Entries Tagged 'computers' ↓

I asked and got a Yahoo! 360?Ǭ? invite from Dave Winer. You can now find my Yahoo! 360?Ǭ? space at http://360.yahoo.com/anaulin. Not yet clear what will I do with it, though.

Random thoughts after playing around Yahoo! 360?Ǭ? for some 10 minutes, in no particular order:

• Extremely easy to use, integrated with the whole Yahoo! system. You can use your existing Yahoo! login.
• Offers what today seems to be the basic life-online toolkit: social networking, blogging, photo albums. Additionally you can display your Yahoo! Groups on your Yahoo! 360?Ǭ? page, and you can check other’s Yahoo! IM status and show your own.
• I like the ‘Blast’ thingie. I might find some use for something like that on this page.
• No tagging anywhere, though you can put your friends into categories.
• No integration with other services such as del.icio.us, Technorati or Flickr.
• I agree with what already has been commented elsewhere about Yahoo! 360?Ǭ? not being aimed to the ‘techiest’ among us.
• They provide feeds of whatever contents you create.
• There are apparently no skins or any other way to customize the look of your page. Not even the basic color-scheme controls of Yahoo! Groups. Annoying. Very.

And of course, I can now invite you, dear reader, to join Yahoo! 360?Ǭ?. So if you are interested in trying this new Yahoo! service, just drop a comment with your e-mail address and I will invite you.

Yeah, that’s right: move your laptop and it will feel it.

PowerBooks (and some ThinkPads too, apparently) have a sudden motion sensor that is used to protect the hard drive in case of violent movement such as dropping the computer. This sensor returns accurate data to the OS and creative hackers have already written some programs that make use of this function. Bumptunes is a Python script that enables you to control iTunes by literally bumping the laptop. Bubblegym is a tilt-sensitive game.

If you still don’t know what to give me for my birthday next week, here is a hint: I don’t have a PowerBook…

(From Wired story Wired News: Hackers Tilt PowerBook for Tricks.)

My good friend Helga kindly translated her Born to be geek essay into English (the original was written in German).

This text of Helga’s is funny. But it’s not only that. What it says is too true.

[...] Often the following is your chat-up line: “Hey, I saw you at the lecture today. How come that a girl studies Computer Science?” We are in the 21st century, aren’t we? Why is it so amazing that there really are girls studying Computer Science?

So go and read it and have a good laugh. And then, please, come back and tell me, what is so strange about women tinkering with computers?

(BTW, Helga is also a talented artist. The cartoon here is one of her depictions of herself for her ‘My perfect day’ page.)

In his new entry The Curse of the Secret Question, Bruce Schneier offers some very interesting reflections on the security offered by passwords and the ’secret questions’ that many sites use to identify a customer that has lost his password. He summarizes:

Passwords have reached the end of their useful life. Today, they only work for low-security applications. The secret question is just one manifestation of that fact.

Bruce talks about calling the customer service and proving his identity to them in some way. I had to do this with my bank too, once when I misstyped my password thrice. They connected me to their “security department” where they nicely asked me for data such as my ID number, my address and my birth date. In short, it was the telephone version of the “secret question”.

I just wonder, what other alternatives do we have? I fear that we do not have a better idea than passwords, yet.

Liz Lawley of Mamamusings has an interesting piece called Broken windows and technical debt. She refers to an article which extends the broken window theory to software development and introduces the term technical debt. The idea is that for each problem in the code that doesn’t get fixed, the developer(s) incur a debt. After too many postponed fixes, the debt might become unmanageable.

While the broken window theory sounds very interesting, it is not clear if it can be applied to software development. It is not even clear if this theory makes sense from a sociological point of view. As folks point out in some comments, it is often difficult to decide what is ‘broken’ in code, and fixing it may incur a bigger cost than just letting it be. Someone else relates this idea to the concept of emotional debt.

Nevertheless, it is an interesting idea that can be applied to many areas of life. See, for example, the mail metaphor of Dave Thomas:

My current metaphor for that is my email inbox. Because I have this habit every now and then of not answering email for a while. And then it gets to the point round about the 250 message mark, where I suddenly realize, I’m never going to answer these messages.

It is just what our mothers try to teach us: that there is a big price to pay for postponing what we know we must do. So all of you who are reading this to avoid exam preparation, acticle revisions, housework and what not, I hope I gave you at least a bit of bad conscience.