cyberpunkture

I spent the last 3 days using the Google Chrome beta for Mac OS X and I just switched back to Firefox, but I figured I’d catalog what I liked and didn’t like about it and what actually made me switch back. The most compelling aspects of Chrome are the technical back-end features where it isolates tabs from each other and provides a mechanism to track resource usage to a given tab.

In windows, I understand that this all functions pretty well, but in OS X things feel a lot less polished. The tab task manager doesn’t exist and a bunch of the other features that any real web browser needs to have are still unimplemented.

• Bookmarks Manager: This is the most glaring omission. It means you can’t delete, rename or move bookmarks around though you can add them. Oddly, when I imported my keyword search bookmarks from Firefox they work in Chrome which is nice, but I doubt I can add a new one.
• Cookie Manger: This is admittedly only a minor annoyance as I think you can nuke all the cookies, but it’s still nice to occasionally go look and see what’s there.
• Certificate Manager: This means you can’t permanently confirm “security exceptions” and have to go through a big ugly red screen for each such exception you want to put in each time you run Chrome.

Then there are a series things which I’ve come to love in Firefox and expect of current web browsers that are missing.

• Open All in Tabs: I use this to open all my web comics at once and scan through them. Also for some blogs and other things. It’s just something small that I rely on daily.
• Vertical Three-finger Scrolling: This is the smallest annoyance, but in Firefox three-finger swipes up and down take you to the top and bottom of the page which is a useful shortcut on my MacBook.

All in all, I’m not overly disappointed with Chrome, but not wildly excited either. In the end if it manged to match Firefox more or less in feature set, then I’d probably pick it for the better and more secure back-end tab isolation.

Last, but not least, there’s the whole lack of extensions which they just fixed for windows and it seems like they’re going to finish that for the Mac soon. I won’t judge it too harshly for that, but rediscovering how many ads the web has on it was less than pleasant.

colin Uncategorized

Apparently ICANN has largely solved a problem with “domain tasting” using relatively straightforward economic means, which is cool and I wish we could see more systemic problems on the Internet approached this way. For those who don’t know (and I was one of these people), here’s what domain tasting is:

The move was intended to stop “domain tasting,” where someone registers a raft of domain names and then monitors those domains for up to five days to see which domains attract a lot of visitors. If the domain looks like a loser, a person could get a refund within five days, called the Add Grace Period.

The grace period is intended to allow people to be refunded, for example, if they made a spelling mistake while registering a domain. But many specialize in abusing the grace period by setting up thousands of Web sites crammed with advertising links on newly registered domains. If the advertising revenue exceeded the registration fees, the domain would be kept.

Pretty evil. Anyway, they’ve started to only refund part of the cost for the domains which are released after the grace period. At first they just kept $0.20 per domain, which didn’t have much effect, but more recently they’ve increased it to $6.75 per domain. The results are apparently impressive:

In a report, ICANN said Add Grace Period deletions for registries that have implemented the policy have dropped 99.7 percent between June 2008 to April 2009.

Cool beans! Now we just need to get other smart people thinking about where we can leverage simple economic ideas like this rather than spinning our wheels fighting technical battles.

colin Uncategorized

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8193951.stm

Augmented reality has always been one of those things that I knew was going to happen and when it did, it would be big. Recently, I’ve instead been really wondering if it’s going to be big or if it’s just going to sneak up on us and suddenly be the way we all do things. The first video in that BBC link is actually pretty good at explaining the idea while keeping it grounded enough to understand what the first apps are likely to look like.

As it is, more than half my friends (as well as me) walk around with location-aware phones that give them location-specific information when they ask for it. For the most part it’s limited to finding things which are near you like gas stations, bus stops, food, driving directions, etc., but there’s no reason for that.

The only thing which seems to be missing is figuring out which direction the phone is pointed (being solved by digital compasses in many phones) and possibly image recognition. Microsoft’s project Natal makes me think that people are going to at least have the balls to try and tackles some of the real-time image recognition stuff.

I’m not quite sure where it’s going, but it’s going fast and I’m excited even if it seems like my Palm Pre may not be the first platform for this stuff. I still can’t believe they re-made the same “all apps are just going to be web pages” mistake that Apple did when they first introduced the iPhone.

colin Uncategorized

http://www.shapeways.com/themes/stainless_steel_3dprinting_gallery

Friends of mine in UW CSE and at the Intel Research lab in Seattle have been 3D printing stuff out of plastic for a while now and I’m always amazed, but it’s mostly prototypes even if they are useful. If you can actually get people to make you stainless steel printed things, that’s just fucking awesome.

The prices aren’t dirt cheap but you seem to be able to get reasonably complex things for less than $100 and the price is likely to come down with time. Maybe we really are going to live in an era where we can flaunt at least some things in the face of economies of scale.

It vaguely reminds me of some comments I overheard about how we’re in the pre-industrial age of software design where each piece of code is really artisanal. That implies that the next step is to move toward industrial production of code, but maybe that’s not the case. Maybe what cheap, on-demand 3D printing is saying that some things can really always stay artisanal without too much cost.

colin Uncategorized

In the last 5 years communication has gone from being massively dominated by e-mail, phones, IM and snail mail to nearly doubling the number of ways to communicate.

You can quibble with me about when this stuff actually started changing, but certain the last 5 years has seen a massive liftoff in at least 4 new areas of communication.

• Social Networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
• Microblogging (Twitter, Facebook status updates, etc.)
• Virtual Worlds (World of Warcraft, Second Life, etc.)
• Video Chat (Skype, Google Talk, etc.)

Each of these seems—at least to me—to be exploring a new set of trade-offs in how we communicate with each other. It’s interesting to stare at them, squint and turn your head sideways to try and see how things are shaping up and what’s going to drop out of it all.

This is especially interesting given the recent demo of Google Wave which claims to be the future of all communication, and while it seems to combine, blur and facilitate a lot of the previously mentioned pieces. It’s not clear to me that this is the correct re-consolidation of communication, though it’s certainly a good first step.

colin Uncategorized computers, facebook, google wave, twitter, web

I was shooting the breeze with Geoff Challen in Zürich before we headed down to HotOS and we chatted about an idea my advisor and I had chatted about a few years earlier. The idea is that there should be some statute of limitations on how long an old systems paper can cause new papers to be rejected because they aren’t novel. The justification is that after some reasonable period of time—say 10, 15 or 20 years—the assumptions of the paper are probably out of date enough that attacking the problem again even in a similar way is probably interesting to the community.

After the conference, Geoff blogged about the idea in better detail and with a few extra ideas that are worth thinking about.

I just wanted to add a few comments. First, the idea (or at least my interpretation of it) isn’t to ignore older work, in fact, not citing the old paper should probably carry the same penalty that it does today. Instead, the idea is that you should be allowed to publish similar work (as long as you cite it) some period later and not have it hurt you the way it does in the current system.

To some extent I think PCs already do this and will look favorably on a paper which makes use of old techniques as long as it provides some new value as well. So, I’m more calling for an increased shift in that direction than anything else.

colin Uncategorized academia

My advisor chaired SOSP this year and asked a bunch of the PC members to give talks about their work during the morning after the meeting. He did a similar thing 3 years ago for SIGCOMM as well and it’s a lot of fun and just stunningly cool to have this number of good talks in a single half-day.

Andrew Myers presented Civitas which is an approach to doing verifiable voting with a bunch of fancy crypto. The two really cool things they did were (1) actually implementing the protocols and pieces of what they propose and (2) providing coercion resistance. It’s cool stuff, but is way complicated. There provide more assurances than any “real world” voting systems presumably because they don’t assume control of the voting location anymore.

Nickolai Zeldovich presented work on how to make security plans explicit to avoid the frustratingly simple security bugs with SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. It seemed relatively straightforward and simple if a significant implementation effort, but that’s exactly what we need. The idea is basically to formalize the idea of having export filters for sensitive data and pass those filters along with the data even when you push it out to the file system or the database. They do it with something like 15,000 lines of changes to the PHP interpreter and see about 30% performance overhead for real workloads. Simple idea seemingly done right and actually built.

Peter Chen talked about how he teaches computer systems to freshman with a little programming experience. The course is crazy ambitious and involves designing their own simple microprocessor, building device drivers in assembly, and finally building some kind of music synthesizer (whatever the students want that to mean) all in a 13 week semester class. The demos he gave were really cool, and he claimed that it wound up being a reasonable amount of work for students. About 12 hours/week in 4 person groups. Cool if he’s telling the truth.

John Osterhout talked about why we should build high-performance data stores in the data center/cloud computing world by keeping all data in DRAM. The idea here is that you can cram 64 GB of DRAM “cheaply” in a 1u server and at the same time disks aren’t getting any faster. We should (and already are in many cases) be storing anything for which performance matters entirely in DRAM. There was a lot of good discussion about various things like the energy costs involved, whether the workloads really demand that everything be in RAM, how much of this is already being done and so on. He also has the quote of the day with: “I am the energy anti-Christ.” Single DRAM DIMMs cost something like 10 watts. Its much more energy expensive to store data in ram, but is apparently actually cheaper in terms of operations per second.

Dave Anderson talked about FAWN which is replacing traditional servers with 10-20 little wimpy boards with embedded CPUs and some big piece of flash memory attached to them. Claims (somewhat convincingly) that they get a 10x improvement in energy costs for big data operations. The key point he makes is that there’s a huge imbalance between CPU, storage throughput, memory throughput, etc. and it’s easier to bring these into balance (and thus become more power efficient) with wimpier nodes. Very cool stuff made surprisingly real, though still mostly proof of concept. People commented at the end that this is really a solution to pin bandwidth and bus latency and happens to help with power.

Mothy Roscoe presented and interesting vision of the future of cloud computing where we talk about what a personal “computer” will look like as we go forward. He defines computer (somewhat aptly) in as the combination our data and what we do with it, so this likely spans you phone, laptop, home server as well as some VMs in the cloud and possibly services. What they actually built is Rhizoma which basically runs as a “sidecar” to what you really want and acquires resources for you based on a constrained-logic program policy that you express about the kinds of resources you want and the value you place on them. Think of it as the brain of the cloud which intelligently moves your stuff around as the situation changes. Cool idea, some preliminary data about it moving around PlanetLab as load and network conditions changed gives an idea that this might do something like reasonable.

Steve Hand talked about his experience with the start up around Xen and basically told the narrative of how they got there and what they did. The story was interesting, but I’m a lot less able to condense it down, so instead I’ve mostly just transcribed some of his notes along with his 8 lessons in the slides.

1. Play to your strengths. Hire where you know what’s going on and where you have contacts, connections, etc. Don’t let VCs, CEOs, CTOs throw you into growing too quickly in ways that aren’t going to obviously help.
2. Ambition can be deadly. Took 1 year to release a buggy, over ambitious, so-so product.
3. Vet your co-founders. Abrasive, megalomaniacal, bullying people will cause you problems. Not-so-smart people hire people who are less smart than they are and so on. Eventually VCs helped to push out the CEO and CTO.
4. Smart business folk exist. There are very good business people out there, but not very many of them.
5. OSS is (mostly) good. Viral marketing/coverage saves money, gets you mind-share. The fact that other people can (and do) take your code, this means you need to (and are driven) to maintain your edge. Problem with weak offerings diluting brand needs to be dealt with.
6. People are everything. Hire the best people you can, they are your entire capital especially when you’re open source, not patents. Both engineers and management.
7. Ship products early and often. One in ten start ups actually ever ship a product of any kind. First release was 21 months after founding of company and they sold only 5 copies. Aimed for 3 month release cycle: 4 weeks dev, 4 weeks test, 4 weeks package/ship. Helped a lot!
8. Arranging a marriage. Needed to find somebody who didn’t offend anyone they had to work with. Citrix wound up being a good choice.

colin Uncategorized academia, sosp

I was poking around the other day and I found this coverage of CHI 2009. A bunch of my friends are HCI researchers and were there, so I’ll need to hit them up for more details, but the back-of-device interfaces are looking way cooler than they did the last time I saw them.

With the preponderance of touchscreen things happening these days, I can say that it’s really hard to hit any button that’s smaller than about a dime, which is a pretty big space given how small the devices are.

It seems to really present a better technique to get control over using touchscreen devices. I can’t tell you how often I can’t quite get the right spot on my Palm Centro and it takes me two or 3 silly stabs with my finger to press the link or button that I want.

I’m curious what the constraints on the device be though when both the front and back surface matter for input and output. It’s essentially removing a degree of freedom from the design of the device by requiring that the back be touch sensitive and presumably flat in the area behind the actual screen.

colin Uncategorized chi, computers, interface

Following on the self-healing rubber from a few months ago, new work (by different people) has made self healing polyurethane coatings.

The secret of the material lies in using molecules made from chitosan, which is derived from the shells of crabs and other crustaceans.

In the event of a scratch, ultraviolet light drives a chemical reaction that patches the damage.

The work by University of Southern Mississippi researchers is reported in the journal Science.

They designed molecules joining ring-shaped molecules called oxetane with chitosan.

The custom-made molecules were added to a standard mix of polyurethane, a popular varnishing material that is also used in products ranging from soft furnishings to swimsuits.

Scratches or damage to the polyurethane coat split the oxetane rings, revealing loose ends that are highly likely to chemically react.

In the ultraviolet light provided by the sun, the chitosan molecules split in two, joining to the oxetane’s reactive ends.

Cool stuff, though I wonder how many bathing suits you need to replace before you make up the cost difference between your self-healing one and a normal one.

colin Uncategorized cyberpunk, future, tech

My mom is a career journalist and I’ve always been interested in journalism, even though the closest I’ve been has been as a graphic artist and IT person for a couple of newspapers. So, when a friend of mine posted a link to this article on the current fate of journalism in this country and and the world with a focus on the newspaper and it’s seemingly imminent demise, I listened up. The article makes a series of very good points and while presenting a lot of cold, hard facts about what’s going on also has an unabashed point about the current world.

From my personal knowledge of what’s going on with the newspapers my mom is associated with, I can say that everything this story talks about is pretty much dead on and it applies to newspapers everywhere from the local weeklies that my mom runs, to the biggest papers in the country as this article points out.

The 3 main points are really this:

1. Today, newspapers provide the overwhelming majority of original reporting and are the single most important tool for informing the public about anything.
2. Newspapers are being hit by a perfect storm of rising newsprint costs, falling advertising revenue, decreasing interest in reading anything, and the current economy leading to sharp cuts to exactly the things newspapers do well.
3. There probably needs to be a replacement for newspaper journalism, but it’s really not clear what that is and how to make it happen.

I’ll just touch on those 3 things, because really you should go read the article.

First, for all the noise being made about “new media” the vast majority of what goes on there is usually a commentary on journalism done in newspapers. Even TV and radio journalism is more often than not picking up on stories first covered in newspapers. This is because traditionally, newspapers have had the most feet on the ground, the most expertise, the most trust and respect and finally the most balls to do what needs to be done in the name of the truth and journalism. The “profitable” sources of news (TV, Internet and radio) may find that it’s much harder to be profitable if you had to field all of your own reporters.

Second, newspapers are seeking to become like the things they’re competing with in the hopes that it will bring readers and profits back. This means abandoning all the things which separated them. Unfortunately this includes nearly all substantive investigative reporting. This essentially commoditizes what newspapers have to offer making it even harder for them to compete.

The way forward is a lot less clear. I’ve spent a bunch of time thinking about it. What exactly made a newspaper? The article seems to believe it was a combination of respect, trust and unified resources with a common, concrete goal to shed light and report the truth. That sounds about right.

The article only hints at another problem which I find personally frustrating which is the increasing suspicion of inserted bias in all forms for journalism. The fact that a huge amount of our news industry is essentially entertainment has tainted all of our news sources and made the average person assume that every article as a position which it’s arguing for.

colin Uncategorized future, journalism, newspapers, web