Technology – Page 7 – Noise Between Stations

Bob has been given two keys…

What is a Digital Signature? is a fun little introduction to digital signatures by David Youd.

Unfortunately the system is generally hard to understand, which I think is the reason it hasn’t caught on more widely (who wouldn’t encrypt the occasional email if they could?). Since I’m on a mental model kick lately, I can’t help but point out that the metaphor of a key breaks down pretty quickly. I like that a key can both lock and unlock information. But one can use a key to “sign” a document? We’re used to keys moving locks into multiple positions (as with a car ignition), so this might have been better as “use the key to make a document read-only, or to encrypt it…” or something similar.

And replacing the “certificate authority” is a no-brainer: she’s the locksmith.

I point this out because the situation is only getting worse. After Paypal recently limited transfer amounts on personal accounts, I signed up for Yahoo’s PayDirect. After using my regular ID and password to sign in, it asks for a “Yahoo! Security Key” and offers a text box. What should I type here? Was I supposed to generate a key before arriving here? This is actually not a key at all, at least not in the PKI sense. It’s just a secondary password. So this is just a labeling problem, but one that makes the difference between understanding how the system operates, and not.

Update: I was considering doing something about this, approaching the PKI folks to consider how design strategy could revolutionize this market, but this article by Jay Heiser points out that the personal encryption market isn’t demanding a product, whether we think they need one or not. Still, I wonder what will happen when someone makes it so easy that a great product will create a demand, that people will start to do protect their messages because they realize they can. Or, it might be a matter of free-agent nation — freelancers who work with large companies — having to adopt it to do business with the enterprise customers whose IT departments have done the hard work of setting it up.

Drive + Mouse

IOGEAR put 64MB of RAM into a mouse. Now that’s smart convergence: take two devices that already plug into the same port and that you have to carry around with your laptop, and combine them, taking advantage of all that hollow space inside the mouse.

There’s still a challenge to help customers form a mental model of it: “You see, it’s a mouse, but you can also save your files on it.” The name helps: “Memory Mouse”. You could go further and make something about the form factor resemble a drive (do people even have a concept of what a drive looks like?).

(And if you start to think too hard, it just gets too weird: “You use the mouse to control the cursor to drag and drop files onto a desktop-mounted drive, the effect of which copies files onto the drive that is inside the mouse…”)

It’s a similar problem with the similarly convergent AirPort Express with AirTunes (sans the elegant name). It took me about 15 minutes to understand what it does, and it only really clicked when I saw the “living room” diagram on page 24 of the Tech Overview (PDF). “You see, it’s a wireless base station like the AirPort, but it can also relay music from your computer into your stereo. Oh, and it’ll let you share your USB printer…” I understand what is inside the thing, but even that would’ve made me raise an eyebrow: “It’s a wireless router, audio digital to analog converter, and USB interface in a little device that plugs into your wall.”

As stuff gets smaller, we’re only going to get more devices like this, and we’ll need to work harder to help people understand them.

Interactionary

Jess has a new blog to share his big thoughts, bless his heart.

Amazing Internet Phone Service

I recently signed up for Vonage, an Internet phone service in the US and Canada, and love it. Also known as Voice over IP, it uses your Internet connection rather than a phone line to connect. Here’s some highlights of why I like it:

Cost: By far the best reason to switch is the savings. My wife and I don’t use the phone much, but we have family in Canada and Germany and these calls were expensive. Our bills averaged US$95, and now they average $25. We have the 500 minute plan for $15 and calls to Germany are only $.03/minute. They also have unlimited US/Canada plans for $30.
Easy to set up: they mail you a device that gets plugged in between your computer and your Internet connection. Then you plug your normal phone into the device. Done. The computer doesn’t need to be turned on or even plugged in.
Same phone number: Vonage can transfer your current number to their system, so I kept my precious 212 Manhattan area code.
Features: Their website records all information in real-time, so I can use it as caller ID, listen to voicemail, manage features, and view current activity as well as all the usual billing info.
Networked: Just as you might plug into the Internet from anywhere using your laptop, you can do the same with the Vonage device. So if I’m on a business trip I can bring the device to a hotel and use it with their Internet connection.

Their customer website is well designed and their customer service is responsive. I’m so psyched to find a company who is doing things right I’m recommending them here. If you’re considering signing up I can refer you and you’ll get a month free (and I’ll get a credit too), just email me at victor (at) victorlombardi.com.

Corporate Blogging and Power

Elizabeth Albrycht on Corporate Blogging and Power: ‘I think blogging is one of those new technologies that makes the negotiations about power visible…. Power needs secrecy. Humanity needs openness. Ergo – blogging actually works on the side of humanity….’

DIY Home Projector

Though I quickly corrected my broken TV problem by picking up a used model on Craigslist, I’m still fascinated by the projector option. Here’s a guide to a $200 DIY projector using an LCD panel and an overhead projector. Part of the appeal is having a school-like overhead projector in your living room, very retro. During parties you could leave some overheads next to the machine and see how people reacted.

Dynamic Text Replacement

Once the HTML is finished loading, our script will search it for specified elements (h2, span, etc.) and replace the text inside of them with an img tag. This dynamic img tag has its alt attribute set to the original text, and its src attribute set to the URL of the PHP script that we just installed. The PHP script then sends back a custom PNG image, and voila: custom headings.

That is whacked.

Textpattern auto CSS?

I’ve been thinking about ways to edit CSS from a content management system, and fascinated by Dean’s description of Automatic CSS mode in Textpattern…

Automatic CSS mode, style sheet editing is taken to a sophisticated new level, using an editing interface and organizational method intended to make CSS parameters more readable and logical. Any existing style sheet can be â€˜pouredâ€™ into the editing interface and modified indefinitely.

Any Textpattern users out there? Does the Auto CSS mode UI look the same as this, or different? My email address is over there in the nav bar.

Projection TV

We came back from vacation on Monday and when my wife pressed the power button on the TV remote all that happened was click, click, click…

I’ll check in with my local repair shop tomorrow, but I thought it was a good time to figure out the brave new world of televisions. My current set is a hand-me-down from my father, so I haven’t actually bought one in over 20 years (a 13″ Emerson to use with my Commodore 64. [sigh]).

In short, it seems like good old fashioned CRTs still look good and provide the most bang for the buck. The ‘flat’ CRTs aren’t as flat as LCDs or Plasmas but are much thinner than our father’s sets. LCDs and Plasmas look great but aren’t that big yet and are molto expensive. Rear projection sets are giant, affordable, and look crappy.

Then there’s front projection, like in a movie theater. My friend Leah had talked about using a projector as a TV years ago, and now the price has come down to where they are being marketed (and sometimes tweaked) for home theater. It’d be nice to ditch the big box, and have gorgeous, huge video projected on the wall (with the project 11 feet away from the wall, the screen will be 65 inches diagonal minimum). Drawbacks seem to be 1) connecting the projector — which is close to your sitting position — to the audio gear which is across the room, and 2) putting a screen on the wall.

ProjectorCentral is an excellent resource. Their recommended list makes shopping easier and their projection calculator is perfectly executed.

On the bargain side (< $1000), Infocus seems to have the lead with performance in their X1 and X2. Here's a thorough X1 review. The X2 seems to be the successor, increasing the brightness for the same price. Here’s a story — not entirely complimentary — of someone who upgraded. Apparently Infocus subtracted some features to sell a premium version of the X2 labeled the 4805 for $200 more.

Also interesting is this Dell vs. Toshiba shootout in which the Dell wins, but they mention the Infocus might be a better option for movie use and the Dell better with more computer use. The comments section there is very astute, but this one is more emotionally charged. The Epson Powerlite 10 is similar, as is the BenQ 6100 which, with the current $100 rebate from Amazon, would be my first choice.

Biometric approaches the chasm

The fingerprint biometric device for $49 was inevitable, I’m just surprised it arrived this soon (should we thank the demand generated by the Dept. of Homeland Security for the accelated development?). I predict within two years someone will build this into a laptop, sitting beside the trackpad.

Update: Josh points out that fingerprint biometrics are already included in the $650 HP iPAQ Pocket PC h5550, probably aimed at corporate customers. At this price point, inclusion on a consumer laptop will be probably happen sooner than two years.

Broadcatching

I recently thought it’d be nice for digital video recorders like TiVo to access parts of programs, so if I wanted to see that one joke from a movie, not the whole movie, I could find it. Just tag and syndicate the video, right? Webjay Brett Singer has the seeds of an implementation, publishing clips of news video. Webjay creator Lucas Gonze calls it broadcatching.

MT’s Innovator’s Dilemma

OK, just one more blogger-blogging-about-blogging-tools post and then I’m done. We might view the MT price increase through the lens of the innovator’s dilemma. They moved upmarket, and the open source, free, and otherwise interesting competitors suddenly looked like compelling options to those of us on the leading edge of the blog tool curve.

What if SixApart had released MT as open source at the same time they started charging for it? It would basically follow the Red Hat model: get the raw (e.g. Linux) functionality for free but pay for easier installation, more features, and support. For companies, it’s a no brainer expense, and the rest of us happily run our software for free. It’s quite hard to convince our brains to accept the risk of giving away the software, but we’re starting to see enough examples to learn from experience.

There’s gold in them thar blogs

WordPress and Textpattern, as previously mentioned, were fortunate to hit 1.x versions at approximately the same time as the MT price policy shift. If you were to try calculating the financial ramifications of this shift, you might fill one of your variables with the number 40,000.

This Old CSS

Roger Johansson uses a helpful “let me show you how I do it, step by step” way of explaining how to construct the XHTML and CSS for a simple but effective two column layout. It’s part of his excellent Developing with web standards mini-book.

New, Improved NBS

I’ve hired a crack team of stylists, programmers, and librarians to re-organize my five+ years worth of blog posts from four different blogging systems. Work is in progress, but you can start basking in the sheer joy of:

A proper RSS 2.0 feed that includes all posts
Permalinks and trackbacks
Categories now displayed in the navigation for easier exploring. The librarians are still cleaning those up and classifying older posts
Posts that post-date the hand-coding era (August ’99) are all in the template system, yielding proper archives.
Newer posts will actually validate.

Thanks for your patience while we strive to facilitate a pleasurable surfing experience.