Dr. K’s Software Ruminations

MySpace Finds 29,000 Sex Offenders by Gary D. Robertson, Associated Press

MySpace.com has found more than 29,000 registered sex offenders with profiles on the popular social networking Web site - more than four times the number cited by the company two months ago, officials in two states Tuesday.

“I’m absolutely astonished and appalled because the number has grown so exponentially over so short of time with no explanation,” said Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who also had pressed the company earlier for sex offender data.

Let me offer a potential explanation. Broadly speaking, there are two types of social networks on the Internet: 1) Those that offer an online mechanism for interaction between people who already know each other in the real world; 2) Those that offer complete strangers an opportunity to meet other strangers on the Internet.

In the first category are sites like FaceBook and LinkedIn, which are philosophically founded on the principle that relationships must exist before online links can be established. In those environments, it’s considered very bad form to solicit a link with someone you’ve never met in person.

In contrast, the second category includes chat rooms of all shapes and sizes as well as sites like MySpace that actively encourage (or at least fail to discourage) individuals to expand their personal network to include many people that they’ve never met.

If you were an Internet predator, which type of social network would you frequent?!

MySpace declined to comment on the figure, focusing instead on its efforts to clean up its profile rolls.

“We’re pleased that we’ve successfully identified and removed registered sex offenders from our site and hope that other social networking sites follow our lead,” MySpace chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam said in a prepared statement.

I would suggest that other networking sites that require (or at least attempt to enforce) that individuals know each other before forging online relationships will have far less cleaning up to do than MySpace.

Students give up social networks for Lent by Katie Hawkins

Lent was over a few months ago. But the story’s so compelling I couldn’t let it go.

For some, it’s chocolate. For others, it’s coffee or cigarettes. But as this Easter approaches, some young and devout Christians are anxious to return to what they gave up for Lent: Internet sites Facebook and MySpace.

“Some of my friends think it’s silly, since people usually give up food,” said 16-year-old Emily Montgomery, who says she’s given up her access to MySpace. “I wanted to give up something that’s really hard for me.”

A definite sign that social networking is here in a big way.

Graham said giving up Facebook has helped her distinguish between her real friends and those of “convenience.” Montgomery says she now plays tennis and focuses on schoolwork more often, and Chiu has been studying, reading the Bible and spending time with friends.

“It’s a nice change,” said Chiu. “The human interaction is so much more personal than anything you could have on the Internet.”

Virtual friends… Real friends… Virtual friends… Real friends… For this generation it’s a non-trivial issue to say the least.

Coincidence? You be the judge…

From natch dot net:

When he finds the MintyBoost! charger he gives me the evil eye.

Now if I was stupid I would have shut down the airport when I saw such a device. It doesn’t look like *anything* they sell at Walmart.

He asks what it is. I tell him it is a battery charger for my iPod. He asks if I made it myself, to which I reply that I purchased a kit over the internet. He says that he can’t let me on the plane with it. I explain to him that I have flown with it 4-6 times a month for a year now and nobody has questioned it. He says, “Not on my watch and not with my people.”

Read it for yourself: http://www.natch.net/stuff/TSA/

This sort of thing just can’t be scripted.

Spent the week before last with my family in Oregon for my oldest daughter’s wedding, and I wanted to share a handful of my geekiest travel moments. As a backdrop, everything was pretty much a blur leading up to the wedding on Saturday the 5th, plus family gatherings on Sunday, so we mostly stowed our devices. But Monday we had a day to just relax and recreate a bit, followed by a long drive home to Utah, giving our latent digital proclivities a chance to emerge.

Netarts Bay: “All your crab are belong to us”

Monday morning we ventured out into Netarts Bay with nine family members in two boats in search of crab. Most pitiful crabbing adventure we’ve had in 15 years, yielding… (drumroll please) …a single keeper. Considering the cost of renting boats, bait, traps, shelfish licenses for the 14-and-older set, this little fella represented the most expensive crab meat on earth, somewhere around $120/pound. On the way home we stopped at the grocery store and bought three more cooked crabs just so we could all enjoy some fresh crab for dinner (and paradoxically lowering the overall cost per pound of the crab meat by a significant amount).

The digital moment came when I watched the boat navigated by my oldest son approach about two dozen seals sunning themselves on a sand bar. As the boat approached, my son stood up and began taking pictures with his phone. Maybe the phone camera thing is already vanilla by now, but it still seemed strangely out of place on a crabbing trip, on the bay, with a light fog rising from the water to see the captain of the boat hoisting aloft… his cell phone! The coup de grace was him subsequently “texting” some of his pictures to my phone. (Begging the question of whether you can actually “text” someone a picture… According to my teenagers, you can!)

Pacific City, Oregon: “We get signal!”

After our fun but non-productive crabbing adventure, we headed south with a temporary stop at Cape Lookout (more pictures by my son).

During this trip both my oldest sons were texting mysterious “friends” on their cell phones. But north of Pacific City we lost all connectivity. The amazingly geekish moment came when I pulled out my Treo to check something just as we approached Pacific City from the north. I saw the signal strength return to my phone, felt a surge of positive emotion, and simultaneous heard spontaneous cheers from my two oldest sons (16 and 18), each independently exulting at the return of their cell phone connectivity. Apparently they had been suffering texting withdrawals for the previous 20 minutes and were now connected again to the real world. I turned to my wife and muttered, “We get signal!” The pitiful part is… she got the reference (see below if you don’t).

Baker City, Oregon: “Main screen turn on”

We were in the mountains of eastern Oregon Tuesday morning at sunrise, heading south under arbitrarily constrained Oregonian speed limits. As I looked to the right I discovered an amazing sillhouette of our van and trailer in the weeds on the west side of the road. With everyone sound asleep, and me just grateful for the arrival of daylight, I did what any red-blooded geek would do… pulled out my Treo and started taking pictures out the passenger side window while driving (approximately) 65 mph on I-84. The effect is actually pretty cool (IMHO).

BTW, if you know anything about how a sundial works (or that the sun appears to move east to west across our earthly sky during daylight hours), you can perceive a time lapse between these two photos, evidenced by the changing length of our shadow. Some with more technical savvy than me could probably calculate the time period during which i was jeopardizing my sleeping family by driving down the freeway pulling a trailer while taking pictures out the passenger window with my Treo.

Somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere, Western Idaho: “You know what you doing”

Some time after sunrise but before business hours I remembered promising my number two daughter (the not married one) that I would transfer funds from my bank account to hers for reasons that are as yet shrouded in mystery. Nevertheless it had to be accomplished before Tuesday’s business hours. I was at that moment a passenger in a van now piloted by my wife, hurtling eastbound through western Idaho at speeds of (approximately) 75 mph.

Despite severe sleep deprivation and an actual opportunity to catch a few z’s, I first fired up my Treo and enabled the Bluetooth capability for dial-up networking. I then pulled my PowerBook G4 from my computer bag (yes… nearby… where it should be), clicked on the phone icon in the task bar, and found myself connected to the Internet. Cool. I launched Firefox, logged into my bank’s web-based automatic teller, and transfered $100 to my daughter’s account for reasons that remain fuzzy (but I’m confident she’ll reimburse me very very soon…). Satisfied at having fulfilled my fatherly duties, and somewhat happier for having had an excuse to open my Mac, I dozed off into a well-earned sleep…

Just a few digital highlights from our grand left coast adventure.

“For great justice.”

(Note: If the goofy quotes are mysterious to you, your life is probably incomplete, having been unexposed to the 1989 Zero Wing game. Click here for enlightenment.)

Got back from Hawaii this morning. Two flights out last week, two flights back last night and this morning. Four doses of airline-speak.

I have boarded, deplaned, stowed my belongings, found the card in the seat-pocket in front of me, and have been careful because items in the overhead bins do tend to shift during flight.

I have watched others pre-board, and pondered the unlikely event of a water landing.

I have returned my seat and tray table to their full, upright, and locked position.

I have been reminded that it is a federal offense to tamper with, disable, or destroy any lavatory smoke detector.

And I have turned my cell phone to the off position. Two questions: 1) Who in the world came up with this phraseology? 2) What precisely does it mean?

It’s bad enough that flight attendants do tend to overuse certain words that they do say repeatedly because they apparently do think that it sounds more officious and they do realize that we do have a choice of airlines and they do appreciate us choosing whatever airline this is. They really do…

But, I mean, what is this “off position”? Switches can be in an off position, but many electronic devices don’t have switches. They have some magic button that you hold until the device becomes dark and lifeless. Is said device now in the “off position”? Even more frightening, the average cell phone user has no idea that while their phone is “off” (meaning screen dark? or maybe silent ring?) it is still waking up periodically to check the availability of nearby cell towers, in case someone wants to call in. And with all due respect to the enormous amount of radio noise my Bose headphones must be generating, it can’t be within a couple orders of magnitude of what half the cell phones in the cabin are probably doing in the “off position.”

Now if they just did something like this… “Ladies and gentlemen, your cell phones generate radio signals even when they may appear to you to be off. Will you please do whatever magic incantation you have to do to your phone to make it so that the phone cannot receive incoming calls? When you have done that, your phone will be in radio silence, and will not interfere with any of the radio or telecommunication instruments in this big bird. Oh yes… and we do hope that you do forgive us if we put airline-speak in the off position.”

Didn’t work… AAARRRRrrrrggghghh!!! Tried, failed. It was going to be one of those uber-cool posts in which I prove my obsessive techno-tendencies beyond any reasonable doubt by sitting in a beach chair, on the Hukilau beach in Oahu, using nothing but my Treo, and blog about blogging on the beach because… um… ah… my wife will explain it to you.

Possessing a modicum of common sense, I made the attempt to login to my blog server on my Treo within the reasonably cool confines of our temporary beachside domicile. I could read the blog from the beach using the Treo web browser, but for an as-yet-undebugged reason, I could never successfully login to the server on the Treo. I thought it might have something to do with cookies, but that didn’t seem to be it after all. Scanned the meager offering of menu options for the Treo’s web browser to no avail. Tried resetting the password remotely (requiring a multi-step process involving a successful email adventure on said Treo), still no worky.

Finally my phone contorted itself into a state in which everytime I go to the web browser, the Treo reboots itself before doing anything else. Classic. I try to do something techno-cool (like blogging on the beach without a laptop) and by the time I get done trying, I’m in a worse state than I would have been had I never tried the uber-cool manuever in the first place. I hate that. And how do I fix my web browser when I can’t get to its menu options because it reboots my phone every time I try?! Sheesh.

Fortunately, the trip to Hawaii was not a total disaster. Weather was absolutely beautiful. Waves were great. Sand was sandy. Food was great. Polynesian Cultural Center was amazing. My visit to BYU-Hawaii in Laie was really fun. Pearl Harbor was moving. Wakiki was picture-perfect.

Oh yeah, and I was able to check my email a couple times a day on my Treo to help mitigate a potentially serious case of technical separation anxiety…

I think I need professional help.

Developers: Expect New Major Language Within Five Years by Daryl K. Taft

There’s really not much to this article, mostly a brief report from TheServerSide.com Java Symposium last week. The punchline is that we should expect a “major language” of the stature of Java within five years. Great, yet another programming language that I will have never coded in before being assigned to teach the class…

Actually, my main motivation for sharing this article is that it gives me an opportunity to tell one of my favorite stories about Prof. Evan L. Ivie, who retired some years back from the Computer Science Department at BYU. Evan was at Bell Labs when Kernighan, Ritchie, and all those smart guys invented UNIX and C… in the group that he managed. He was like the Forrest Gump of computing. Seemed like every time something amazing happened in the world of computing, Evan was lurking somewhere nearby (or maybe managing the group that did it).

Anyway, one day in an operating systems class, Dr. Ivie made an offhand remark about “C, or whatever language was the fad at the time”. I was stunned. This was circa early 90’s and C was THE programming language that we all wanted to know, and that we all became really good at. We thought the ten commandments had been handed down to Moses in C, and then translated into Hebrew. What we didn’t know (but Evan did) was that C was the language du jour, and that it would be followed by another, and yet another, and yet another, ad infinitum.

What’s amazing today is the absolute explosion of languages that students and professionals actually know and use: C, C++, C#, Java, Tcl, Python, Perl, Ruby, Smalltalk, Scheme, MATLAB, Lisp, Delphi, Visual Basic, JavaScript, PHP, Prolog, SQL, Pascal, Ada, etc. (PLEASE, Please, please forgive me if I left your personal favorite programming language off this list… please! This is random, and off the top of my head!) It’s not the fact that these languages exist that’s so amazing. Lots of goofy languages have always existed. It’s the fact that they’re all relevant, and are all used by a large enough number of people that most software engineers today have at least heard of them, even if (like me) they don’t know much about them.

So I wonder what the heck we mean by “major” language like Java in the future. Is that our ultimate destiny? An uber-language of some kind? A multiparadigm miracle language? Or is our future to be a large community of programming polyglots, drawing fluently from a dozen different tool boxes? I’m not sure which one I find more exciting… either way it’s pretty cool!

Sir Tim Berners-Lee Gives Congress Vision Of The Future by K.C. Jones

The title pretty much tells the tale. Nice summary of what Berners-Lee had to say to Congress. He is, of course, the inventor of the World Wide Web. It’s hard to come up with many inventions that have so thoroughly impacted the world like the Web. Automobiles? Air travel? Telephones? Cellular telephones? Satellites? Credit cards? The personal computer? Oh yeah, and the web is 17 years old as an invention, 10 years old as a part of most people’s lives. The evolution of the Internet and the Web is like a great sci fi story but with entirely unrealistic time frames.

Oops! Technician’s error wipes out data for state fund

Back to some of the principles that Don Norman writes about in “The Design of Everyday Things”: “I was among a group of social and behavioral scientists who were called in to determine why the control-room operators had made such terrible mistakes [at Three Mile Island]. To my surprise, we concluded that they were not to blame: the fault lay in the design of the control room. Indeed, the control panels of many power plants looked as if they were deliberately designed to cause errors.”

Obviously these aren’t completely analogous situations. But a computer technician accidentally reformats disks containing data pertaining to $38 billion in oil dividends for Alaskans? How does that happen?

Who’s fault is this? The poor schmuck who accidentally toasts off $38 billion of data on both primary and backup disks? Or the software system that let him do it?!

Norman identifies a rule of thumb for door design — if you have to label it “push” or “pull” you designed it wrong. Here’s another rule of thumb — if you have to warn people not to push that one big red switch… maybe the switch shouldn’t be out in the open.

I’d love to know more about just what happened to allow a single computer technician to innocently wreak such devastating havok. I appreciate the fact that they weren’t holding the technician responsible, or conducting a witch hunt. But you’d think that someone (software designers? software architects?) should be responsible, and probably at the design level.