Twitter

This is an entirely new addition to the historical record, the second-by-second history of ordinary people.

-- Fred R. Shapiro, of the Yale Law School, on an agreement by the Library of Congress to archive Twitter messages, New York Times, 15 April 2010

50 Years Of Public Computing

I had a good time this morning at 50 Years of Public Computing at the University of Illinois where I attended the session dedicated to the PLATO educational computer system.

http://50years.lis.illinois.edu/bibliography/plato.html

The panelists were Don Bitzer, Peter Braunfeld, and Lippold Haken. Half of the people in the audience could easily have served on the panel as well, and I had the pleasure of hearing many of them reminisce about those good old days. I saw Jim Kraatz and Celia (Davis) Kraatz, Rick Hazlewood, Paul Tenczar and Darlene, Jim Knoke, Jack Stifle, Rick Blomme, John Gilpin, Aaron Woolfson, Helen Kuznetsov, Mike Walker and CK Gunsalus, and many others (my apologies to those I've left out).

Here's a link to the dozen or so pics that I shot today. Sadly, I forgot to bring my camera, so these were taken with me Palm Pre -- no zoom, and today the background (thin drapes over a window) was brighter than the foreground ...

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2065040&id=1191873703&l=c35eb843ef

It was a lot of fun, and it makes me that much more interested in the PLATO@50 Conference coming up on 2-3 June 2010 in Mountain View, CA at the Computer History Museum. The conference is dedicated entirely to PLATO, with the theme "Seeing the future through the past". Here's a link to the Museum's page about the conference --

http://www.computerhistory.org/events/listing/plato-at-50/

Presenters include:
Ray Ozzie (Microsoft's chief software architect)
Don Bitzer (initiator of the PLATO project at the UI)
David Frankel
Andrew Shapira
Dave Woolley
... and many others (as listed at the conference URL, above)

In addition to discussing the hardware and software of the PLATO system, there will also be a focus on the culture of the development team, and the online community that sprang up around the PLATO system.

Besides the conference itself, I'm interested in visiting with the people involved, many of whom I worked with (or went to school with) in times past. I started using the PLATO system while in high school, and was a student programmer on the PLATO System Staff at the UI in my teenage years in the late 70s. I was a software engineer at NovaNET (which PLATO evolved into, locally) for over 8 years, ending in 2002. I also worked on the PLATO system as a computer operator at the UI, and as a programmer for the Department of Defense at Chanute AFB in the early 80s. In all, I worked on PLATO and its descendant systems developing educational software and its related infrastructure over a 25-year period.

At the UI's CERL (Computer-based Education Research Lab) much of the work was accomplished by people who pursued their own interests, and then made that work relevant to the community at large. It was a pleasure to work in that culture.

I plan to go to the conference if I can manage it.

Only More So

In today's online world, what your mother told you is true, only more so: people really can judge you by your friends.

-- Harold Abelson, MIT computer science professor, on personal information that can be gleaned from social networking sites, NY Times, 17 March 2010

Amateurs

Software is an incredibly young discipline. Everything in software is so new and so frequently being reinvented that almost nobody really knows what they are doing. It is amateurs who make all the progress.

-- Jeff Atwood, 29 May 2008, Coding Horror Blog,
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001124.html

Crosses The Line

When it works, it's amazingly impactful, but when it doesn't work, it's not only creepy but off-putting. What a marketer might think is endearing, by knowing a little bit about you, actually crosses the line pretty easily.

-- Tim Hanlon of Riverview Lane Associates of Chicago, on advertising aimed at Facebook users, New York Times, 4 March 2010

Pre For Me

Palm Pre+ (Verizon) for me today. I've been carrying a Palm Centro as my combination cell phone/calendar/contacts/clock/music system/data caddy for the past year and a half or so. From the little I've played with it so far, the Pre does *not* feel like a Palm. It does feel like a slick high-tech device.

I've spent over 7 years learning all the Palm OS applications that are useful for the types of things I like to do. I hope it's quicker (and cheaper) to find and learn to use the best Pre software.

Not Evil

Mickey is never going to be evil or go around killing people.

-- Warren Spector, creative director of Junction Point, a Disney-owned game developer overhauling the image of Mickey Mouse, New York Times, 5 November 2009

On All The Time

We have entered this new era where essentially everything is on all the time.

-- Alan Meier, an expert on energy efficiency, on the proliferation of gadgets in American homes, New York Times, 20 September 2009

What Sticks

We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks.

-- Michael Snow, Wikimedia board chairman, on steps to impose editorial review on articles about living people, New York Times, 25 August 2009

Looking Stupid

[W]e need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.

-- Charles Dunstone, head of UK ISP TalkTalk, on legislation aimed at limiting file sharing, quoted on Slashdot, 7 June 2009

World Peace

If the militaries of all nations standardize on Windows, then eventually they will all be immobilized by malware -- thus bringing about world peace.

-- Comment by jhansonxi on the Linux Insider Blog, June 2009

EULA

If your advertising giveth and your EULA [license agreement] taketh away don't be surprised if the FTC comes calling.

-- Mary K. Engle, Acting Deputy Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, quoted in The Wall Street Journal, 28 April 2009

Spam Nation II

A year ago today I complimented Google for their ability to filter spam, and griped about the roughly 350 pieces of spam that went into my GMail spam folder on a daily basis. At that time, I had 10,251 messages in my spam folder, and I was receiving spam every 4 minutes, 12 seconds.

I don't know whether we're winning the spam wars, or perhaps Google is doing some upstream spam filtering, but my spam folder currently stands at 1324 messages, an average of just over 44 messages per day, or one every 32 minutes, 37 seconds. That's about an eight-fold improvement, and now I can actually check my spam folder for false positives again!

donald appleman / cerl

The following events all occurred on March 12, 1974 --

* Donna Gail Manson, 19, disappeared from the campus of Evergreen State College, the second of "Son of Sam" Ted Bundy's 28 murder victims.

* John Lennon got into a tiff with a photographer at The Troubador in LA.

* Goldie Hawn was filming "Shampoo".

* Lt. William Calley was freed on bail pending an appeal of his convictions for murdering Vietnamese civilians at My Lai 6 years earlier.

* Paul & Susan Newman were spotted in Beverly Hills at Dan Tana's.

* NASA's Mars 6 spacecraft reached Mars where a descent module broadcast the first data returned from the atmosphere of Mars, for 224 seconds, before crashing into the surface.

* My first PLATO signon, donald appleman/cerl was created for me by Bill Golden.

Sincerely

Dear Sir or Madam,

We are writing to let you know that computer tapes containing some of your personal information were lost while being transported to an off-site storage facility by our archive services vendor. While we have no reason to believe that this information has been accessed or used inappropriately, we deeply regret that this incident occurred and we wanted to explain the precautionary steps we have taken to help protect you. ...

Protecting the confidentiality of this information - and all of our clients' information - has long been a top priority at The Bank of New York Mellon. However, in late February 2008, our archive services vendor notified us that they could not account for one of several boxes of data backup tapes being transported to an off-site storage facility. The missing tapes held certain personal information, such as your name, address, Social Security number and/or shareowner account information. ...

Sincerely, Investor Care Response Team

Plenty There

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

-- Alan Turing (23 June 1912 - 7 June 1954), British mathematician and cryptographer, Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)

LHC Day 1

Don't cross the streams.

-- Harold Ramis as Dr. Egon Spengler, Ghostbusters, 1984

--

You can think of each experiment as a giant digital camera with around 150 million pixels taking snapshots 600 million times a second.

-- CERN's Ian Bird, who leads the LHC Grid project, a network of 60,000 computers to analyze what happens when protons are hurled at each other

--

If you can read this, then the Large Hadron Collider did not create any earth-consuming black holes today.

Code For The Maintainer

Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.

-- From theC2 Wiki Page, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CodeForTheMaintainer

Spam Nation

I use Google Mail (gmail) as a simple way to get ubiquitous access to my email with good spam filtering. They leave stuff in the "spam" folder for 30 days. And they display how many messages are in your spam folder, so it's easy to tell (roughly) how many spam messages were received per day over the past 30 days

I'm just guessing here, but I seem to get a lot of spam, and I'm awfully glad gmail is good at catching it. For the first time today, my spam folder hit >10,000 messages. It currently stands at 10,251 (it was 10,249 when I started typing this), for an average of 341.7 spams per day, which works out to 14.2 spams per hour, or one spam every 4 minutes, 12 seconds.

Now it's at 10,254, up about 300 since yesterday, which indicates a *lot* of spams in the last 24 hours.

Unreliable Parts

Software developers have become adept at the difficult art of building reasonably reliable systems out of unreliable parts. The snag is that often we do not know exactly how we did it.

-- Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++

Not A Problem

I don't have a problem. Seventeen hours a day online is fine.

-- Lee Chang-Hoon, 15, at a camp for compulsive Internet users in South Korea, New York Times, 18 November, 2007

Data Decryption Law In UK

From ars technica --

UK can now demand data decryption on penalty of jail time
By Ken Fisher | Published: October 01, 2007 - 10:20PM CT

New laws going into effect today in the United Kingdom make it a crime to refuse to decrypt almost any encrypted data requested by authorities as part of a criminal or terror investigation. Individuals who are believed to have the cryptographic keys necessary for such decryption will face up to 5 years in prison for failing to comply with police or military orders to hand over either the cryptographic keys, or the data in a decrypted form.

Part 3, Section 49 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) includes provisions for the decryption requirements, which are applied differently based on the kind of investigation underway. As we reported last year, the five-year imprisonment penalty is reserved for cases involving anti-terrorism efforts. All other failures to comply can be met with a maximum two-year sentence.
... snip ...

Ironic Way Of Failing

It's not about money, it's about freedom. If you think it's about money you've missed the point. I want to use a computer in freedom, to cooperate, to not be restricted or prohibited from sharing. The GNU/Linux system is catching on somewhat more now. The system is becoming popular for practical reasons. It's a good system. The danger is people will like it because it's practical and it will become popular without anyone having the vaguest idea of the ideals behind it, which would be an ironic way of failing.

-- Richard Stallman in a Software Libre article by Richard Hillesley, 3/18/07

FSF

There are four "defining freedoms" to free software:

1) The freedom to run the program as you see fit,
2) Study and adapt it for your own purposes,
3) Redistribute copies to help your neighbour, and
4) Release your improvements to the public.

-- Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation