Becoming a designer
Boy, it’s been a while. An oxymoronic combination of being lazy and busy, I guess. Anyway, for this post I wanted to talk about design. It’s a topic that comes up a More »
Support for Windows 7 ends today
It is a sad day, as Microsoft is officially ending updates and security patches for Windows 7, the popular OS still being used by a large majority of PCs. Windows 7’s popularity More »
Returning Home: World of Warcraft Classic Comes Online
On August 26th, fans of the original World of Warcraft (henceforth referred to as WoW), and those who are just curious to see what all the hubbub is about, were finally able More »
The Lawnmower Man, and Vintage CGI
Inspired by a couple of Reddit forums to which I am subscribed, VintagePixelArt and VintageCGI, and being a fan of all things historical as it pertains to technology, I uploaded to the More »
Jony Ive leaves Apple
As someone who teaches extensively about design as it intersects with technology, and is also a computer and technology historian, I am conflicted about Jonathan (Jony) Ive leaving Apple. Mainly because he’s More »
A very useful, and very unnerving, webpage
Last week, I was sent a link to a website that was at once fascinating and informative, and at the same time unnerving. Allwyn alerted me to flightaware.com, a website that allows you to track all planes in the air, their airports, their origins and destinations, and a multitude of other factors. As you can see form the homescreen below, there are a re a ton of things you can do, from tracking airlines, to checking airport status, to determining arrival, departure, and current locations of flight, to checking the weather, and a ton of others.
I thought I would give it a run with the airport of my adopted hometown, Baltimore-Washington International (BWI) in Baltimore, Maryland. Massive international hub that it is, it can’t be seen on the small national map on the right unless you zoom in, and I’m ok with that. That map also shows real-time storm tracking – very impressive.
I clicked on ‘Live Flight Tracking,’ then ‘Browse by Airport’ (although you can also browse by flight, by aircraft type, and by operator among others), and entered ‘BWI’ into the search box. I was greeted with the following screen, that shows all flights currently inbound and outbound from the airport.
BWI information page
An earth-view that shows terrain is available, even infrared views! Hovering the mouse over an airplane icon shows information about that airline, and if you click on it you will be taken to a page that gives further information, including its starting point and departure time, the type of plane it is, its current and final altitude, as well as its destination and estimated arrival time (screen below). Not only that, the planes’ positions are updated in real time, so they are all slowly moving across the screen as you watch.
Flight information for a specific flight
There is a lot you can do, and while this is easily one of the most amazingly useful and informative sites I’ve ever seen, it also fills me with unease. This year has been one of the most deadly in aviation history, and although the contributors to that have been overseas in hostile territories, and even considering air travel is still the safest means of travel by far, but if we can have mapping services that can tell someone how to drive directly to your house, perhaps this isn’t so bad after all, and nothing has happened as a direct result of it. To be fair, none of tit is classified information, you can get the same information by visiting an airport/airline website or calling their number. Which means I could see myself really using this site.
All Simpsons episodes going online, with a catch
Love The Simpsons? Of course you do, everyone does. The greatest, longest-running, most award-winning, most culturally influential animated show in history has brought in fans for 25 years. While there have been ebbs and flows in the quality over that period of time, it can’t be denied that the show, like Krusty the Clown himself, has been nothing less than an industry unto itself.
Even so, the show has not embraced the digital age as much as one might expect. Yes, they’ve had albums and games and a virtual world and a really great attraction at Universal Studios and even that total piece of offensive crap Tapped Out, but as for the episodes themselves, they’ve been the AC/DC of television shows. It’s why I had to rip my own collection, that’s it in the screenshot below.
Using XBMC Media Manager
But all this is coming to a spectacular end. FXX has announced that they have acquired the rights to the entire catalog of Simpsons episodes as well as the movie, and will be making them all available online to stream and watch whenever you want on any device you want wherever you want. Not only that, you can search for episodes or characters and set up playlists, just like a music service. But there is an enromous catch:
In order to bask in the glory of The Simpsons, you have to be a subscriber to FXX, and that channel is only carried in about 25% of the country, and apparently bundled as part of a sports package since it was originally intended as a soccer channel. If you don’t have FXX in your lineup, then no Simpsons, or their massive 552-episode, movie-included marathon for you!
The Simpsons are not the first animated show to do this. At southparkstudios.com you used to be able to watch every episode of South Park (well, except for one) whenever you wished. The creators of the show, which started as an animated short on the Internet, were very smart to negotiate all online rights back when the Internet was a fledgling idea. The network gladly agreed, never thinking the Internet would become what it is, and as a result we all had full access to all episodes.
What used to be southparkstudios.com
But no more. Just this month, an agreement was signed that put all South Park episodes behind the Hulu paywall, and starting in September you’ll need a Hulu subscription to watch them. I’m no fan of Hulu, never have been, and I was disappointed to see this. I sense a lot of new torrenting will take place. Or a lot of new visitors to watchcartoononline.com.
So screw South Park! Watch The Simpsons instead, as well you should.
Who is on your wifi?
We talked extensively in class about networking, and only a little about WiFi specifically, however your WiFi setup leaves a lot of security holes, even if you have security in place (you did set a WEP, or even better a WPA or equivalent, right?).
There is a well-known activity known as wardriving, in which someone drives around a neighborhood or commercial district looking for a WiFi signal to leech off of. The problem is, if someone manages to attach to your network they have access to your whole system, even if they don’t exploit that.
If you’re interested in seeing all the devices attached to your wireless network at any given time, you’ll want to head over to whoisonmywifi.com and download their eponymous program. After set up, you will have to do a couple of network scans, after which it will show you what devices are connected to your network. If you know the device, you can set it to ‘known,’ otherwise you’ll have to do some investigation. A screenshot of my network is below:
You can see from the scan that my router runs the network with the name of that network (SPIDERBABIES), along with its MAC address and associated IP. The MAC, or Media Access Control address is a unique address assigned to every piece of hardware for identification on a local network, and it’s one of the ways a device checks whether or not a packet is in the right place or not. You can also see it looks very similar to an IPv6 address as we talked about in class (please read the link, it thoroughly explains IPv6 and why we need it).
There is also an iMac, a Surface, a Nokia phone, a Dell desktop (ALLINONE-PC), my main media server (DESKTOP), and an HP printer. For things that aren’t named, it is very easy to determine what they are: If you copy and paste the MAC address, colons included, into a search engine it will tell you what manufacturer owns that code. It’s how I discovered the last entry is an LG smart TV I have upstairs.
But as I mentioned, if you can’t determine what a device is, you’ll need to find out. If you don’t recognize the device, or if the manufacturer isn’t one you own, you might want to consider blocking it, something you can also do from the results screen.
Below is a video that explains how it works and what it can do. Check your network!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tFPrJI9-Ts
Useful links tuesday
As usual, I have some very, VERY useful links (which I originally mis-typed as oinks; that’s never happened before) to make your Tuesday, and your life, easier. You will instantly see a ten-fold increase in productivity and people wanting to know your name and how you became so great. Ready? Here we go!
Fake Outlook
That’s right, it isn’t real! But if you need to make it look like you’re actually doing something when the boss walks by, this is one option. Unless of course your company uses Gmail. Then you’re screwed. Honestly, this seems like a copyright violation of some sort, but I just can’t say for certain.
RunPee
RunPee is an app, actually, the official mobile website isn’t very good. But the app performs the most valuable of services – it tells you the best times you can run and pee during a movie, for how long, and what happens during the time you’re away. Whether it’s Star Wars: Episode I where you could really mosey ff for a pee whenever you wanted and not miss anything, or Pacific Rim where you couldn’t miss a second, this might be one of the most useful apps ever.
Type Like a TV/Movie Hacker
Ever notice that hackers, even computer users in general, in movies manage to carry out sophisticated commands and procedures with what seem like very few keystrokes? From WarGames to Sneakers to Jurassic Park to TRON to Law and Order, they type a little but what appears on the screen is a lot. I’m no fan of CollegeHumor, but watch this clip, it’s the best example of absurd hacking scenes in movies/TV you’ll ever see.
And now you can do it too! Just head to hackertyper.com and start typing. You’ll be instantly transformed into a movie-quality hacker, with deep technical commands appearing faster than you can type. Impress your friends!
Oldversion.com
It’s happened to all of us. We update or install a new version of a program we’ve used for a while, only to discover the previous version was much better. For me it was Skype. For years I purposely didn’t let it update because the newer version was so terrible. The problem is, downgrading software is much more difficult than upgrading.
But thanks to oldversion.com, it’s now much easier to do that. If there’s something you need in an older version, this is the site for you. They have programs that go way back, they even have Netscape. Very useful site.
How Much of Your Favorite Drink Will it Take to Kill You?
Caffeine, and especially energy drinks, are bad for you in large amounts (I know, I know, everything is bad for you in large amounts). This site will tell you exactly how much of your favorite caffeinated/energy drink it will take to kill you. Be careful, moderation is key!
Rainy Mood
Finally, something simple that we could really use here in Southern Nevada, the soothing sound of a rainy day. RainyMood.com presents the very well-recorded and looped sounds of soothing rain – very comforting when it’s in the low-100s outside. (if you’d rather hear white, pink, or brown noise you can try SimplyNoise.com).
A new way to get things done
Before I get into the not-quite-a-review of HabitRPG, I need to define some terms.
The first is ‘RPG,’ or role-playing game. That’s the type of game where you play a role in which your character gains levels and completes tasks and what have you. Normally if the game involves killing a dragon, it’s an RPG.
The second is ‘Gamification.’ This is the idea that if a task is arduous or hard to be motivated for or something you have to do, it can seem less so if a game is made of it, just like Principal Skinner advised. Have a boring task to do? Then give yourself a reward, or points, or something when you do it. The idea of gamification has been around for a long, long time, and when actual games began to introduce the idea of achievements, managers tried to work those in as well.
Those very brief intros bring me to the point of this post. I have discovered a website called ‘HabitRPG,’ in which the ordinary, everyday, perhaps less-than-fun or motivation-requiring tasks you have to do are turned into a RPG.
It has limited graphics very representative of the pixely old-school 8-bit style as you can see in the screen below, yet that lends to its charm. Your character is in the upper left, and you have some basic options to make it look like you, and you add tasks that need to be completed. They could be habits you’d like to form, daily tasks that need to be carried out, or one-off events that you can’t forget. True to RPG tropes, completing these tasks earns some experience for your character and some loot, which can be used to purchase rewards you set for yourself – such as watch an episode of a TV show or eat a Big Mac – or they can be used to purchase upgrades for your character. You know it would look good with a rainbow wig. You can even acquire multiple pets and mounts, and sell or buy at the market.
HabitRPG screen
If you don’t do the tasks you’ve set out for yourself, they will become darker and darker red until you lose some experience and have to start the task over. If you regularly perform well on the task it becomes green and you get additional rewards and experience, level up, improve your character and weapons and even fight some monsters.
The point of it all is to give yourself a reward or two for completing the mundane or difficult tasks of your day, provide motivation for doing the tasks, and give yourself a framework in which to complete them. It can be a very effective in that way. You can check in at the inn if you won’t be able to meet your normal quotas and there is a robust community – for example, if you want to start running a mile a day, you would add that to your habits or dailies and form a party or even a guild with other like-minded players. Then, by completing the task your party can gain experience and even take on a boss monster that might take weeks to defeat (through daily running), but skip days and the whole party will be weaker. It’s a neat implementation of responsibility. There are mounts you can buy, and subscribing for a fee grants some additional features, but none I found added to or took away from the overall experience in any significant way.
I’ve been using it for a little bit and it has helped. It lets you think about tasks in a different way than you might normally, and motivates and encourages you to complete them. The developers appear to make improvements and introduce new elements at a brisk pace, which always keeps the experience new. Finally, it has a companion app for iPhone and Android so you can check things off gain experience no matter where or you are or when you complete your tasks. Now there’s no excuse for not doing what you’ve set out for yourself.
Did Russian hackers almost bring down the nasdaq?
It has just been revealed that in 2010, Russian hackers, likely associated with the Russian government, and using using custom-designed malware to exploit zero-day vulnerabilities (something that should absolutely not be present in systems of this sort) were able to infiltrate the NASDAQs systems for the purposes of snooping around. However, it appears it also had the capabilities of delivering what is known as a ‘Logic Bomb;’ a destructive program that waits until a specific date occurs before it does its damage.
A destructive program destroying the internals of the NASDAQ’s servers would have wreaked havoc across the U.S. financial infrastructure, and the world’s as well. And it turns out that once the malware was discovered it appeared it could have wiped out the NASDAQ’s internals completely. So serious was it, that although no less than five separate federal security agencies had discovered the infiltration, they felt it had to be brought to the attention of the President.
The investigation discovered that not only did these Russian hackers have access to the NASDAQ’s servers, but Chinese hackers did as well along with other unidentified intruders, and that the servers were very vulnerable to attack with one person referring to it as a swamp. Although the potential impacts were catastrophic, the NASDAQ never reported the attacks nor indicated their severity. Expanding on the investigation, it turns out most banks and large financial institutions were possessed of the same vulnerabilities.
The scary part is that no conclusion was ever reached. Even the ultimate purpose of the intrusion is unclear; some say it was to do damage, some say it was just so the Russians could build an equivalent system. It also shows that we are not as far ahead as we often think in terms of security or technology; we still can’t definitively say it was actually the Russians. Great advances have been made since this event happened, but it’s a global race and it seems we’re still in no position to prevent it.
Amazon makes their next move
As some of you may already know, Amazon has unveiled Kindle Unlimited, a service which, for $9.99 a month offers unlimited books and audiobooks, and you can have as many in your library at any given time as you can handle.
Not only that, you can apparently go from reading a book to having it read to you then back to reading it without ever losing your place. Dubbed Whispersync, it appears the ebook must have the Whispersync capability to begin with, or it can be added after the book is downloaded, but there already tens of thousands of books that have it.
You’d have to be a pretty voracious reader to get true value out of this service, but there are certainly people who fit that description. Would you use it? I’m genuinely interested what people think of this service and whether they think it has value.
I’m all for prosthetics, but come on now
I’ll post, and we’ll talk about, some amazing prosthetics that can give almost a normal life back to people who have lost limbs from disease or trauma, but this just might be going to far.
At MIT they have developed a set of prosthetic fingers for people who still have all their fingers. And the prosthetic only offers two additional digits. It’s so you can have seven fingers instead of five. Why would you need this? Well, to stir your coffee for one, as the image below, blatantly stolen from the source using only five fingers, shows. Or perhaps if you have an especially troublesome itch, or perhaps if you have to poke 3 1/2 people in the eye all at once.
They are neat in their way; they’re controlled by a glove worn over the hand, so they exert the same amount of force and grip that the other fingers are exerting. I suppose there could be real applications for this, I just can’t think of what they might be. Still, progress.
Massive layoffs at Microsoft
Opinion incoming! We all knew it was coming, but the numbers were bigger than anyone had anticipated. 18,000 Microsoft employees will be laid off over the course of the next year. It’s a terrible circumstance, and one Microsoft isn’t completely familiar with. In fact, it was only in 2009 that the company made it’s first ever large-scale layoffs. Just like then, these are global with most of the cuts expected to come from the newly-acquired Nokia. Factory workers, especially in Finland but also in San Diego, Hungary and Beijing will be the largest casualties, but in a company-wide email CEO Satya Nadella emphasized that even management positions were on the chopping block as well. I’ll post the email, which was posted on Microsoft’s web site, below, and then offer some thoughts of my own.
From: Satya Nadella
To: All Employees
Date: July 17, 2014 at 5:00 a.m. PT
Subject: Starting to Evolve Our Organization and CultureLast week in my email to you I synthesized our strategic direction as a productivity and platform company. Having a clear focus is the start of the journey, not the end. The more difficult steps are creating the organization and culture to bring our ambitions to life. Today I’ll share more on how we’re moving forward. On July 22, during our public earnings call, I’ll share further specifics on where we are focusing our innovation investments.
The first step to building the right organization for our ambitions is to realign our workforce. With this in mind, we will begin to reduce the size of our overall workforce by up to 18,000 jobs in the next year. Of that total, our work toward synergies and strategic alignment on Nokia Devices and Services is expected to account for about 12,500 jobs, comprising both professional and factory workers. We are moving now to start reducing the first 13,000 positions, and the vast majority of employees whose jobs will be eliminated will be notified over the next six months. It’s important to note that while we are eliminating roles in some areas, we are adding roles in certain other strategic areas. My promise to you is that we will go through this process in the most thoughtful and transparent way possible. We will offer severance to all employees impacted by these changes, as well as job transition help in many locations, and everyone can expect to be treated with the respect they deserve for their contributions to this company.
Later today your Senior Leadership Team member will share more on what to expect in your organization. Our workforce reductions are mainly driven by two outcomes: work simplification as well as Nokia Devices and Services integration synergies and strategic alignment.
First, we will simplify the way we work to drive greater accountability, become more agile and move faster. As part of modernizing our engineering processes the expectations we have from each of our disciplines will change. In addition, we plan to have fewer layers of management, both top down and sideways, to accelerate the flow of information and decision making. This includes flattening organizations and increasing the span of control of people managers. In addition, our business processes and support models will be more lean and efficient with greater trust between teams. The overall result of these changes will be more productive, impactful teams across Microsoft. These changes will affect both the Microsoft workforce and our vendor staff. Each organization is starting at different points and moving at different paces.
Second, we are working to integrate the Nokia Devices and Services teams into Microsoft. We will realize the synergies to which we committed when we announced the acquisition last September. The first-party phone portfolio will align to Microsoft’s strategic direction. To win in the higher price tiers, we will focus on breakthrough innovation that expresses and enlivens Microsoft’s digital work and digital life experiences. In addition, we plan to shift select Nokia X product designs to become Lumia products running Windows. This builds on our success in the affordable smartphone space and aligns with our focus on Windows Universal Apps.
Making these decisions to change are difficult, but necessary. I want to invite you to my monthly Q&A event tomorrow. I hope you can join, and I hope you will ask any question that’s on your mind. Thank you for your support as we start to take steps forward in evolving our organization and culture.
Satya
Here are my thoughts: Firstly, this is to be expected after any merger. The fact is, this kind of thing introduces a lot of redundancy and that has to be dealt with. When there’s a merger, where the two merged companies overlap there will be a duplication of duties and that results in wasted money and a sluggish company. Other units are also being axed, such as the Xbox Studios which never had a chance to produce anything of note.
On the other hand, we are talking eighteen thousand layoffs. These are real people, people with families and kids and responsibilities, and in Oulu Finland where Nokia is the largest employer (I believe), the impact will be devastating.
And that leads to my biggest issue of all: The tone of the email. It is incredibly cold and managerial with no compassion for the human toll. He uses the word ‘Synergy’ three separate times, along with other management-speak terms such as ‘synthesize,’ ‘strategic alignment,’ and ‘people managers.’ You can read a much more thorough of the analysis at Ars Technica; they broke it down quite nicely. And sadly.
You know what screws (not the term I wanted to use, mind you) up every company it touches? Managers. bean counters. MBAs. When a once-great company has its heart and soul sucked out, and people ask “What happened to this company?” it’s always because managers came in and focused on numbers. That has to be done to some extent, I get that, but the focus on the bottom line becomes so deterministic that the creativity and the humanity are forced aside. And this email reads like it was written straight out of ‘Management 101.’ Bad management is bad, I’m not denying that. But management as it’s often taught in school is much, much worse. Cuts need to happen, I understand that, but the tone and language of his email rubs me the wrongest way possible.
I hope this turns out to be the right thing, and again I emphasize that I understand why he is doing what he is doing. It’s just the way he expresses it that I don’t like.
The press release regarding the cuts can be found here, and Stephen Elop’s (head of Nokia) email to employees, which may actually be worse than Nadella’s, can be read here.
You, YES YOU, can still comment on net neutrality
Remember the post I made about Net Neutrality, the one with John Oliver ripping on the whole idea of mergers and the loss of Internet freedom? Well guess what? Proving that the Internet works exactly as intended when left to the whims of the unwashed masses, his plea to leave comments about maintaining Net Neutrality crashed the FCCs servers! Democracy works!
Last night in class the comment was made that the time for comments had been extended until Friday because of the overwhelming response, and just today I saw on Cnet that not only had Netflix filed a comment of its own regarding Net Neutrality and interconnection (connecting directly to the major network carriers) and how did it ultimately explain its situation? that’s right, it just told regulators to watch the John Oliver video. It’s so important I’ve included it again below.
But don’t just watch the video! You – YES YOU – can leave a comment of your own of the FCC’s website that is still seeking comments. Say something, this is a very big deal. If Net Neutrality falls through, it will be the end of the Internet as we know it; higher prices for worse service, being nickel-and-dimed for everything you want to do (for example additional charges to use Facebook or Twitter), only having access to the services your cable company wants you to have access to, slower speeds, it will be a disaster. I mean really, since when did gigantic mergers ever result in better service? Will Time-Warner ever learn?
You can leave your comments for the FCC on this and a number of related issues here. Do it!
