditional private key format to PKCS#8 is roughly comparable to adding two extra keystrokes to your passphrase, for free. And if you have a weak passphrase, you can take your private key protection from “easily breakable” to “slightly harder to break”.

It’s so easy, you can do it right now:

$ mv ~/.ssh/id_rsa ~/.ssh/id_rsa.old
$ openssl pkcs8 -topk8 -v2 des3 -in ~/.ssh/id_rsa.old -out ~/.ssh/id_rsa
$ chmod 600 ~/.ssh/id_rsa
# Check that the converted key works; if yes, delete the old one:
$ rm ~/.ssh/id_rsa.old

The openssl pkcs8 command asks for a passphrase three times: once to unlock your existing private key, and twice for the passphrase for the new key. It doesn’t matter whether you use a new passphrase for the converted key or keep it the same as the old key.

Not all software can read the PKCS8 format, but that’s fine — only your SSH client needs to be able to read the private key, after all. From the server’s point of view, storing the private key in a different format changes nothing at all.

Join the discussion about this article on Hacker News.

alagu/pagoda · GitHub

Fri, 24 May 2013 09:14:21 -0700

Comments: "alagu/pagoda · GitHub"

URL: https://github.com/alagu/pagoda#pagoda-----

Pagoda

Zen like blog editor for your Jekyll blog, heavily inspired by Svbtle and Obvtse.

Screenshots

Dashboard

Editor

Fullscreen editing

Mobile Dashboard and Editing

......

Install

Two commands, one for installing, another for running.

 gem install pagoda-jekyll
 pagoda .

Deploying on your own server

I use basic http authentication in real world use. I've deployed through nginx + unicorn. There could be easier deployment than this.

This is still not well organized, but the setup works.

Create sock and pid folders

mkdir -p tmp/pids
mkdir tmp/sock

Your unicorn configuration (unicorn.rb):

pid "./tmp/pids/blog-admin.pid"
listen "unix:./tmp/sock/blog-admin.sock"
ENV['blog'] = '/path/to/your/jekyll/blog'

Script to start Unicorn (start.sh):

cd /path/to/pagoda
rvm use 1.9.3
unicorn -c unicorn.rb -D

Note: This should be run as bash --login start.sh

Create htpasswd file for authentication

htpasswd -c /path/to/httpasswd/file alagu
New password: <enterpasswd>
Re-type new password: <re-enterpasswd>
Adding password for user alagu

Nginx configuration

myblog.com shows the generated blog and myblog.com/admin pops up a http authentication for your admin.

upstream unicorn_server {
 server unix:/path/to/tmp/sock/blog-admin.sock;
}
server {
 server_name myblog.com;
 listen 80;
 location / {
 root /path/to/your/jekyll/blog/_site/;
 }
 location /admin {
 auth_basic "Restricted";
 auth_basic_user_file /path/to/htpasswd/file;
 proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
 proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
 proxy_redirect off;
 proxy_pass http://unicorn_server;
 }
}

FAQ/Bugs

I get ArgumentError - invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII

Set localte to UTF-8

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

Is Having A lot of Money An Efficient Means to Happiness?

Fri, 24 May 2013 09:27:18 -0700

Comments: "Is Having A lot of Money An Efficient Means to Happiness?"

URL: http://life-longlearner.com/want-a-lot-of-money/

Be honest with yourself – why do you want to make a lot of money?

Is it because you want to:

gain acceptance from peers?

have total autonomy over your time?

be more attractive to the opposite sex so you can find your ideal mate?

to travel to really epic places? (so you can post the pictures on instagram!)

create the biggest impact possible?

feel like you’re successful? (You’ve made it baby!)

I challenge anyone reading this to take a moment to be 100% honest with themselves and answer this question – why do you want to make a lot of money?

If people without families to support are brutally honest with themselves, BTW sadly few are, and they juxtapose their life with the answers to this question, I think there’s a lot of inefficiency going on here. And by inefficiency I mean wasted life.

Most of the things that people think require a lot of money can actually be achieved by taking a much more direct path [sans mucho dinero]…and the path I’m talking about is often more enjoyable as well as yields more certain results. Oh an P.S. -

“A lot of people spend decades chasing something that someone convinced them they should want without realizing it won’t make them happy” -Derek Sivers

But first…here’s a story:

Guy decides he wants to be a tech entrepreneur. He tells people “he likes building things” because that seems to be a publicly acceptable rationale for building a tech company…but super secretly he just sees starting a tech company as a means to generating an inordinate amount of wealth quickly in a way that’s more enjoyable than playing excel like a keyboard. He never asks himself why he wants a lot of money, but thinks the amount of optionality it will provide him will eventually propel him to happiness.

—fast forward button—

He spends 3 years working 12 hour days on his company (though tells people he’s working 90 hour weeks…12×6 = 72?). The company never hits it big, but they have a soft landing that results in a 500,000k landfall for him if he stays at the company for an additional 2 years.

For that 500k he’ll have put in a total of 5 years on top of his 70k founder’s salary.

The journey was fun, but it was also hard as hell. He’s definitely a better person for it…but is he closer to his end game? (which is happiness BTW)

He’s locked up for 2 years and since the earnout isn’t enourmous, he doesn’t really have autonomy anytime soon.

He has less friends because he didn’t really have time to see much of anyone while he was building his company unless they were sporting a MongoDB hoodie.

He didn’t spend a ton of time dating during that time period and actually got worse with women due to the lack of interaction – “OMG you’re from Texas too!” (psst…no one cares)

He doesn’t really have nicer things outside a sweet [X Ventures] Northface.

He’s taken 10 vacation days over the past 3 years (he tells people less than a week though just to seem hard)

He’s only volunteered twice over the past 3 years because he “never had enough time” while he was building his company. He has however made an impactful difference on display advertisers’ ability to generate a .2% higher clickthrough. Sick!

His friend in the startup game just sold his company for $38 million. This coupled with his lack of ego diversification (success with friends, women, health etc) make him feel far from successful.

He looks in the mirror and realizes that 3 years later he’s strangely further from happiness than when he started. Crap.

Chasing money is not usually the most efficient or enjoyable route to happiness. So does it make sense to waste our lives doing things we honestly don’t love to make it so we can eventually.…uhh [insert something that will eventually make you happy here]???

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately….and then I read Derek Sivers’ awesome book “Anything You Want” which resoundingly resonated with all my hazy conclusions…

I think a better framework to establish how you spend your time when you’re young if don’t have a family to support (kids or your parents) or enourmous college debt, is to start with the end game of determining what creates enduring happiness in your life for yourself and those you care about.

Specifically, ask yourself:

How would I consistently spend my time if I didn’t have to worry about money ever? Not sure…ask yourself what activities excite and fulfill you? I’m talking about the stuff that raises the hair on your arms and leaves you walking away on your toes with a racing heart.

Then I’d ask:

What areas of my life do I wish were different in the realm of health and relationships? i.e. I want more close friends, a fulfilling relationship with a member of the opposite sex, to be healthier etc

Once you establish these things, then ask yourself how can craft a life which eventually embodies all of these things 85% of the time without a lot of money being involved in the equation. Is there a more direct path to your aspirations that supersedes obtaining massive wealth?

Here is some commentary on what I perceive to be a more direct and guaranteed way to arrive at happiness reviewing the common aspirations people want money for listed above:

How to achieve the things people want a lot of money for…without a lot of money.

Is it because you want to gain acceptance from peers?

Become a really cool, interesting person whose constantly enjoyable to be around because they live a life they love…not because they have bottle service on the reg or a nice car.

It is because you want total autonomy over your time?

Find a career that is already what you’d consistently be doing if you had total autonomy or build a small side business that manifests your passion which you can eventually go full time on

Is it because you want to be more attractive to the opposite sex so you can find your ideal mate?

Work on becoming a really cool, interesting person who embodies attractive qualities. I’m not talking about having a six-pack, I’m talking about becoming someone with strong moral fiber, a zeal for life, and complete comfort in who they are and what they’re all about. Our behavior and personality is malleable if we choose to accept the challenge of shaping it.

Is it because you want really nice things?

Ok you need money for this…but in my experience this is leads to a hollow, fleeting happiness.

Is it because you want to travel?

You can travel pretty cheaply in across the world if you’re resourceful. The barrier to entry to traveling for extended periods of time is far lower than you think, especially if you know how to make $$ online. If you have 10k right now you can pack in more travel in the next year than most people will dream of in a lifetime.

Is it because you want to create the biggest impact possible?

Does this sound familiar? “If I’m super rich, I can create a bigger impact ipso facto I should just focus on starting a huge company right now!” Be real - is this a self-fabricated rationalization to justify action rooted in more selfish desires (it’s okay if it is). The focus of this post is on an efficient path to happiness, not moral high ground. Just know what really motivates you and own it.
Starting a multi-national company is only one way to achieve impact that a small subset of people can accomplish. Note* take a look at what true impact these people achieve and ask yourself if that’s really the impact you’d find fulfilling – “I created sooo many jobs…and toxic waste!”
If impact vs. personal gratification is really your desire, you can probably already start guaranteeing impact today through volunteering, creating some type of group or organization, or helping fuel an existing rocket-ship that’s in direct alignment with your passion. For most people*, starting to focus on creating the impact your passionate about today and building upon that will probably yield a greater amount of fulfilling impact over the course of a lifetime than gunning for uncertain success that you hope you will be able to channel toward a mission you’re passionate about “one day”.

Is it because you think it will make you feel like you’re successful? (You’ve made it baby!)

Money alone is a hollow surrogate for success. This is why you need to redefine how you measure it. Look deeply at what will truly make you feel successful and run towards accomplishing those things and becoming that person. I personally believe “feeling success” is much more about becoming the person you want to be vs. accomplishing specific things. If you become the person you want to be, the accomplishments will follow.

The Purpose of This Post

The goal of this post is to spark introspection around what makes you happy and why you want money. Then to prompt you to ask yourself if you can already achieve those things without an inordinate amount of money…hint – you probably can. Then ask yourself if you’re spending your time in the optimal way.

If you’re interested in this type of stuff and by stuff I mean your precious life, I encourage you to come check out the New York Personal Development Meetup. We’ll be posting a new one soon.

As for me, I’m still trying to figure this out. Though I’ve never had a ton of money, I’ve also never been incrementally more happy with a deeper pocket – so this is merely a hypothetical rant. Still, I figured others could potentially benefit from someone else’s perspective by stating what’s going on in my head after calibrating my thoughts with Derek’s book. Long-live authenticity!

This post was inspired by Derek Sivers book “Anything You Want” – big ups to Jerry Colonna for getting it on my radar. You can find my notes on it here.

Backbone.js for large scale applications – UI Architecture « Orizen Designs – Oren Farhi – Javascript Blog, Backbone Blog, HTML5, CSS3

Fri, 24 May 2013 09:41:18 -0700

Comments: "Backbone.js for large scale applications – UI Architecture « Orizen Designs – Oren Farhi – Javascript Blog, Backbone Blog, HTML5, CSS3"

URL: http://orizens.com/wp/topics/backbone-js-for-large-scale-applications-ui-architecture/

Can Some One Turn Me On? | Tokbox Blog

Fri, 24 May 2013 09:53:18 -0700

Comments: "Can Some One Turn Me On? | Tokbox Blog"

URL: http://www.tokbox.com/blog/can-some-one-turn-me-on/

Here’s our dirty little secret: for the longest time, our little team here at TokBox never used TokBox to talk to each other. There was no need. We all worked together in our Wes Anderson-esque office in SOMA, ate lunch together around our big table, and went for coffee breaks together at Epicenter on Harrison Street.

Then last summer I moved to NYC. I learned quickly that it’s tough to get a team that doesn’t have a remote co-working culture to pick it up right away — not even a team that works on video chat. Desk drive-bys for quick questions became long IM threads. Impromptu meetings with the whiteboard became “oops we forgot to call you” or “dammit, I can’t see the whiteboard” fails. Casual lunch conversation became…nothing.

We got better at this, but the turning point was when Double Robotics loaned us a Double to beta test (Disclosure! TokBox powers the video component for Double). We affectionately named it J9000.

J9000 and I are about the same height.

Some people thought this was funny. I thought it was OK.

At first, J9000 was more of a gimmick than anything else. I had trouble driving her (my fault). She fell down a lot (Double’s fault). The video chat didn’t always work (TokBox’s fault). People would either burst into peals of nervous laughter or get very quiet when she sidled up (no one’s fault but an interesting study in human-machine interaction).

But over time, things improved on all fronts. Iterations on the iPad interface made her easier to drive. The newer, more stable body made it virtually impossible for her to keel over (I crash tested her by running her into the wall repeatedly. Some people enjoyed this a little too much). The reliability and quality of the video chat increased dramatically on WebRTC.

Most of all, people started to take her seriously. The first time I had an inkling that J9000 was going to make a real difference was at an engineering meeting that I was politely invited to, attendance optional. I drove into the conference room anyway and parked in a corner. Some of the engineers nodded at me, a couple grinned, but there was no awkward shifting or chuckling. I turned toward the presentation on the screen and watched. I didn’t understand some of the content and asked a couple of questions. Some one answered. The meeting adjourned and I rolled myself out.

Can you spot the Double?

And that was pretty much what it would have been like in person. No pre-meeting fiddling to make sure I was on, or slowing down in case I wasn’t following along with the presentation, or post-meeting recapping of anything I missed.

Badri in Madras, Ian in SF, me in NYC (in SF via J9000) — taken from Badri’s computer

When Lauren and I put together case studies with partners using OpenTok, we try really hard to get the Holy Grail of success stories — measurable data. With our Double, I’m stumped. What’s the ROI of being there? I’ve worked at TokBox for long enough to know that Important Stuff doesn’t always happen in meetings that get scheduled. It’s those meetings that you don’t need to be at but just want to sit in on. Or those meetings that aren’t planned at all but happen when people are working really late and start saying what they really mean. Sometimes it’s not meetings at all — it’s what people’s faces look like at lunch.

I don’t know what that adds up to, but I do know that as our little team becomes not so little, Ian‘s asked if we could get another Double. For upstairs. J9000 doesn’t do stairs.

Like the rest of the TokBox family, she’s not perfect but I think she’s pretty awesome.

Coffee

Come by Song‘s API Discovery Meetup every other Tuesday to check out J9000 in action.

Don't build a Galapagos product - startup thoughts

Fri, 24 May 2013 10:06:18 -0700

Comments: " Don't build a Galapagos product - startup thoughts "

URL: http://josephwalla.com/dont-build-a-galapagos-product

British naturalist Charles Darwin famously wrote about the Galapagos islands after a five-year voyage around the world. His investigations included the observation that several species of birds had become specialized to the conditions of each island. There’s a parallel here to some startup companies, which become highly specialized to a small market.

A few years ago, I met with a founder about his startup. They had spent several years building their business and had some users that paid a lot of money for it. There were great initial indicators.

He was concerned, however, because there were not enough people to buy his service. The market was literally too small to support a small team.

The issue was that the product wasn't build to easily scale to other niches. It would take a big re-engineering effort to meet the needs of a larger market. After a few years working on it, he wasn't sure if it was worth the effort. He was constrained to the island that he had adapted to. Maybe he had adapted too well.

When you build something people want, it's important to make sure that a) a lot of people want it or b) a few people will spend a lot for it. Facebook can become a public company because every single person on the planet could use it. Same for Google. Palantir does well because a few clients pay them millions.

It’s important not to confuse a niche strategy with a niche company. Facebook initially focused on universities, which is a subset of everyone with an internet connection. The danger is to get stuck in that niche by building for a small audience without planning how you'll scale beyond that niche.

If you become too niche-focused, you can end up with a Galapagos product. It's a product that's highly specialized for a small group of people and difficult to market anywhere else.

Teenagers hate Facebook: A Pew study says that 94 percent of teens use Facebook, and hate it.

Fri, 24 May 2013 10:36:11 -0700

Comments: "Teenagers hate Facebook: A Pew study says that 94 percent of teens use Facebook, and hate it."

URL: http://mobile.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/05/22/teenagers_hate_facebook_a_pew_study_says_that_94_percent_of_teens_use_facebook.html?original_referrer=http%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FXafaQRrtKG

Teenagers don't like Facebook, but they're not leaving. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

A new report released this week from the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that Facebook remains the leading social network among American teenagers. It’s also the most reviled. While some teenagers interviewed by Pew claimed they “enjoyed using it,” the majority complained of “an increasing adult presence, high-pressure or otherwise negative social interactions (‘drama’), or feeling overwhelmed by others who share too much.”

In other words, Facebook—as any adult with a profile knows—feels a lot like high school. “I think Facebook can be fun, but also it's drama central,” one 14-year-old girl said. “On Facebook, people imply things and say things, even just by a ‘like,’ that they wouldn't say in real life." Said another, “It's so competitive to get the most likes [on a Facebook picture]. It's like your social position.” Ninety-four percent of American teenagers maintain a Facebook profile, but that doesn’t mean they have to like it. “Honestly,” one 15-year-old girl told Pew, “I'm on it constantly but I hate it so much.”

If Facebook is high school, other social media platforms can function as opportunities to escape from Facebook's pervasive social structure—the online equivalent to cutting class and hanging out beneath the bleachers. “While ‘drama’ is the result of normal teenage dynamics rather than anything specific to Facebook, teens are sometimes resentful toward Facebook from this negative association,” Pew reports. Online spaces outside of Facebook—all of which attract just a fraction of Facebook’s teen user base—become places “where teens seek out spaces free of adults, and teens who want to avoid the drama of teenage life try to inhabit alternative social spaces.”

On Instagram, which is used by 11 percent of teenagers, “people tend to not come off so mean,” one 13-year-old girl told Pew. “Because all they really want is for people [to] like their photos.” And the medium can influence the message: Instagram is perceived as a supportive environment, but on Facebook, “if they say something mean, it hurts more.” Twitter (used by 26 percent of teens) can help cut through the drama of Facebook because “there's only so much you can say,” one 18-year-old boy said. “On Facebook, they say so many details of things that you don't want to know.” Snapchat (which Pew didn’t collect subscription rates for) can help relieve teenagers of the identity maintenance pressures of Facebook, which logs users’ photos and comments for instant recall. Said one 13-year-old, “it's better because I could pick the most embarrassing photo, and know that they'll see it for 10 seconds, and then I'm done.” And Tumblr (5 percent of teens) helps teenagers detach entirely from Facebook’s imposed social structure: “I like Tumblr because I don’t have to present a specific or false image of myself and I don’t have to interact with people I don’t necessarily want to talk to,” one 15-year-old girl said.

One 16-year-old boy told Pew that he signed up for Twitter because “everyone’s saying Facebook’s dead.” But despite reports of a mass exodus, most people aren't leaving. In fact, teen Facebook usage climbed one percentage point between 2011 and 2012. Facebook is the living dead: the most popular, least relevant social network where teenagers and adults alike gather out of fear of missing out on things that don't even make them happy. Facebook is "a major center of teenage social interactions, both with the positives of friendship and social support and the negatives of drama and social expectations," Pew reports. And without it, what would they make fun of on Tumblr?

Build a lead capture page with Meteor and MongoDB in minutes | MongoLab: MongoDB-as-Service

Fri, 24 May 2013 10:48:11 -0700

Comments: "Build a lead capture page with Meteor and MongoDB in minutes | MongoLab: MongoDB-as-Service"

URL: http://blog.mongolab.com/2013/05/build-your-own-lead-capture-page-with-meteor-and-mongolab-in-minutes/

This is a guest blog post written by Niall O’Higgins and Peter Braden at Frozen Ridge, a full-stack web consultancy offering services around databases, node.js, testing & continuous deployment, mobile web and more. They can be contacted at hello@frozenridge.co.

Meteor is a framework for building real-time client-server applications in JavaScript. It is build from the ground up to work with MongoDB – a JSON database which gives you storage that’s idiomatic for JavaScript.

We were incredibly impressed with how easy it is to write apps with Meteor using MongoLab as our MongoDB provider. With less that 100 lines of Javascript code we were able to build a fully-functioning newsletter signup application, and with MongoLab we don’t have to think about database management or hosting.

To demonstrate Meteor working with MongoLab, we’ll walk you though building a lead capture web application.

Since MongoDB is a document-oriented database, it is very easy to modify the application to store any data you want. In our example, we are building this as an email newsletter signup system. However, you could just as easily make this into a very simple CRM by capturing additional fields like phone number, full name etc.

Overview of our newsletter signup app

Our newsletter signup app will consist of two views:

A user-facing landing page for people to enter their email address
An internal-facing page with tabular display of signups and other metadata such as timestamp, referrer, etc.

You can grab the complete source to the finished newsletter signup app on Github here and view a fully-functional, running example of the application here.

Create the Meteor app

First install Meteor:

> curl https://install.meteor.com | sh

Once Meteor is on your system, you can create an app called “app” with the command:

> meteor create app

Now you will have a directory named app which contains files app.js, app.css and app.html.

Landing page template

First we need a nice HTML landing page. In the Meteor app you just created, your templates are stored in app.html. At the moment, Meteor only supports handlebars for templating.

It’s worth noting that everything must be specified in template tags, as Meteor will render everything else immediately. This enforces thinking of your app as a series of views rather than a series of pages.

Let’s look at an example from our finished app to illustrate. We have a “main” template which looks like this:

Data is bound from client-side code to templates through the Meteor template API.

Hence, the variable showAdmin is actually bound to the return value of the JavaScript functionTemplate.main.showAdmin in the client-side code. In our app.js, the implementation is as follows:

Due to Meteor’s data bindings, when the session variable “showAdmin” is set to true, the “admin” template will be rendered. Otherwise, the “signup” template will be rendered. Meteor doesn’t have to be explicitly told to switch the views – it will update automatically when the value changes.

This brings us to the client-side code.

Client-side code

Since Meteor shares code between the client and the server, both client and server code are contained in app.js. We can add client specific code by testing Meteor.isClient:

Inserting data on form submit

For the user-facing landing page, we merely need to insert data into the MongoDB collection when the form is submitted. We thus bind to the form’s submit event in the “signup” template and check to see if the email appears to be valid, and if so, we insert it into the data model:

One of the nice things about Meteor is that the client and server side data model API’s are the same. If we insert the data here in the client, it is transparently synced with the server and persisted to MongoDB.

This is very powerful. Because we can use any MongoDB client to also connect directly to the database, we can easily use this data from other parts of our system. For example, we can later link-up mailmerge software to make use of our database of emails to send newsletters.

Adding authentication

Now that we’ve got our newsletter signup form working, we will want the ability to see a list of emails in the database. However, because this is sensitive information, we don’t want it to be publicly visible. We only want a select list of authenticated users to be able to see it.

Fortunately, Meteor makes it easy to add authentication to your application. For demonstration purposes, we piggy-back off our Github accounts via OAuth2. We don’t want to create additional passwords just to view newsletter signups. Instead, we’ll consider a hardcoded list of Github usernames to view the admin page:

Meteor makes it very easy to add a “login with Github” UI flow to your application with the accounts and accounts-ui packages. You can add these with the command:

> meteor add accounts-ui accounts-github

Once these are added to your app, you can render a “login with Github” button in your templates by adding the special template variable {{loginButtons}}. For example in our finished app we have:

Email list view

The data display table is simply a handlebars table that we’ll populate with data from the database. Meteor likes to live-update data, which means if you specify your templates in terms of data accessors, when the underlying data changes, the DOM will automatically reflect the changes:

This is a pretty different approach to typical frameworks where you have to manually specify when a view needs to refresh.

We also make it possible for admin users to toggle the display of the email list in the app by inverting the value of the ‘showAdmin’ Meteor session variable:

Server-side code

Meteor makes it super easy to handle the server-side component and marshalling data between MongoDB and the browser. Our newsletter signup simply has to publish the signups collection for the data display view to be notified of its contents and it will update the view in real-time.

The entire server-side component of our Meteor application consists of:

With a unified data model between client and server, Meteor.publish is how you make certain sets of server-side data available to clients. In our case, we wish to make the Github username available in the current user object. We also only wish to publish the emails collection to admin users for security reasons.

Bundling the Meteor app

For deployment, Meteor apps can be translated to Node.JS applications using the meteor bundle command. This will output a tarball archive. To run this application, uncompress it and install its only dependency – fibers.

Fibers can be installed with the command

> npm install fibers

Deploying the Meteor app with MongoLab

Now your Meteor application is ready to run. There are a number of configuration options which can be set at start-time via UNIX environment variables. This is where we specify which MongoDB database to use. MongoLab is a great choice, taking a lot of the hassle out of running and managing your database, with a nice free Sandbox plan that you can create in seconds here.

In order to have you Meteor application persist data to your MongoLab database, set the MONGO_URL environment variable to the MongoDB URI provided by MongoLab for your database:

> export MONGO_URL=mongodb://user:password@dsNNNNNN.mongolab.com:port/db

For Meteor to correctly set up authentication with Github, you need to set the ROOT_URL environment variable:

> export ROOT_URL=http://localhost:8080

To run your Meteor application on port 8080, simply execute main.js:

> PORT=8080 node main.js

You should now be able to connect to it at http://localhost:8080!

log-shuttle

Fri, 24 May 2013 10:49:11 -0700

Comments: "log-shuttle"

josh.io -- The homepage of Joshua Merrill -- mobile design and product reviews

Fri, 24 May 2013 11:27:25 -0700

Comments: "josh.io -- The homepage of Joshua Merrill -- mobile design and product reviews"

URL: http://josh.io/apples-wwdc-invite-suddenly-makes-sense

Earlier today, 9TO5Mac posted a revealing story about Apple’s upcoming iOS 7 software, describing the all-new, flat design championed by lead designer Jony Ive. Interestingly, the story mentioned a unique color scheme for each app in iOS:

Apple has been known to drop hints about its upcoming releases in its press invitations, but there have been relatively few guesses about this year’s WWDC invite. Now it makes sense. Each layered color represents a preloaded app in the new iOS 7.

UPDATE:

Some interesting discussion going on over at Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5764352

The History of Programming Languages | Visual.ly

Fri, 24 May 2013 11:09:11 -0700

Comments: "The History of Programming Languages | Visual.ly"

URL: http://visual.ly/history-programming-languages

Tumblr Proves That Even Billion Dollar Companies Can Screw Up Mass Emails | TechCrunch

Fri, 24 May 2013 11:33:14 -0700

Comments: "Tumblr Proves That Even Billion Dollar Companies Can Screw Up Mass Emails"

URL: http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/24/tumblr-proves-that-even-billion-dollar-companies-can-screw-up-mass-emails/

Tumblr just can’t catch a break. Yeah, yeah, they’re getting a billion dollars from Yahoo — but it’s been a torrent of criticism ever since. Angry users! Porn! Poooooorn!

Know what probably won’t help? Botching the key detail of an email sent to many of your most tech-savvy users.

Tumblr just sent out a big ol’ mass email to all of the users who host a Tumblr blog through their own, independently owned domain. In other words, to the folks who know enough about these bleepy-bloopy electronic space typewriters we use to be able to get a bit fancy with their Tumblr blogs.

It warned users of an impending change they’d need to make to their settings — a new IP address they needed to point their domain at — unless they wanted their blog to suddenly “no longer work“.

The catch: they, uh, kinda forgot the most important part. They’d put in a placeholder for the IP, and… it never got replaced. “Please point your custom domain to [IP Address],” it directed. Wherps.

For many of these users, this was among the first emails they’d received since the Yahoo acqusition. Within about 30 seconds, the tweets lampooning the email started going up.

Moral of the story: If you work at a lil’ company and manage to botch a mass email, don’t worry too much. You’re in good company. Billion dollar company.

ifs and &&s and Plan 9's Source Code | Computationally Endowed

Fri, 24 May 2013 11:42:14 -0700

Comments: "ifs and &&s and Plan 9's Source Code | Computationally Endowed"

URL: http://computationallyendowed.com/blog/2012/12/03/ifs-and-ands-and-plan-9s-source-code.html

ifs and &&s and Plan 9's Source Code

It’s not every day that you come across code that makes you feel funny because of its unusual syntactic structure; code that makes you sit and stare for a moment and wonder, Will it parse? There just aren’t that many Duff’s Devices out there. Yet when I came across Plan 9’s source code and started poking around in cp.c, I did a double-take when I saw this function:

int
samefile(Dir *a, char *an, char *bn)
{
 Dir *b;
 int ret;
 ret = 0;
 b=dirstat(bn);
 if(b != nil)
 if(b->qid.type==a->qid.type)
 if(b->qid.path==a->qid.path)
 if(b->qid.vers==a->qid.vers)
 if(b->dev==a->dev)
 if(b->type==a->type){
 fprint(2, "cp: %s and %s are the same file\n", an, bn);
 ret = 1;
 }
 free(b);
 return ret;
}

What makes this code look odd is the lack of indentation of nested statements, and the omission of brackets. I quickly identified that as the source of my funny feeling, and then its meaning became clear. The author of this function is using if statements to conjoin several expressions. I think this more readable than the alternative of using the && operator to conjoin the expressions in a single if statement. Most programmers won’t be familiar with the pattern, so despite my aesthetic judgement, I’m not going to use it in code that other people have to see and maintain.

Still, its a curiosity worth noting, especially given its source.

Dec 03, 2012 if (expr1) if (expr2) stmt ≡ if (expr1 && expr2) stmt

B go beyond by B — Kickstarter

Fri, 24 May 2013 11:42:14 -0700

Comments: "B go beyond by B — Kickstarter"

URL: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2017062404/b-go-beyond

B is a revolutionary new remote controlled hybrid car-helicopter with a patent pending design. It is capable of driving across difficult terrain using its large rear drive wheels and when the obstacles become too big, simply take-off and fly over them.

B is a toy that provides an extraordinary experience. B is virtually unstoppable, capable of transitioning between ground and air allowing the development of tricks otherwise impossible to achieve.

Due to its large wheel diameter of 220 mm it achieves outstanding performance in difficult terrain. On flat surfaces B reaches high speeds.

Vertical take-off and landing.
Able to transition on the move between driving, flying and back again.
Up to 15 minutes of action on a single charge.
HD (1280 x 720 px) camera on-board with recording capability.
An experience which has not been possible within one package before.
Durable construction that is designed with punishing terrain in mind.

The combination of the design and material selection creates a solid construction that is capable of surviving the worst of landings. When the vehicle crashes from high altitudes, the driving rings detach from the housing and can be easily put back together. The main chassis is made out of Polycarbonate, which is the same material used in protective goggles and bullet proof windows.

The body shell not only serves as a protective and decorative feature, it is also a structural element. The chassis when combined with the body shell not only forms a rigid and light construction that maintains its shape when flying or driving, but is also flexible enough to absorb excessive forces generated during crash landings.

Therefore, you can push B to the limits even when your skills are not at the highest level. This makes B an excellent platform for all users ranging from newcomers to experts.

The wheels naturally guard the blades around them. If an impact occurs on the side of the vehicle, the prop-saver will protect the blades.

Quality electrical components including brushless motors, lithium batteries and sophisticated a flight controller. Will provide you with performance and safety when operating.

HD camera (1280x720 px) on board will capture video footage from your exploration missions, performing acrobatic tricks or shooting yourself from the extreme perspectives. The camera supports Micro SD Cards up to 32 GB.

B currently is protected by patent pending. The patentable aspect of the design is called PDU (Propelling Driving Unit). The patentable mechanism can be briefly described as any part of the propeller going through the vertical plane of the driving ring (such as a wheel or a caterpillar track). B utilizes 4 wheel based PDUs, but this can vary in design such as 3, 4, 6, etc... therefore a family of similar models could be designed in the future.

Exploration Vehicle: the body of B could be covered in solar panels, which enables charging from the sun or the use of freely rotating propellers against the wind to generate extra power when stationary. Even if the charging time would take a few days, B could autonomously conduct exploration missions, land in a safe place, charge and then travel depending on environment either by flying or driving. Providing interesting video footage and still images, B may be able to discover new species which we may not have discovered yet (we have only discovered less than 15% of the world's species).

Full-scale vehicle: a future sport could be born here as B can provide amazing performance in the air as well as on the ground. Sports such as motor-cross, but with more interesting tracks can create a new generation of extreme sporting events which were not possible before.

Full-scale rescue vehicle: that could get to the site of an accident before a helicopter or ambulance. Given that B can drive as well as fly, there is no need for extra infrastructure such as a helicopter landing site.

B is the first fully working prototype, the model was tested for the past 6 months in the most extreme conditions (crash landings, driving in dust and sand ) The design was continuously improved.

There are few changes that will be implemented into the design once the funds are in place.

Implement component upgrades to make B even more agile.
Close the wheel housing to protect against dirt and sand. That is the most significant change to the design. With injection moulded parts the total number of wheel components will go down to 18 from current 56.
Produce packaging to get your B to you safe and sound.
Work on the styling and create variations of body shells.
Improve driving system by implementing better prop-shafts.

These modifications will be applied to the base model before production begins. At the current University I have access to state of the art workshops and mentors, therefore necessary testing and design modification can be quickly and cheaply applied.

Until now I was the only person involved in the project and in the kickstarter campaign. I already established network of professionals from various backgrounds. With your help we will work hard to provide you quality product.

If your support extends beyond the pledged amount I intend to:

Upgrade B to suck itself to walls and ceilings enabling it to drive up buildings
Make the body and electronics water proof to conquer and film land, sea and air.
Develop a smart phone app to control B

The biggest assets at the start up period is the tooling cost of injection moulding and vacuum forming parts.Tooling cost covers creation of necessary cavities that are made of high grade steel.That method allows to produce parts at lowest cost possible in high volume. Most of the plastic components (wheel housing, chassis, steering system parts, driving rings, gears) will be made utilizing this production method.

The body shells are also made from plastic, but require different manufacturing process called vacuum forming. The initial cost covers creation of the steel or alloy moulds that will be used in a later stage.

Electronic components such as; Electronic Speed controllers ESC, Brushless motors, Radio Transmitter, Receiver, Flight Controller, Li-Po Batteries, HD Camera module are available from more than one supplier. A custom electronic PCB will interface all modules to allow the switching between flying and driving modes.That is cost effective method that additionally makes the model customisable.

Packaging will consist of vacuum formed protective layer of plastic and the cardboard box with graphics.

The components will arrive from suppliers to the assembly site where they will be assembled, tested, packaged and shipped out to the backers. Delivery estimations will be from December 2013. Backers will be well informed about work progress at all stages of product development.

B is intended for recreational use but it could have a far more serious and humanitarian application.

If B becomes a commercial success I want to reinvest to use B as a way to help people. You never know, one day I may even be able to live out my ultimate dream and make a life size model that can carry people!

I love both art and technology. I enjoy sketching ideas and making them real.
I have degree in Economics (BA), Product Design and Robotics (BSc)
I am currently undertaking a PhD (Computational Engineering and Design) at Southampton University. My PhD research is in area of novel propulsion system for small aircraft. I hope to surprise you once again with my work in near future.
I was the design engineer on the successful DARPA UAVforge entry in 2012. The HALO team won against 150 international competitors.
I am passionate about my designs and the possibilities.

More of B here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJMQQg_Qmf0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux2JqKYHilY

The prototype has de-risked the design and though a few modifications are to be made, these are to enhance the capability of B.
The risk in the supply chain has been reduced by a smart approach to the design. The moulded parts will be made as single direction draft components; the complexity of the cavity, production time and cost are reduced. Above all, set up time for injection moulding is significantly shorter. Most of the electronic components are available from more than one supplier. Further reduction in risk can be made by ordering the same component from two suppliers.
I have access to Southampton University's facilities (one of the top UK engineering University) and mentors. Consequently, I have links to some of the top engineers in the country; many of them have their own business or provide service.
I can deliver high quality work in a short period (with B it took me about 2-3 months to transfer the idea from a sketch to a fully functional prototype. At the same time, I was involved in another project, the design of a flying drone for US Defence Agency; as member of team Halo we won their prestigious competition "UAV Forge" that involved over 150 teams from 140 countries).

Quantopian - Google Search Terms predict market movements

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:27:25 -0700

Comments: " Quantopian - Google Search Terms predict market movements "

URL: https://www.quantopian.com/posts/google-search-terms-predict-market-movements

Stock prices reflect the trading decisions of many individuals. For the most part, quantitative finance has developed sophisticated methods that try to predict future trading decisions (and the price) based on past trading decisions. However, what about that the information gathering phase that precedes a trading decision? Two recent papers in Nature’s Scientific Reports suggest that Google searches and Wikipedia usage patterns contain signal about this information gathering phase that can be exploited in a trading algorithm. As is (unfortunately) very common, there is no published code in the paper that we can use to easily replicate the results. The algorithms are very simple, though, so I coded both of them on Quantopian. They indeed seem to perform quite favourably and thus roughly replicate the results of the paper, as you can see below. The original simulations have not included modeling transaction costs or slippage which we include here. In that regard, we can show that these strategies still seem to work under more realistic settings.

This algorithm looks at the Google Trends data for the word ‘debt’. According to the paper, that word has the most predictive power.

This data is not as easy to automate within Quantopian, but it’s relatively easy to do so manually. I downloaded the csv file and edited it to get it into the right format. I uploaded the resulting file here.

If you want to use my data on ‘debt’ feel free to do so. If you want to use a the Google Trend for a different word, you can download the CSV, edit it to look like mine, and place it in a public Dropbox or some other webserver.

If there is enough interest we can make this data more accessible (if you want to help me with this, an automated Python script that parses the csv returned by Google Trends to the format I posted would be well appreciated).

http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130425/srep01684/images/srep01684-f3.jpg

For this algorithm, once the weekly average is smaller than the moving average of the delta_t (in this case delta_t == 5 weeks), we buy and hold the S&P500 for one week. If the weekly average is larger than the moving average then we sell and re-buy the S&P500 after one week. The original paper uses the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P500 is highly correlated however.

Suggestions for improvement (please post improvements as replies to this thread):

The authors used many different search queries, listed here . If you upload different queries in the same csv format as I did we can explore those as well.
delta_t == 3 is what the authors of the paper used. It would be interesting to see how the algorithm performs when this is changed.
The underlying algorithm is a very basic moving average cross-over. Certainly a more clever strategy might be able to do a much better job.

Yahoo Submits Bid for Hulu - Peter Kafka - Media - AllThingsD

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:27:25 -0700

Comments: "Yahoo Submits Bid for Hulu - Peter Kafka - Media - AllThingsD"

URL: http://allthingsd.com/20130524/yet-another-hulu-bidder-yahoo-is-in-too/

Add one more name to the Hulu bidding derby: Yahoo, which just announced plans to buy Tumblr for $1.1 billion, has made an offer on the video website as well.

The Web giant submitted a bid for the video site this morning, according to a person familiar with process. Other people looking to buy all or a piece of Hulu include:

Directv,
Time Warner Cable
William Morris Endeavor, along with with PE backer Silverlake
KKR
Guggenheim Digital
The Chernin Group

As AllThingsD reported earlier this month, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and COO Henrique De Castro have met with Hulu’s team recently for a get-to-know-you; Yahoo had previously tried to buy a large stake in French video site DailyMotion, but that bid was stymied by the French government.

Yahoo declined to comment.

The question, as it always is with Hulu, is what its owners — News Corp., Disney and Comcast — are actually willing to sell, and at what price. The three media conglomerates provide the site’s most valuable programming, primarily via shows that have already aired on their broadcast networks. Disney and News Corp. have been at odds about the best way to manage the site for some time; Comcast gave up its management rights as a concession to Federal regulators a few years ago. (News Corp. also owns this website.)

In 2011, Hulu’s owners put the company up for sale and were looking for a bid of at least $2 billion; in exchange, they would offer content licenses that would run for two to three years. But they ended up pulling the site back off the sales block after a few months.

Last month, former News Corp. COO Peter Chernin submitted a starting bid of $500 million, with the understanding that he would be willing to pay more for extended licenses. Bloomberg first reported on the KKR and William Morris Endeavor/Silverlake bids today.

Hulu hasn’t had a formal M&A process, but had asked prospective bidders to make an offer by Wednesday. That deadline apparently isn’t a firm one, so it’s worth wondering if the field will grow more crowded before this over.

jQuery 1.10.0 and 2.0.1 Released | Official jQuery Blog

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:27:25 -0700

Comments: "jQuery 1.10.0 and 2.0.1 Released | Official jQuery Blog"

URL: http://blog.jquery.com/2013/05/24/jquery-1-10-0-and-2-0-1-released/

Posted on May 24, 2013 by dmethvin

It’s a wonderful day for a software release. Such a wonderful day, we’re doing two software releases! Today it’s jQuery 1.10.0 and jQuery 2.0.1 making their debut — five years to the day after jQuery 1.2.6 was released.

A simultaneous release isn’t always easy, but it can be very satisfying. The team is certainly satisfied with this duo of deliveries; those of you who have already upgraded to the 1.9/2.0 level should have an easy time with these versions. If you’re upgrading older code, the advice in the jQuery 1.9 upgrade guide still applies to these two releases as well. Also don’t forget that jQuery. 2.0 doesn’t support IE 6, 7, or 8 since we’re leaving that work to the 1.x branch. If you need some help updating or keeping older pre-1.9 jQuery code going, don’t forget about the jQuery Migrate plugin.

As always, the latest versions are all available on our download page.

What’s new? Our main goal with these two releases is to synchronize the features and behavior of the 1.x and 2.x lines, as we pledged a year ago when jQuery 2.0 was announced. Going forward, we’ll try to keep the two in sync so that 1.11 and 2.1 are feature-equivalent for example. We don’t anticipate you’ll find any of these to be disruptive changes. Here are a few highlights:

Relaxed HTML parsing: You can once again have leading spaces or newlines before tags in $(htmlString). We still strongly advise that you use $.parseHTML() when parsing HTML obtained from external sources, and may be making further changes to HTML parsing in the future.

Increased modularity: In either version, you now can do a custom build that excludes the .wrap(), .wrapAll(), .wrapInner() and .unwrap() methods. If all your code is using the newer .on() event methods introduced in jQuery 1.7, you can also exclude .bind() and .delegate() as well. The builds available on the jQuery, Google, and Microsoft CDNs continue to include all methods to provide maximum compatibility.

No more IE9 focus of death: If a page inside an iframe attempts to focus an element or even tries to read document.activeElement before the page is ready, it causes an error. We now work around this issue.

Cordova bug fix in 2.0.1: The Cordova deviceready event doesn’t properly set an event target, so we work around the problem by setting the target to document.

Many thanks to the people who contributed work to jQuery 1.10.0 or jQuery 2.0.1: Brandon Johnson, Chris Talkington, Dmitry Gusev, James Burke, Jason Bedard, Julian Aubourg, Kyle Robinson Young, Mark Raddatz, Michał Gołębiowski, Nguyen Phuc Lam, Oleg Gaidarenko, Renato Oliveira dos Santos, Richard Gibson, Rick Waldron, Scott González, Timmy Willison, Timo Tijhof, and Tom H Fuertes.

jQuery 1.10.0 Changelog

Ajax

Attributes

Build

Core

Event

Manipulation

Selector

Support

Traversing

jQuery 2.0.1 Changelog

Ajax

Attributes

Data

Effects

Event

Manipulation

Selector

Traversing

The Adventures of DevOps Dave: The DevOps Team

Fri, 24 May 2013 13:10:25 -0700

Comments: "The Adventures of DevOps Dave: The DevOps Team"

URL: https://www.scriptrock.com/blog/devops-dave-devops-team/

Floobits/floobits-vim · GitHub

Fri, 24 May 2013 13:28:24 -0700

Comments: "Floobits/floobits-vim · GitHub"

URL: https://github.com/Floobits/floobits-vim

Real-time collaborative editing. Think Etherpad, but with native editors. This is the plugin for Vim. We're also working on Emacs and have a working plugin for Sublime Text as well as a web-based editor.

Development status: fairly stable.

Unfortunately, Vim's plugin API has few options for running event-driven code. We've figured out two ways, which are described below. Floobits will fall back to the second method if something goes wrong with the first.

1. Vim Server and --remote-expr (Recommended)

To take advantage of this method, you should launch Vim as a server. Some versions of Vim do this automatically, like MacVim. On others, you may need to invoke Vim like so:

vim --servername superawesomename

You will also need to define vim_executable exectable_name in your ~/.floorc file. If you use MacVim, your floorc should contain the line:

vim_executable mvim

This option will sometimes call redraw, which can make the minibuffer blink on ocassion.

2. CursorHold/CursorHoldI with feedkeys.

If your Vim wasn't launched as a server, or something goes wrong, floobits falls back to making an event loop by repeatedly triggering autocommands. This will unfortuantely escape any key sequence, like ctrl-w j, unless you finish it within one tick of the event loop. You can call :FlooPause and :FlooUnpause to pause/unpause the event loop if you have to. Alternatively, you can type really quickly.

Unfortunately, at the end of the day, Vim is purposefully designed to make async actions impossible and these are the only options available.

Installation

username myuser
secret gii9Ka8aZei3ej1eighu2vi8D
vim_executable mvim

Vundle users: Add Bundle 'Floobits/floobits-vim' to your ~/.vimrc.
Pathogen users: cd ~/.vim/bundle and git clone https://github.com/Floobits/floobits-vim Floobits

Usage

:FlooShareDir /path/to/files. Share a directory with others. This will create a new room, populate it with the files in that directory, and open the room's settings in your browser.
:FlooJoinRoom https://floobits.com/r/room_owner/room_name/. Join a Floobits room. Room URLs are the same as what you see in the web editor.
:FlooPartRoom. Leave the room.
:FlooToggleFollowMode. Toggle follow mode. Follow mode will follow the most recent changes to buffers.
:FlooSummon. Make everyone in the room jump to your cursor.
:FlooPause. Pause the event loop so you can type keyboard shortcuts. (Only necessary in feedkeys fall-back mode.)
:FlooUnPause. Resume the event loop so you can collaborate again. (Only necessary in feedkeys fall-back mode.)
:FlooDeleteBuf. Delete the current buffer from the room.

Troubleshooting

Other plugins can interfere with Floobits. For example, YouCompleteMe changes updatetime to 2000 milliseconds. This causes increased latency and decreased reliability when collaborating. add let g:ycm_allow_changing_updatetime = 0 to your ~/.vimrc.

If you experience problems, try disabling other plugins before submitting a bug report.

Too scared to write a line of code — I.M.H.O. — Medium

Fri, 24 May 2013 14:27:10 -0700

Comments: "Too scared to write a line of code — I.M.H.O. — Medium"

URL: https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/eef96ea6f4cb?imm_mid=0a9102&cmp=em-velocity-newsletters-vl-save20-20130523-direct

“Design Patterns”, “Code architecture”, “Scalability”, “OOP”, “Maintainability”, “The code you write now, is the legacy code of the future”, “Be kind to your future self” & “Code smells”.

Just like Bruce Almighty trying to block out the voices in his head, my pangs of guilt and angst come from the paradigms above; like an unwavering, continuous stream of distraction overwhelming my thinking as I’m trying to write one single line of code. One single line of code. That’s it. Nothing special. No one’s going to live or die if it’s not the most optimised, architected and scalable line in the world.

We are under a constant barrage of posts, tutorials and articles about these paradigms. I often feel guilty if these paradigms aren’t at the forefront of my mind whilst developing.

It often kills my output.

I’m trying to adopt a new workflow where I won’t try and solve a problem until it becomes a problem; until I see it in the ‘wild’. Just like Adii Pienaar wrote, why do we worry about scalability on day 1?

This is precisely the approach I’m trying to apply to my developing. However, it’s the same with any new approach, I’m not blindly following it. It doesn’t give you an excuse to write shit code, but forces you to complete a task more quickly and get that feature out there.

Your users care about precisely two things, “Does it work?” and “Is it fast?”. (I’m talking specifically development here, they obviously care about design and all that jazz.)

So, I’m trying to stick to the following mantra:

Build it, release it, analyse it and only then decide if it needs optimising.

If this resonates with you, feel free to drop me a message on Twitter:

@benhowdle

or, join the discussion!

wtcss

Fri, 24 May 2013 14:28:10 -0700

Comments: "wtcss"

Supporting American Choices on Measurement | We the People: Your Voice in Our Government

Fri, 24 May 2013 14:45:10 -0700

Comments: "White House response to the petition requesting a switch to metric"

URL: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/supporting-american-choices-measurement?utm_source=wethepeople&utm_medium=response&utm_campaign=metric

Official National Institute of Standards and Technology Response to Make the Metric system the standard in the United States, instead of the Imperial system.

By Patrick D. Gallagher

Thanks for your petition.

There’s a lot of history here. Right after the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson signed legislation that made it "lawful throughout the United States of America to employ the weights and measures of the metric system in all contracts, dealings or court proceedings." In 1875, the United States was one of the original 17 nations to sign the Treaty of the Metre. Since the 1890s, U.S. customary units (the mile, pound, teaspoon, etc.) have all been defined in terms of their metric equivalents.

So contrary to what many people may think, the U.S. uses the metric system now to define all basic units used in commerce and trade. At the same time, if the metric system and U.S. customary system are languages of measurement, then the United States is truly a bilingual nation.

We measure distance in miles, but fiber optic cable diameter in millimeters. We weigh deli products in pounds, but medicine in milligrams. We buy gasoline by the gallon, but soda comes in liter-size bottles. We parcel property in acres, but remote sensing satellites map the Earth in square meters.

While many countries mandate the use of the metric system by law, the U.S. Congress has repeatedly passed laws that encourage voluntary adoption of the metric system. We use a mixture of metric and customary units depending on the context. We also have a long tradition of voluntary standards and our bilingual system of measurement is part of that tradition.

The Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the agency I direct, was specifically tasked by Congress to help businesses and federal agencies adopt use of metric units.

The NIST Metric Program provides manufacturers and exporters with the information about the metric system they need to sell U.S. goods abroad. And it helps distribute resources for educators who are teaching the metric system in their classrooms. That responsibility is growing as more students look to careers in science, technology, engineering, and math, where metric is universal.

Since the 1970s, all American schools have taught the metric system. Many federal agencies use metric routinely, and the U.S. military does so almost exclusively. Moreover, since Congress updated the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act in 1992, most consumer products in this country are labeled in both metric and U.S. customary units. So-called dual-unit labeling has helped consumers become familiar with using metric units.

NIST is currently working to make it possible for manufacturers to label their products with metric units only (.pdf) if they choose to do so because it will reduce their costs or improve their international competitiveness.

Ultimately, the use of metric in this country is a choice and we would encourage Americans to continue to make the best choice for themselves and for the purpose at hand and to continue to learn how to move seamlessly between both systems.

In our voluntary system, it is the consumers who have the power to make this choice. So if you like, “speak” metric at home by setting your digital scales to kilograms and your thermometers to Celsius. Cook in metric with liters and grams and set your GPS to kilometers.

We were thrilled to see this petition from “We the People” succeed. Feedback like this from consumers shows everyone from policymakers to businesses how important having this choice is to Americans.

So choose to live your life in metric if you want, and thank you for signing on.

Patrick D. Gallagher is Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and Director, National Institute of Standards and Technology

Tell us what you think about this response and We the People.

It’s 2013, And They’re Burning ‘Witches’ | The Global Mail

Fri, 24 May 2013 15:28:25 -0700

Comments: "It’s 2013, And They’re Burning ‘Witches’ | The Global Mail"

URL: http://www.theglobalmail.org/feature/its-2013-and-theyre-burning-witches/558/

Belief in black magic persists in Papua New Guinea, where communities are warping under the pressure of the mining boom’s unfulfilled expectations. Women are blamed, accused of sorcery and branded as witches — with horrific consequences.

“They’re going to cook the sanguma mama!”

The shout went up from a posse of children as they raced past the health clinic in a valley deep in the Papua New Guinean highlands. Inside, Swiss-born nurse and nun Sister Gaudentia Meier — 40-something years and a world away from the ordered alps of her homeland — was getting on with her daily routine, patching the wounds and treating the sicknesses of an otherwise woefully neglected population. It was around lunchtime, she recalls.

Sister Gaudentia knew immediately the spectacle the excited children were rushing to see. They were on their way to a witch-burning. There are many names for dark magic in the 850 tongues of Papua New Guinea, sanguma resonating widely in these mountains. The 74-year-old sister hurriedly rounded up some of her staff, loaded them in a car and followed the crowd, with a strong foreboding of what she would find.

Two days earlier she had tried to rescue Angela (not her real name), an accused witch, when she was first seized by a gang of merciless inquisitors looking for someone to blame for the recent deaths of two young men. They had stripped their quarry naked, blindfolded her, berated her with accusations and slashed her with bush knives (machetes). The “dock” for her trial was a rusty length of corrugated roofing, upon which she was displayed trussed and helpless. Photographs taken by a witness on a mobile phone show that the packed, inert public gallery encircling her included several uniformed police.

In Papua New Guinea, the Pacific nation just a short boat ride from Australia’s far north, 80 per cent of the 7 million-plus population live in rural and remote communities. Many have little access to even basic health and education, surviving on what they eat or earn from their gardens. There are few roads out, but a burgeoning network of digital-phone towers and dirt-cheap handsets now connect them to the world — assuming they can plug into power and scrounge a few kina-worth of credit.

The beautiful landscape of PNG’s highlands belies the brutal reality of life in the region, where more than 90 per cent of women report suffering gender-based violence.

The resources-rich country is in the midst of a mining boom, but the wealth bypasses the vast majority. In their realities, some untouched by outside influence until only a couple of short-lived generations ago, enduring tradition widely resists the notion that natural causes, disease, accident or recklessness might be responsible for a death. Rather, bad magic is the certain culprit.

“When people die, especially men, people start asking ‘Who’s behind it?’, not ‘What’s behind it?’” says Dr Philip Gibbs, a longtime PNG resident, anthropologist, sorcery specialist and Catholic priest.

Last year, a two-year investigation by the country’s Constitutional and Law Reform Commission observed that the view that sorcery or witchcraft must be to blame for sickness or early death is commonly held across PNG.

Many educated, city-dwelling Papua New Guineans also espouse some belief in sorcery. But in the words of the editor of the national daily Post Courier, Alexander Rheeney, city and country-folk alike overwhelmingly “recoil in fear and disgust” at lynch-mobs pursuing payback, and at the kind of extremist cruelty that Sister Gaudentia was about to witness.

Angela’s accusers — young men from another town, high on potent highlands dope and “steam” (home-brewed hooch) — had come back for her. Sister Gaudentia suspected the same mob had tortured a young woman she nursed a few months earlier. She had dragged herself, “how … I don’t know”, says the nun, into the clinic, her genitals burned and fused beyond functional repair by the repeated intrusions of red-hot irons.

The concept of a serial-offending torture squad hunting down witches doesn’t fit the picture anthropologists have assembled of the customs that underwrite sorcery “pay-back” in parts of PNG. Attacks are, as a general rule, the spontaneous act of a grieving family, inspired often by vengeance, and sometimes by fear that evil magic will be exercised again. But experts also concede there are caveats to every rule in PNG. One of the most ethnically diverse landscapes in the world, PNG is endlessly confounding to outsiders, and even as modern explorers strive to pin down aspects of the old world, it changes before them.

Walne was accused of using sorcery to kill a young boy and hunted by her husband's family. Narrowly escaping public execution, she is currently in hiding.

As more reports of sorcery-related atrocities find their way into the PNG media, United Nations’ forums, and human rights investigations, there are concerns that the profile of this social terrorism is shifting. Ritual attacks on accused sorcerers — historically brutal in some parts, notoriously so in the punishing highlands — appear to have broken out of traditional boundaries, and now crop up in communities where they have no history.

Despite a lack of data and the suspicion that only a fraction of incidents are ever reported, the 2012 Law Reform Commission examination of sorcery-related attacks concluded that they have been rising since the 1980s. It estimated about 150 cases of violence and killings are occurring each year in just one volatile province, Simbu — wild, prime coffee country deep in the nation’s rugged spine. Figures vary enormously but volumes of published reports by UN agencies, Amnesty International, Oxfam and anthropologists provide unequivocal evidence that attacks on accused sorcerers and witches — sometimes men, but most commonly women — are frequent, ferocious and often fatal.

Australian National University anthropologist Dr Richard Eves is a PNG specialist who is convening a conference on the issue in Canberra in June. As he explains, the truism of anthropological literature is that the thrall of sorcery and witchcraft over a society declines with modernity, as occurred in Europe and North America. But right now in Melanesia, and particularly in PNG, this seems not to be the case.

Instead reports indicate tradition has in places morphed into something more malignant, sadistic and voyeuristic, stirred up by a potent brew of booze and drugs; the angry despair of lost youth; upheaval of the social order in the wake of rapid development and the super-charged resources enterprise; the arrival of cash currency and the jealousies it invites; rural desperation over broken roads; schools and health systems propelling women out of customary silence and men, struggling to find their place in this shifting landscape bitterly, often brutally, resentful.

“I have been in PNG since 1969,” says Sister Gaudentia. “We always had sanguma, but not to the extreme, not like it is now.”

Gibbs, who has published many articles on the issue, agrees that attacks have become more brutal. “It used to be that they would push someone over a cliff, something like that. They still ended up dead, but it wasn’t the torture, like now. This interrogation, this public stuff, with the kids watching, it becomes a spectacle.”

On the first day of Angela’s agonies, the nun pleaded with the watching police to intervene. Why would they and other community leaders not act? Gibbs explains: “Even if they would want to stop the violence, they have little power today in the face of a village mob — particularly when many young men within the mob are affected by alcohol or drugs”.

These men call their gang “Dirty Dons 585” and admit to rapes and armed robberies in the Port Moresby area. They say two-thirds of their victims are women.

PNG’s police force is underpaid, under-resourced and under-trained. It’s also notoriously corrupt and abusive. Many members subscribe to sorcery belief and some may see the interrogation of women like Angela as legitimate under custom, a view some argue is encouraged by the controversial PNG Sorcery Act of 1971, which acknowledges the existence of sorcery and criminalises both those who practice it and those who attack people accused of sorcery.

On that opening day of her “trial”, Angela was tortured, humiliated and interrogated; an absurd Monty Python-esque parody of prosecution in which she was in one moment accused of causing the deaths, the next being asked to give up the name of the real witch — “kolim nem, kolim nem [call the name]”, the gang demanded. At one point, in wracked desperation, she shouted out the name of another woman, but her accusers showed no interest.

For reasons not clear, they let her go, and the next day Sister Gaudentia heard she had been taken to a holding room at the police station, apparently for her safety. The nun tried to see her but the room was locked and no-one could locate the key. “I thought she was safe.” She later learned that at some point the police had released Angela after her attackers signed pledges to leave her alone.

It was lunchtime the next day when Sister heard the children’s chilling chorus outside the clinic window. “I left the car up the road and then we went into the village. At least we tried to go in,” the Sister recalls. The crowd was so dense she couldn’t push through. “I went back to the car and drove to the police station to report that they were torturing her again. The police commander said, ‘We can’t do anything. They promised me they wouldn’t.’”

Sister drove back, taking a priest with her. This time they fought their way through. “There must have been 600 people watching; men, women and children — a lot of them.”

Angela was naked, staked-out, spread-eagled on a rough frame before them, a blindfold tied over her eyes, a fire burning in a nearby drum. Being unable to see can only have inflated her terror, her sense of powerlessness and the menace around her; breathing the smoke and feeling the heat of the fire where the irons being used to burn her were warmed until they glowed. Would she be cooked, on that fire? She must have known it had happened to others before — and would soon infamously happen again, the pictures finding their way around the world.

The photographs witnesses took of Angela’s torture are shocking, both for the cruelty of the attackers and the torpid body-language of the spectators. Stone-faced men and women and wide-eyed children huddle under umbrellas, sheltering from the drenched highlands air as Angela writhes against the tethers at her wrists and ankles, twisting her body away from the length of hot iron which a young man aims at her genitals. [The photograph of Angela accompanying this article, taken on the first day of Angela’s torture, is confronting, but chosen as less humiliating and dangerous than pictures taken on the second day which would identify key individuals.]

Angela — a woman in her late 40s — is the mother of a small boy, says Philip Gibbs, who later collected her testimony and that of witnesses to her ordeal. Typical of the victims of sorcery-related attacks and killings in the highlands, she had been existing on the margins of her community. She had no husband or male family to protect her. Custom often requires women to leave behind the safe enclave of their own place and family when they marry. If their husband dies or leaves or abuses them, they find themselves stranded on “foreign” soil. As Gibbs has documented in his published work, which delves into the dynamics of accused and accusers, “when a family, believing that death comes through human agency, looks for a scapegoat to accuse, fingers will very often point at a woman without influential brothers or strong sons”.

Sister Gaudentia shouted over Angela’s screams, part begging, part ordering the interrogators she calls “the marijuana boys” to cease their assaults. “They held me back, stopped me getting to her,” she says. When Gibbs later investigated, he learned that the nun had put herself at dire risk — the torturers had tried to burn her, too. It was perhaps only her pale expat skin that saved her.

When there was nothing more she could do to stop Angela’s torment, the Sister gathered her clinic staff around her and shouted out to the crowd. “I called on the people. I asked, ‘Who here is a Catholic? Come, we will pray the rosary.’

“And a lot of people came and prayed with me. We prayed the whole rosary.” Angela’s suffering echoed around them through their invocation, the ritual comforts of one belief system colliding with the atrocities of another.

“A man came from another village and drove us back to the police and we pleaded with them again to come,” Sister recalls. She was still at the station when Angela was cut down. By then there was heavy rain falling. Perhaps the fire had gone out. Perhaps some of the sport had been dampened. Perhaps police did intervene.

It was around 5pm when “the marijuana boys” let Angela go, more than four hours after they began their assaults. When Angela’s elderly mother tried to attend to her they set upon her too, breaking her leg and her pelvis.

Later a police car delivered Angela and her mother to Sister Gaudentia’s clinic. “We treated them that night. People came to our house and wanted us to send these women out, but we didn’t.”

Then the mob grew and began shouting and throwing stones on the clinic roof, and Sister called the police, fearing the clinic would be burned down. “This time a different policeman came, he was really concerned. We had to agree to let the women go to the police cell for their own protection. We took them food.”

With that officer’s help, they smuggled Angela and her mother away by car, taking them a long way away, eventually finding them care in another hospital. When their physical wounds were healed, she was relocated again. She has now joined the ranks of sorcery survivors who are not only damaged but forever displaced by their experiences, refugees within their own country, forced away from the land many of them rely on for survival.

She remains in hiding with her young son.

Dini was accused of using black magic to kill her son. His friends dragged her to a pigsty, where she was tortured using bush knives and red-hot iron bars.

ON FEBRUARY 7, Papua New Guineans woke to the headline “Burnt Alive!” and pictures of a large crowd, including school children, watching as flames engulfed the body of a young woman.

It happened in the busy, mercurial hub of Mount Hagen, smack in the heart of the country. A 20-year-old mother of two, Kepari Leniata, had been stripped, tortured, trussed, doused with petrol, thrown on a rubbish tip, covered with tyres and set alight.

The killing was reportedly carried out by relatives of a six-year-old boy who had just died in the local hospital. They seized a couple of women they suspected of causing the death, among them Leniata, and soon determined that she would be the scapegoat of their grief. Witnesses claimed the crowd blocked police officers and firefighters who tried to intervene.

The news provoked a statement of “deep concern” from the UN human rights office and international media coverage. PNG Prime Minister Peter O’Neill condemned the killing as a “despicable” and “barbaric” act. He said he had instructed police to use all available manpower to bring the killers to justice.

“It is reprehensible that women, the old, and the weak in our society, should be targeted for alleged sorcery or wrongs that they actually have nothing to do with,” said O’Neill. Similar sentiments resounded across PNG’s always animated social media scene, and included a push for a campaign to enlist Leniata’s name and legacy to rally momentum to address endemic, epidemic violence against women.

Leniata’s death and the anguish it provoked reprised a very similar scenario only two years ago, also on a rubbish tip in Mount Hagen, when an unidentified young woman — according to some reports, possibly as young as 16 — was tied at the stake and burned. But this time there were pictures. The horror of the act, and the passivity of the watching crowd, sent shockwaves across the country.

As the Post Courier’s Rheeney editorialised, the failure of witnesses to intervene, “to stop and condemn the murderers’ actions, points to a bigger danger of ordinary Papua New Guineans accepting this callous killing as normal and this methodology of dispensing justice as acceptable.

Dini shows wounds she received after she was accused of using sorcery to kill her own son.

“Respect for the rule of law and the rights of others are pillars of a modern-day democracy, and we would like to think PNG falls under this category,” he wrote. Leniata’s murder raised questions, he noted, about whether “we believe that justice is dispensed in a legally constituted court of law and not a kangaroo court chaired by individuals misled by superstition and trickery”.

The earlier witch-burning at Mount Hagen, in January 2009, had been the catalyst for the Government’s directive to the PNG Constitutional and Law Reform Commission to review sorcery violence and the legal issues around it. Community distress had peaked following a series of similar reports, including that people accused of sorcery had been roasted over slow fire, nailed to crosses, hung in public places and beaten to death, locked inside homes and set alight, weighted with stones and thrown into rivers, and hacked to death with machetes.

Now Rheeney’s editorial echoed the view of many PNG commentators and international human-rights groups when it urged the Government to at least pursue one powerful, urgent measure and fast-track the key recommendation to emerge from the review: repeal the Sorcery Act.

The 1971 Act, in its preamble, acknowledges “widespread belief throughout the country that there is such a thing as sorcery, and sorcerers have extra-ordinary powers that can be used sometimes for good purposes but more often bad ones”. It distinguishes “innocent sorcery”, defined as protective and curative, from “forbidden sorcery” — everything else.

The Act, the review explains, was largely aimed at recognising the reality of citizens’ concerns and to provide a mechanism for them to have an accused sorcerer dealt with by the courts rather than taking the law into their own hands. Extensive consultations out in the PNG provinces over the past two years revealed that many communities still wanted the law to recognise that sorcery was real and active, and to provide systems to prosecute and punish sorcerers and their accomplices.

As the late Sir Buri Kidu, PNG’s first national Chief Justice, observed in a judgment in 1980, “in many communities in Papua New Guinea belief in sorcery and its powers is very strong and we cannot brush it aside. My own people believe it and greater fear is caused by such belief.” (His Australian-born widow — Dame Carol Kidu, for many years the only woman in the PNG Parliament until her recent retirement — has recounted the story that every night of her young married life in the family’s village home, Buri’s mother would pull the shutters to keep out what in her language they called the “vada”, only to have Buri get up in the small hours and open them again.)

Rasta was accused of sorcery by people in her village after the death of a young man in 2003. She was set upon by a crowd at his funeral, beaten and strangled until she escaped. She lost her hand in the attack.

The review concluded that the Sorcery Act had plainly not prevented bad magic, and nor had it punished practitioners. What it had done was provide legal refuge for murderers and vigilantes to argue sorcery as a mitigating factor, allowing self-styled witch-killers — and comparatively few have even been prosecuted — to get off with light sentences.

After examining various options for amending the Act, the Commission has recommended its repeal, but with provision for village courts to continue to deal with sorcery disputes. It has drafted a Bill to that effect that commission secretary, Dr Eric Kwa, hopes will go before the PNG Parliament in the next few months.

“I’m really appalled by the [latest] reports,” Kwa told The Global Mail. “It is really sickening that Papua New Guineans are not able to stand up for the weak and vulnerable to oppose this evil in our society. We hope that with the repeal of the Sorcery Act [if the recommendation is supported], the normal criminal liabilities will apply in terms of serious crimes such as the one we read of today.”

Many commentators argue it will take much more than a change in legislation to achieve any meaningful inroads against the violence. Anthropologist Philip Gibbs, whose archive of work was heavily drawn on by the Law Reform Commission review, is one of them.

At the national level he urges the Government to also set up a PNG human-rights council — a measure promised in the past — and to consider establishing special police task forces to pursue killers. Human rights and UN agencies have repeatedly slammed PNG police for failing to intervene to stop attacks or to arrest suspects. But they also recognise the besieged force requires monumental investment in training, resources and equipment if it is to be effective.

As one 2011 UN report summarised, the PNG constabulary lacks everything from adequate pay, uniforms and accommodation to leadership. As a consequence, corruption is rife and morale poor. Police have almost no intelligence-gathering capacity. The likelihood of criminals being caught has been estimated at less than 3 per cent.

Even assuming the political will emerges to invest in stronger policing and community protection, it will be years before the terrorism fades in communities like Simbu, an epicentre for violence. Aid and development agencies have also been reluctant to touch the issue, says Richard Eves. “For many years religion was a taboo for donor agencies. Because it is so cultural and so complex, it’s not easy to come up with projects to address it.”

In the meantime concerned citizens, local human-rights activists and churches — deeply engaged with their congregations, and often the only functional institutions in sight — are devising grassroots interventions, some of them with substantial effect, according to Gibbs.

Rasta had one hand severed and the other mutilated by the frenzied crowd.

One such program is championed by Bishop Anton Bal, the Catholic bishop of Kundiawa, the capital of Simbu. Born and raised in the province’s remote south, he’s enlisting his networks and his understanding of the culture to find ways to infiltrate and change thinking. Working with him is Polish-born surgeon and priest Father Jan Jaworski, whose work in the community as a healer of body and soul over more than 25 years resonates widely, earning authority.

Through its close connections to families the diocese is able to measure the reverberating damage from sorcery violence. The casualties number many more than the dead. The bishop’s office has estimated that as much as 10 to 15 per cent of the population have been displaced by fallout from accusations and attacks, many of them banished, their homes and sustaining gardens destroyed.

Bishop Bal argues that the catch-22 with sorcery is that the more it’s talked about, the greater its power and allure. So his programs include training up networks of local parish volunteers as a kind of resistance movement. Operatives deflect and douse conversations about blame as soon as a death in the community occurs. They go to the funeral and when someone brings up the question of sanguma they shift the topic — talk about the weather, shut it down. Or raise the alarm.

Kundiawa is in name a provincial capital, but in reality a pit stop on the nation’s only east-west thoroughfare, the Highlands Highway, which is heavily trafficked and rapidly eroding under the wheels of fortified convoys running to and from mine sites. It’s also the trading post and heart of a far-flung society of hamlets sprinkled through some of PNG’s steepest, tallest, harshest and lushest ranges.

At Kundiawa Hospital, which is distinguished by the proud efforts of its staff and community as something of a showpiece within PNG’s weary provincial hospital network, Jaworski sees patients with sorcery-related trauma being admitted at least a couple of times a week. “[They’re] usually women, but not only. It’s the tip of the iceberg. It is still very strong [the belief]. It is part of the system of justice.” After so many years at sanguma ‘Ground Zero’, there’s not much that shocks him.

Part of his practice is to use the influence he has gained to interrupt the cycle of accusation and prosecution, to go to the grieving family and explain medical cause of death whenever he has the opportunity, and pray that his story finds its way onto the bush telegraph and around the district.

Gimu Jack, from Yamox Village in the Eastern Highlands. She lost her finger when her husband attacked her with an ax.

Not long ago the brother of a local politician died. When Jaworski got word that some 300 family members had gathered and were milling about looking for someone to blame, he went and confronted the mob. “I told them [his death] was his own responsibility. He was a fat man. He didn’t look after himself. Sometimes you have to put the responsibility on the person who has gone, or it hurts someone else.”

On another occasion he confronted the family of a young woman who had died of HIV/AIDS. When she was still a girl the family had given her to an older man in the community. She became his third wife, and then she became infected and sickened, leaving behind a young baby. “I told them ‘It is your fault she died — not sanguma. You sold her as a third wife.’ I wanted to burden them with the responsibility, otherwise they will just accuse someone else.

“The uncle stood up and said, ‘Thank you for providing the explanation — we will not go for sanguma’. It was a hard thing for the family to hear’ — and, the priest admits, a nerve-wracking thing to say to a riled Simbu family — “but otherwise some innocent will be tortured and killed.”

Anecdotal testimony, discreetly shared, points to a substantial and growing underground movement of self-proclaimed human-rights defenders working within communities to identify and hide people who are at risk of attack, or who have survived. In some of the most fraught parts of the highlands aid agency Oxfam engages in a range of programs that support some of those evolving networks.

But people operate in this sphere do so at some personal risk. In a locally infamous case in 2005 highlighted by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Anna Benny, a woman in Goroka who had a reputation for fearless work protecting and supporting rape victims, tried to defend her sister-in-law from allegations of sorcery. Both women were killed. Police took no action.

Emate Sekue was accused of using sorcery to kill her husband. She survived the brutal attack that followed, but has to pay for her own treatment, as the government offers neither support programs nor shelters.

In his interviews surveying survivors of sorcery-violence, including Angela — the woman likely rescued by the intervention of Sister Gaudentia and some heavy rain — Philip Gibbs identifies a consistent, fortifying thread. Those victims who lived to tell the tale owe their lives either to individual police members or to a strong church leader who intervened for them. “In effect it means that, if sufficiently motivated to act, the power of the police and civil authorities, or the power of the church, can be enough to defend a person who is otherwise powerless.”

Supporting people with the will and courage to exercise their power at the grassroots to tackle violence in any of its manifestations — domestic, social, sorcery-related — is the focus of Bal and Jaworski. Parables of successful interventions become their currency of hope. But they admit they are often despairing.

Jaworski blames much of the escalating violence in all spheres on deeper social malaise, in particular the angry frustrations of young men, and for which there are no easy remedies. “Today 70 to 90 per cent of young people are unemployed. They went to school, but there is no future for them. They don’t fit back in their gardens and their villages.” They are without prospects in the new world, and without skills for the old one.

On bleaker mornings, navigating broken roads strewn with rocks from a night of fighting, or stitching up the casualties in the operating theatre, Jaworski worries that the rage of young men will one day propel the community back to the tumbuna (the time of the ancestors).

“I hope I am a wrong prophet.”

Penguin 2.0/4 - Were You Jarred and/or Jolted? | SEOmoz

Fri, 24 May 2013 15:53:25 -0700

Comments: "Penguin 2.0/4 - Were You Jarred and/or Jolted? | SEOmoz"

URL: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguin-2-were-you-jarred-and-or-jolted

The long-awaited Penguin 2.0 (also called "Penguin 4") rolled out on Wednesday, May 22nd. Rumor has been brewing for a while that the next Penguin update would be big, and include significant algorithm changes, and Matt Cutts has suggested more than once that major changes are in the works. We wanted to give the dust a day to settle, but this post will review data from our MozCast Google weather stations to see if Penguin 2.0 really lives up to the hype.

Short-Term MozCast Data

First things first - the recorded temperature (algorithm "flux") for May 22nd was 80.7°F. For reference, MozCast is tuned to an average temperature of about 70°, but the reality is that that average has slipped into the high 60s over the past few months. Here's a 7-day history, along with a couple of significant events (including Penguin 1.0):

By our numbers, Penguin 2.0 was about on par with the 20th Panda update. Google claimed that Penguin 2.0 impacted about 2.3% of US/English queries, while they clocked Panda #20 at about 2.4% of queries (see my post on how to interpret "X% of queries"). Penguin 1.0 was measured at 3.1% of queries, the highest query impact Google has publicly reported. These three updates seem to line up pretty well between temperature and reported impact, but the reality is that we've seen big differences for other updates, so take that with a grain of salt.

Overall, the picture of Penguin 2.0 in our data confirms an update, but it doesn't seem to be as big as many people expected. Please note that we had a data collection issue on May 20th, so the temperatures for May 20-21 are unreliable. It's possible that Penguin 2.0 rolled out over two days, but we can't confirm that observation.

Temperatures by Category

In addition to the core MozCast data, we have a beta system running 10K keywords distributed across 20 industry categories (based on Google AdWords categories). The average temperature for any given category can vary quite a bit, so I looked at the difference between Penguin 2.0 and the previous 7 days for each category. Here they are, in order by most impacted (1-day/7-day temps in parentheses):

33.0% (80°/60°) – Retailers & General Merchandise
31.2% (81°/62°) – Real Estate
30.8% (90°/69°) – Dining & Nightlife
29.1% (89°/69°) – Internet & Telecom
26.0% (82°/65°) – Law & Government
24.4% (79°/64°) – Finance
23.5% (81°/65°) – Occasions & Gifts
20.8% (88°/73°) – Beauty & Personal Care
17.3% (70°/60°) – Travel & Tourism
15.7% (87°/75°) – Vehicles
15.5% (84°/73°) – Arts & Entertainment
15.4% (72°/62°) – Health
15.0% (83°/72°) – Home & Garden
14.2% (78°/69°) – Family & Community
13.4% (79°/70°) – Apparel
13.1% (78°/69°) – Hobbies & Leisure
12.0% (74°/66°) – Jobs & Education
11.5% (88°/79°) – Sports & Fitness
7.8% (75°/70°) – Food & Groceries
-3.7% (70°/73°) – Computers & Consumer Electronics

Retailers and Real Estate came in at the top, with just over 30% higher than average temperatures. Consumer Electronics rounded out the bottom, with slightly lower than average flux, oddly. Of course, split 20 ways, this represents a relatively small number of data points for each category. It's useful for reference, but I wouldn't read too much into these breakdowns.

"Big 20" Sub-domains

Across the beta 10K data-set, we track the top sub-domains by overall share of SERP real-estate. Essentially, we count how many page-1 positions each sub-domain holds and divide it across the entire data set. These were the Big 20 sub-domains for the day after Penguin 2.0 hit, along with their SERP share and 1-day change:

5.66% (+0.29%) – en.wikipedia.org 2.35% (-0.75%) – www.amazon.com 2.22% (+3.11%) – www.youtube.com 1.49% (+6.05%) – www.facebook.com 1.35% (-8.11%) – www.yelp.com 0.84% (+4.77%) – twitter.com 0.58% (+0.37%) – www.webmd.com 0.58% (+1.87%) – pinterest.com 0.52% (+1.24%) – www.walmart.com 0.49% (+4.54%) – www.tripadvisor.com 0.47% (+0.45%) – www.foodnetwork.com 0.47% (-0.44%) – allrecipes.com 0.44% (+1.98%) – www.ebay.com 0.41% (-0.76%) – www.mayoclinic.com 0.38% (+1.72%) – www.target.com 0.37% (-4.37%) – www.yellowpages.com 0.37% (+0.58%) – popular.ebay.com 0.36% (+2.12%) – www.huffingtonpost.com 0.33% (+3.27%) – www.overstock.com 0.32% (-0.32%) – www.indeed.com

By percentage change, Yelp was the big day-over-day loser, at -8.11%, and Twitter picked up the highest percentage, at +4.77%. In absolute positions, YouTube picked up the most page-1 rankings, and Yelp was still the biggest loser. Overall, the Big 20 occupied 20.00% of the page-1 real estate the day after Penguin 2.0, up from 19.88% the previous day, picking up a modest number of ranking positions.

3rd-Party Analyses

I'd just like to call out a few analyses that were posted yesterday based on unique data, since there are bound to be a lot of speculative posts in the next few weeks. SearchMetrics posted its Penguin 2.0 biggest losers list, with porn and gaming sites taking the heaviest losses (Search Engine Land provided additional analysis). GetStat.com showed a jump in Top 100 rankings for big brands, but relatively small changes for most sites, and most of those changes on pages 3+ of SERPs.

Most reports yesterday showed relatively modest day-over-day changes (solid evidence of an algorithm update, but not a particularly big update). One exception was Dejan SEO's Australian flux tracker, Algoroo, which showed massive day-over-day flux. We believe that at least two other major algorithm updates have rolled out in May in the US, so it's possible that multiple updates were combined and hit other countries simultaneously. This is purely speculative, but no other reports seem to suggest changes on the scale of the Australian data.

The May 9th Update

I'd like to also call out an unconfirmed algorithm update in early May. There was a period of heavy flux for a few days at the beginning of the month, which was backed up by webmaster chatter and other 3rd-party reports. Temperatures on May 9th reached 83.3°F. The MozCast 7-day graph appears below:

The temperature spike on May 5th is unconfirmed, and may have been a test across a small number of data centers (unfortunately, our 10K data for that day was running a separate test and so we can't compare the two data sets). Reports of updates popped up across this time period, but our best guess is May 9th. Interestingly, traffic to MozCast tends to reveal when people suspect an update and are looking for confirmation, and the traffic pattern shows a similar trend:

Traffic data also suggest that May 5th was probably an anomaly. Private data from multiple SEOs shows sites gradually losing traffic over a couple of days in this period. Unfortunately, we have no clear explanation at this time, and I do not believe that this was directly related to Penguin 2.0. Google did roll out a domain crowding update at some point in the past couple of weeks, which may be connected to the early May data, but we don't have solid evidence either way. At this point, though, I strongly believe that the data indicates a significant algorithm update around May 9th.

Were You Hit by Penguin 2.0?

It's important to keep in mind that all of this is aggregate data. Algorithm updates are like unemployment rates. If the unemployment rate is 10%, the reality for any individual is still binary – you either have a job or you don't. You can weather 20% unemployment if you have a job (although you may worry more), and 5% unemployment is little comfort if you're jobless. I don't want to suggest any lack of empathy for those hit by Penguin 2.0 by suggesting that the update was relatively small, but overall the impact seems to be less jarring and jolting than many people feared. If you were hit, please share your story in the comments.

PrivCo Responds to Criticisms of Its Tumblr Report By Slinging Twitter Insults at Fred Wilson, Everyone Else [UPDATED] | Betabeat

Fri, 24 May 2013 16:27:08 -0700

Comments: " PrivCo Responds to Criticisms of Its Tumblr Report By Slinging Twitter Insults at Fred Wilson, Everyone Else [UPDATED] | Betabeat "

URL: http://betabeat.com/2013/05/privco-responds-to-criticisms-of-its-tumblr-report-by-slinging-twitter-insults-at-fred-wilson-everyone-else/

"this is malicious defamation of yr competitor." Oh, boy.

Rumble!

Yesterday, Crain’s reported on some eye-popping Tumblr numbers from PrivCo, suggesting VCs reaped huge rewards, including a 5,000 percent return of $253 million for Union Square Ventures, $154 million for Spark Capital, and $77 million for Spark partner Bijan Sabet.

Almost immediately, Bijan Sabet and Fred Wilson fired back, calling the report “garbage” and refuting the specifics (without coughing up what they actually made). Dan Primack (who’s tangled with PrivCo before) calls the report “a load of Yahoo.” He says USV and Spark actually put $13 million each into the company ($350,000 of it seed funding) and got around $192 million each. Not too shabby, but not the jackpot PrivCo alleges, either.

Well, this morning PrivCo responded to the critics, on Twitter, with all the rancor appropriate to the medium.

For starters, the firm responded to Mr. Sabet’s sniping with a barrage of criticism about Spark’s portfolio:

@bijan @AntDeRosa Still bitter we outed your prize investment Foursquare as a total failure Bijan? Never heard of a VC pout he had less ROI.— (@PrivCo) May 22, 2013 Summary of @Bijan Sabet and @SparkCapital's #VC investment skills: "Total garbage." Mostly "dead-pool" portfolio: privco.com/investors/vent…— (@PrivCo) May 22, 2013

And Fred Wilson:

@DavidAmerland @FredWilson not to be trusted. He'll say & make up anything to coverup a massive investment failure. Foursquare Loans anyone?— (@PrivCo) May 22, 2013

Then there’s this exchange with Business Insider writer Alyson Shontell:

How is PrivCo allowed to exist and how has it not been sued to death by all of these terrible, false reports?— Alyson Shontell (@ajs) May 22, 2013 @ajs @gmanolatos @Ajs's sloppy writing skills: badapostrophes.com/tag/alyson-sho… We have 100 more. How is she employed w 8th grade English education?— (@PrivCo) May 22, 2013

And the grand finale:

@ajs BI is our competitor, yr not independent: this is malicious defamation of yr competitor. Strict standard.Screenshots.taken for lawsuit.— (@PrivCo) May 22, 2013

Did PrivCo hire the social media geniuses from Amy’s Baking Company to run their Twitter account?

Update: Looks like PrivCo has deleted the Tweets. But of course Betabeat screencaps compulsively, so they’re below. Also, Dan Primack says PrivCo has blocked him:

Seems I've been blocked from following @privco— (@danprimack) May 22, 2013

Meanwhile, PrivCo just tweeted that “a @Tumblr VC just called us to bury the hatchet & gave us the precise figures. Despite blanket denials our calcs were very close,” and, “Thanks guys for calling & for realizing we’re giving PROPS for yr success not criticizing Tumblr. No horse in race.”

Sure, okay.

Update 2: PrivCo says they’ve talked to a Tumblr VC and updated their numbers accordingly. Now that must’ve been an awkward convo.

Follow Kelly Faircloth on Twitter or via RSS. kfaircloth@observer.com

Pagos de Google Play en Argentina suspendidos

Fri, 24 May 2013 16:27:32 -0700

Comments: "Pagos de Google Play en Argentina suspendidos"

URL: http://www.celularis.com/google/pagos-de-google-play-en-argentina/

De forma repentina, sin dar una explicación, y sin haber tenido datos anteriores que pudieran presagiar esto. Los pagos de Google Play en Argentina han sido vetados, sin más, a partir del próximo 27 de junio. Así lo ha comunicado Google a los desarrolladores argentinos dados de alta en Google Play, quienes a partir de esa fecha (y preparándose desde ya mismo para ello) sólo podrán ofrecer aplicaciones gratuitas en Play Store. Lo mismo ocurre con las aplicaciones gratuitas que integran pagos in-app. Si los propios desarrolladores no lo hacen antes, Google eliminará de Play Store sus aplicaciones de pago.

Una de las víctimas de esta medida es Mariano Zorrilla, uno más de los desarrolladores que nos contactaron y tienen que dar de baja sus aplicaciones de pago a lo largo de los próximos 30 días. Él es uno -como tantos otros- de los que han recibido el correo de Google informándoles sin dar explicación alguna. Correo, de hecho, enviado un viernes a las 20.00 h de Argentina, movimiento nada casual, sino escogido para restarle visibilidad. En el mismo correo, aparte del fin de los pagos de Google Play en Argentina, se informa de que el último envío de pagos acumulados hasta la fecha del 'apagón' tendrá lugar el 22 de julio. Curiosamente, Google AdSense para celulares sí continúa funcionando, lo cual deja más todavía en el aire esta extraña actuación, aunque se podría señalar como sospechoso el tipo de cambio a dólares.

En resumen, Google acaba de cargarse a todos los desarrolladores argentinos de aplicaciones móviles. La profesión que mejor representa el nuevo paradigma digital, muerta de forma repentina en todo un país, Argentina. Éste ha sido el correo con el Google ha notificado la noticia a la comunidad de desarrolladores en Argentina:

We are writing to you today to inform you that Google Play will no longer be able to accept payments on behalf of developers registered in Argentina starting June 27, 2013. Developers based in Argentina may continue to offer free applications in the Google Play store. All applications requiring the billing permission as well as in-app products will be unpublished from the Google Play store on June 27, 2013. A payout for your earnings through this time will be made on July 22, 2013. If your accumulated earnings at that time do not meet the payout threshold, you may close your linked AdSense account to receive a final payment.If you are legally able to do business in one of the other supported countries and otherwise satisfy the Google Wallet Terms of Service for that country, you may register for a Google Wallet Merchant Center account in that country and transfer your applications to it. To review the Google Wallet Merchant Center account Terms of Service, go to this link:https://checkout.google.com/termsOfService?type=SellerYou would need new Google Play Developer account to tie to your new Merchant account. To learn more about creating new Google Play Developer account and transferring your applications, please visit our Help Center at https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/139626If you have any questions, please contact Google Checkout Merchant team at https://support.google.com/payments/?hl=en#topic=3091397&ts=3126357&contact=1We hope to restore payouts to developers based in Argentina in the future. While no specific plans are in place at the moment, we are looking forward to restoring this service, and we will make sure to notify you once payouts to developers based in Argentina are restored.Regards, The Google Play Team

FAQ - Bitmessage Wiki

Fri, 24 May 2013 17:27:32 -0700

Comments: "FAQ - Bitmessage Wiki"

URL: https://bitmessage.org/wiki/FAQ

Installation and configuration

How do I install Bitmessage

A great write up for setting up and using Bitmessage on Windows can be found Here.

Bitmessage should run on any OS though it is only lightly tested on OSX. The start-on-boot and minimize-to-tray features are only implemented for Windows thus far. Several examples of how to install Bitmessage on *nix and OSX platforms can be found in the forums.

How do I become a node to help the network

If your connection indicator is green then you are already accepting incoming connections and helping the Bitmessage network.

If your connection indicator is yellow, check your firewall settings and port forwarding to make sure incoming connections are allowed to your machine on the correct port (Default TCP 8444).

You can click on the indicator for more information about each color.

Why is my Connection Indicator Yellow

Bitmessage will work normally with a yellow indicator. If your indicator is yellow, you can have up to 8 connections and you are not acting as a relay node for the network. To make your indicator green and act as a relaying node for the Bitmessage network, please forward TCP port 8444 (default).

How do I setup Bitessage to work with Tor

Tor

If you are using the Tor Browser Bundle skip to the next section. In order for Bitmessage to use Tor as a proxy follow these steps.

Navigate to Settings > Network Settings and select SOCKS5 from the Type: drop down under the Proxy server / Tor section.
Next to 'Server hostname:' enter 'localhost' and next to 'Port:' enter '9050'.
Select ok.
Restart Bitmessage.

Tor Browser Bundle

Navigate to Settings > Network Settings and select SOCKS5 from the Type: drop down under the Proxy server / Tor section.
Next to 'Server hostname:' enter 'localhost' and next to 'Port:' enter '9150'.
Select ok.
Restart Bitmessage.

Usage

How can I run Bitmessage in daemon mode

Refer to the Daemon Mode Page Here.

How many connections should I have

As long as you have at least one connection, you can communicate with the network. If your connection indicator is yellow, you can have a maximum of 8 connections.

Can I send a message to someone that is offline

Yes. However, if you go offline then they must come back online within 2 days of the message being sent. Nodes delete data, and do not accept data, older than 2 days.

How do I format my messages

Here is the list of supported HTML tags. [hhttps://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/richtext-html-subset.html https://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/richtext-html-subset.html]

How does Bitmessage work

Startup

When you first start Bitmessage, your client connects itself to the network and starts downloading a list of known nodes. Each new node that you connect to shares its list of known nodes. In addition to the known nodes, you will also start receiving person-to-person messages, broadcasts, and public keys. If any of these messages are bound for you, they will be shown in your inbox. All of this data is exchanged between all of your connections to make sure that everyone has a copy.

Sending a Message

When you send a message, your client must first compute a Proof of Work (POW). This POW helps mitigate spam on the network. Nodes and other clients will not process your message if it does not show sufficient POW. After the POW is complete, your message is shared to all of your connections which in turn share it with all of their connections.

Where can I find more documentation about Bitmessage

How does Bitmessage compare to other messaging methods

Here is a table comparing Bitmessage to other common messaging services.

Comparison of Messaging Services Trustless P2P Open Source Requires Proof of Work Hide Sender? Hide Receiver? Mobile Version Application or Web Based Text Only Messages Attachments Acknowledge delivery Bitmessage Standard Email Email + GPG OTR TorChat Skype Scayl I2P Bote CryptoCat IRC SMS RetroShare Freenet + Frost Freenet + FMS Freenet + Freemail 0.2 Freenet + FLIP

Yes	Yes	MIT	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Application	No	Small only	Yes
	No	Depends	No	No	No	Yes	Both	No	Yes	No
Yes	No	Depends	No	No	No	Yes	Application	Yes	No	No
Yes	No	GPL V2.1	No	No	No	Yes	Application	Yes	No
Yes	Yes	GPL	No	Yes	Yes	No	Application	Yes	Yes
No	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	Application	No	Yes
No	Yes	No	No	No	No	Alpha	Application	No	Very Large
Yes	Yes	GPL V3	No	Yes	No	No	Application	Yes	Yes	Yes
No	No	GPL	No	No	No	Yes	Both	Yes	No
	No	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	Both	Yes	No
	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	Application	No	Yes	No
No	Yes		No	No	No				Yes
Yes	Yes	GPL	No	Yes	Yes	No	Application	Yes	Yes
No	Yes		No	No	Yes	No	Application	Yes	No
No	Yes	GPL	No	No	No	No	Application	No	Yes	No
Yes	Yes		No	No	No	No	Application	Yes	No

Troubleshooting

My Connection Indicator is Red

Check your connection settings. Can you access the internet? Have you allowed Bitmessage through your firewall? Have you tried a different port number under Settings > Network Settings? Sometimes Bitmessage takes time to connect to the network. Please allow at least 30 minutes for it to connect before posting to the forum.

If none of that works, please visit the forum here.

I have not received a reply from the Echo Server

Your connection indicator should be yellow or green.
Make sure that your POW is complete and the message has been sent. You should see an acknowledgement under "Status" on the "Sent" tab.
On average it should take 8 minutes from the time you click the send button to the time you receive a response.
Be sure to allow extra time in the event that the server is under heavy traffic (Example: An article about Bitmessage was posted on a popular website).
You can always send a message to another echo server. Here are two echo addresses:
- BM-orkCbppXWSqPpAxnz6jnfTZ2djb5pJKDb
- BM-omXeTjutKWmYgQJjmoZjAG3u3NmaLEdZK

If you still do not receive a response, visit the forum to see if there is a current technical issue or to submit a new request for assistance.

Other

Here is a list of average times for different parts of Bitmessage. https://bitmessage.org/wiki/PyBitmessage_Help

Please visit the forum for all other issues.

UCLA Surgeons Live Vine Brain Surgery

Fri, 24 May 2013 19:27:06 -0700

Comments: "UCLA Surgeons Live Vine Brain Surgery"

URL: http://mashable.com/2013/05/24/instagram-vine-live-brain-surgery/

List of probability distributions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fri, 24 May 2013 20:27:26 -0700

Comments: "List of probability distributions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia"

URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_probability_distributions

It Is Not Flat Design by andyrutledge

Fri, 24 May 2013 20:52:26 -0700

Comments: "It Is Not Flat Design by andyrutledge"

URL: http://slid.es/andyrutledge/its-not-flat-design

Hexo - Node.js blog framework

Fri, 24 May 2013 22:27:32 -0700

Comments: "Hexo – A fast, simple and powerful blog framework"

URL: http://zespia.tw/hexo/

Features

Incredibly fast - generate static files in a glance
Markdown support
Deploy to GitHub Pages & Heroku with only one command
Ported Octopress plugins
High extendibility & customizability
Compatible with Windows, Mac & Linux

Install

npm install -g hexo

Update

npm update -g

Getting Started

Setup a project:

hexo init project cd project

Create a new article:

hexo new "New Post"

Generate static files:

hexo generate

Start the server:

hexo server

Next Step

Interested? Check the documentation for more info!

Your oldest, most outdated device - Yahoo! News

Fri, 24 May 2013 22:27:32 -0700

Comments: "Your oldest, most outdated device"

URL: http://news.yahoo.com/your-oldest--most-outdated-device-010249339.html

by Rob Walker (@notrobwalker) | @YahooTech

Recently, belatedly, I upgraded to a smartphone, ditching my old and not-so-smart phone. I felt a little sad letting go of that hearty gizmo — and that got me thinking: What other “old” devices are we hanging on to, despite our better judgment, and supposedly superior alternatives?

I decided to ask some of the smartest technology writers around about their "most outdated device." I was intentionally vague about what I meant by "device," and "outdated," since I figured vagueness would lead to more interesting answers.

It sure did! Read the great replies below. Then, if you are so inspired, tell us: What is your most outdated device? Why haven't you upgraded? Are you proud of, embarrassed by or ambivalent about this outdated thing?

Here’s what people who make a living from cutting-edge tech-thought say. You can view photos of their gadgets at the bottom of the article:

Kevin Kelly (@Kevin2Kelly), author of What Technology Wants and founder of Cool Tools: “I have a Panasonic land-line telephone from the ’80s right here on my desk I still use every day,” Kelly says, adding: “I don't have a handset for the phone, I use a headset and a glass globe to hold down the off button.”

Well, that’s awesome. And I had to start with Kelly, because this whole subject reminded me of an observation in his What Technology Wants — that posturing aside, we all have different categories in which we are early/late adopters. (Plus he has interesting things to say about tools never dying.) So I wasn’t surprised that Kelly has a full-on theory of upgrading that guides his own practice: “I used to hold off till I couldn't hold off any longer,” he explains.“Now I try to go with the flow. Not at the head as bleeding-edge first adopter, but fast-following.”

Alexis Madrigal (@AlexisMadrigal), senior editor for The Atlantic and author of Powering The Dream: “I think it's the sound system in our car 2003 Volkswagen Golf TDI,” Madrigal says. “We have one of those magical devices that lets you play an iPod through the tape deck (how do those work?) — but it makes a horrible screeching noise when it gets hot.” That leaves the CD player and terrestrial radio: “We seem to rotate between the same three CDs we burned or borrowed some time ago, and the local NPR affiliate.”

Madrigal hastens to add that what he really wants is a stereo with “an aux-in so that I can play Rdio throughout the vehicle.” The problem? “I am scared of car audio guys,” he says. “I knew a lot of them in high school. They are a kind of gadgethead that just kind of freaks me out. I loathe the idea of going in there and having to explain why we have this old-ass tape deck, and then — because I don't know any better — getting ripped off on a new stereo.

“Or,” he continues, “maybe there is a simpler explanation: You can't order a car stereo off Amazon, which is where I get the rest of my stuff.”

Joanne McNeil (@jomc), technology writer for Internet of Dreams: “I got a Nikon Coolpix E4300 in 2003 after starting my first real job, with my first real paycheck,” McNeil says. “It was probably the most I'd ever spent on anything in my life ($400).” Splurging was a motivator to take the object seriously, although “several thousand self-portraits for my MySpace page later, I only barely understood the settings.”

Before long, of course, there was a camera built into her phone with twice the megapixels. “The Nikon is now held together with duct tape and feels enormous in my hands. … I haven't taken it outside the house in years. But the picture quality is still fairly good. It is my inside-the-house camera, totake pictures for ebay sales or things I don't want mixed in with my iPhoto images. And I'm not the only one: Seems Coolpix 4300 is still going strong on Flickr.”

Douglas Rushkoff (@Rushkoff), author of Present Shock (see our interview about that here): “Probably my little notepad and pen,” Rushkoff says. “I have a little leather fold with a small notepad inside it, and a strap for a pen. It fits in a sport coat pocket, or in my computer bag. When I get an idea, or someone says to get a book or see some website, I write it down in there. I write down little ideas for talks or book chapters.

“Sometimes I'll have a meeting with someone and who is jotting notes in a smart phone or tablet,” he continues, “and I'm just using the pad. I think it's superior. I am not embarrassed. I think it looks kind of cool at this point. Retro. More professional, even. As if a real writer would still be using things that let him actually write. Plus it feels more private. It's not being disseminated or stored up in the cloud. It's quite literally close to my chest.”

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: “The ‘device’ that feels most outdated to me is my blog,” says Carr. “When I started the thing, in 2005, the personal blog was the iconic expression of ‘new media’; having one put you in the oxymoronic category of journalist-hipster. But the action has moved away from blogs, to the more conversational social networks like Twitter and their bite-sized bulletins. To be a blogger today makes you feel a little like Norma Desmond after silent movies were replaced by talkies: ‘I'm still big; it's the internet that got small!’”

Jenna Wortham (@jennydeluxe), technology reporter for New York Times. “I found my first Nintendo under a softly glowing Christmas tree,” says Wortham. She shared that present with her sisters, and grew up “deftly grabbing coins, squashing goombas, saving princesses.” Her second was an ex-boyfriend’s $10 Craigslist find, useful for “reliving our youth.”

“My third, and current, Nintendo, I picked up at a friend's moving sale,” she continues, “when she was trying to get rid of some junk before moving into a new apartment. Junk! I rode home on the subway with the machine on my lap, grinning back at anyone who smiled appreciatively at my prize. That was two years ago.” Today the device sits on a bookshelf, in the company of “cascading leafy green plants and books, unused.”

But that doesn’t mean it’s useless. “I'll never get rid of it,” Wortham insists. “I love looking at it and thinking about its past lives in my life. Nintendo wasn't the first console I played or the last, by far, but it was the most universal. Everyone I knew had a Nintendo — it represented this precious, universal kidlanguage that everyone spoke, still speaks, and that meant something to me that nothing else has since. I can't give up hope that some day, all the pieces might somehow magically make their way back into my life and I'll press play again someday.”

“I have a Panasonic land-line telephone from the ’80s right here on my desk I still use every day,” Kelly says, adding: “I don't have a handset for the phone, I use a headset and a glass globe to hold... more

Hacker News

Free information, as great as it sounds, will enslave us all – Quartz

Everything I Know About Project Management, I Learned from Game of Thrones

See also:

dotJS - The largest JavaScript conference in Europe

What makes dotJS special

Jony Ive’s new look for iOS 7: black, white, and flat all over | 9to5Mac

Layer Trees vs. Flat Drawing – Graphics Performance Across iOS Device Generations — Florian Kugler

Measuring Technique

Performance of first time rendering

iPhone

Rubber Duck [UX] Debugging — Design/UX — Medium

Step 1: Define your flows with User Stories

Step 2: Wireframe your flows

Step 3: Prepare your fake screens

Step 4: Fake it ‘til you make it

Step 5: Take the red pill (optional)

Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more

sidorares/vnc-over-gif · GitHub

Snowfallgate and Startups :: madhatted.com

Death to the Cult of Stealth Startups! | I am Vidar @blacktar Andersen

Can I help you? Why retail customers always say no | Start Up Blog

Like this:

The Future of Human Data Interaction | tomasz by Tomasz Tunguz

Stop Validating Email Addresses With Your Complex Regex - davidcel.is

Just send them an email already

Inside Pixar’s Leadership

Feature Column from the AMS

Mathematical tourism

The temple

The tablet

The background

References

Acknowledgements

Images

Why Yahoo! Buying Tumblr Is Not Great For NYC's Tech Scene - Forbes

Iffy Can: Angular service or factory?

provider

factory

service

value

constant

In summary

Improving the security of your SSH private key files — Martin Kleppmann’s blog

Improving the security of your SSH private key files

The unencrypted private key format

Passphrase-protected keys

Better key protection with PKCS#8

Conclusion: better protection for your SSH private keys

alagu/pagoda · GitHub

Pagoda

Screenshots

Install

Deploying on your own server

Create sock and pid folders

Your unicorn configuration (unicorn.rb):

Script to start Unicorn (start.sh):

Create htpasswd file for authentication

Nginx configuration

FAQ/Bugs

Is Having A lot of Money An Efficient Means to Happiness?

Be honest with yourself – why do you want to make a lot of money?

But first…here’s a story:

—fast forward button—

He looks in the mirror and realizes that 3 years later he’s strangely further from happiness than when he started. Crap.

How to achieve the things people want a lot of money for…without a lot of money.

The Purpose of This Post

Backbone.js for large scale applications – UI Architecture « Orizen Designs – Oren Farhi – Javascript Blog, Backbone Blog, HTML5, CSS3

Can Some One Turn Me On? | Tokbox Blog

Don't build a Galapagos product - startup thoughts

Teenagers hate Facebook: A Pew study says that 94 percent of teens use Facebook, and hate it.

Build a lead capture page with Meteor and MongoDB in minutes | MongoLab: MongoDB-as-Service

Overview of our newsletter signup app

Create the Meteor app

Landing page template

Client-side code

Inserting data on form submit

Adding authentication

Email list view

Server-side code