Category: Technology

Categories
Internet Just Shelley

Cornered

Tuesday I called Charter Communications to see if I can continue the high speed internet but cancel the basic television lineup. I was informed that I could, but it would cost 10.00 more a month. Since I’m already paying twice as much for Internet access as Charter advertises at the company site and on TV, I wasn’t interested in being further penalized and said that I’ll just cancel both, then.

Only to be informed that to get the ‘good deal’ I have with my current internet service, I supposedly signed a contract in November to carry both television channels and internet for a year; if I don’t, I’ll be penalized 150.00. I don’t remember being told about $150.00 penalty for canceling my account. I asked where it said I had agreed to these terms. The Charter person said that when I signed the work order, I signed the agreement.

Tonight, the roommate and I thought we’d take in the free music concert at the Botanical Gardens. When we got there, I was surprised to find several parking attendants–big, burly, unsmiling, sun-glassed, parking attendants. Not the friendly, khaki clothed Park volunteers. No, these guys all looked like the type of people you would expect to come out of the woods from the movie, “Deliverance”–except wearing blue shirts, tan shorts, and wraparounds. They all had mullet hair cuts. It was surreal.

Following the signals, we found ourselves down one row where we were faced with two attendants, one of whom signaled me to pull into a slot between two cars. I signaled back that I couldn’t park between the cars–one was a very large Cadillac that stuck out in the back, and straddeled the parking line and I knew I couldn’t swing my car around enough to pull in. I pointed to the spot on the other side of the furthest car. The guy just looked at me, shook his head, and pointed at that one spot.

Now, the parking lot was about 70% empty. Still I started to reverse my car to see if I could angle it into the spot. About that time, a family had gotten out of their car and started walking behind me. So there I was, stuck between a couple of cute little kids, and two big, burly, unsmiling, black-mullet-haired, sun-glassed parking attendants.

I put my car back in drive, and started moving forward, yelling at the attendant to get out of my way, I was leaving.

And that’s exactly what I’m telling Charter Communications.

Categories
Web

Breaking out all Web 2.0 week

I don’t care if the weather is hot enough to burn you when you touch metal, I have to get out for some walks or go mad. And if I continue going mad, like I have been, I’ll chase you all away and then what value will I be?

Catarina from Flickr just announced a beta test for Yahoo’s new My Web 2.0. This follows on iTunes podcasting and Microsoft’s RSS — we’re busting out microformats and social networks all over.

There is an interesting twist to Yahoo’s My Web 2.0: your search results can be impacted by those who are in your community list. I’m still not sure about how this works, but if anyone wants to try this out with me, send me an email and I’ll send you an invite. Or you if you want, you can invite me. My Yahoo email address is p2psmoke.

I can see issues with search results being impacted by your community, and the fact that doesn’t this narrow our world vision rather than broaden it. But I’ve been critical of all this Web 2.0 technology all week, and this isn’t done, so I’m not doing it.

Categories
Technology

Bubble wrap up

I’m not going to be spending a lot of time on the the topic of Microsoft’s embrace of RSS, primarily because the implementation of much of this stretches too far out into the future. When the tech hits my hands, then I’ll kick the tires, and look under the hood.

I will say that I found the Microsoft examples of their RSS integration to be less than compelling: updates of calendars in Outlook and subscribing to Amazon wishlists. The former is just ActiveX subscriptions all over again; the latter seems more geared to bringing in the Amazon name than demonstrating anything particularly useful.

I can’t help thinking that, just like years ago when Microsoft realized it was late to the browser games, it’s now discovered it’s late to the syndication party. To make up for it, the company hopes to do something bigger and better: to redefine what a ‘feed’ really means, and in the process remind people not to forget who the Big Dog is. Yet I just don’t find the effort to be exciting.

I remember when Microsoft entered the browser wars, it did so with such a bang. It brought a lot of innovation to the concept of ‘web browser’: integration with the desktop, DHTML, object models, and even early work with CSS. It was the first browser to drop support for BLINK.

Along the way, though, it also wrecked havoc with its proprietary extensions and implementations–damage we’re still feeling today. Perhaps that’s why much of the positive feedback about the announcement yesterday is more along the lines of, “Wow, Microsoft hasn’t tried to take ownership of RSS. I’m impressed. And it’s honoring the CC license, too. Golly.”

In other words, Microsoft isn’t causing harm with its effort. Whew! Let’s wipe our brows, that was a close one! I ’spect, though, that some of the stronger proponents of this move will be changing their mind on the goodness of this effort in about 2-4 months time. Tops. (Maybe less.)

In the meantime, Atom is moving forward to its first release, and other XML vocabularies are appearing in new or increased uses. Even us bastard XMLers, the RDF clan, are actually doing something useful with our unreadable and indecipherable specification. We just don’t get stage space at Gnomedex.

While Microsoft has stood still, the world has moved on: Gimp, OpenOffice, Atom, LID, podcasting, Mac OS X built on BSD, Ubuntu Linux, NeoOffice, RDF, Firefox, MySQL, PHP, REST, WordPress, even Ajax–light, open, tasty little nibbles in a world suffering a surfeit of heavy metal infrastructures. We’ve moved on.

Microsoft’s RSS team has worked hard, and I respect their efforts. I enjoyed seeing their enthusiasm in the Channel 9 video, and I hope the company gives them space to do something exciting. The photo integration demonstration was one of the more interesting ones, but even that, as they say themselves, is dependent on bandwidth and copyright issues. Also the fact that most folks use PhotoShop or Gimp, though I imagine a plugin could be created to work with these non-Microsoft tools. Come to think of it — you could traverse feeds to pages and scrape the images to pop up into PS or Gimp now, wouldn’t have to wait for them to appear in enclosures. Or Microsoft, for that matter.

Eighteen months to see most of this rolled out is a long, long time. Especially when Microsoft is already eighteen months too late.

Categories
Web Writing

Dusting off the poet

It’s been a long time since I’ve indulged in any poetry at the site. Been a long time since I’ve haunted poets.org to look for just the right verse to suit a picture or a mood.

This week, I oiled my inner poet and set it on its creaky way only to find out that poets.org has undergone a rather significant reorganization. Faced with ‘new’ and wondering if there was anything in there for the inner geek as well as the inner poet, I explored about.

One new feature, or at least, new to me, is many of the poems now is have a topic association. For instance, if a poem is related to aging, other poems related to this topic are listed in the sidebar. This goes beyond groupings of poem by poet, period, and era. It definitely goes beyond keyword searches. It’s given me much thought, and new ideas, in my own continuing search for the case-insensitive semantic web.

The site also has a listening booth, though perhaps it already had this and I didn’t notice. Anyway, the listening book contains readings by poets and readings about poets, including my favorite Dylan Thomas.

Having satisfied the geek, at least for the moment, I returned to the poet, though poet is inaccurate and even a conceit, because I can barely walk and talk at the same time, much less rhyme. If, though, code is poetry, then I wield a mean curly bracket with the best of them. As for loops, you should see me loop–sexiest thing since fishnet stockings.

Returning to my poet, I accessed the improved search engine and searched on the keyword “words”; finding not one but two really great poems from contemporary poets among those returned. Since I’ve been remiss in letting my inner poet out for a walk, I’ll publish both.

Sorry, no photos to accompany the works. The weather continues in the 90s and heavily humid, and I have had no desire to sweat and puddle my way through new venues (though I must break out of my cave tomorrow morning before I bite the cat from cabin fever).

A Quick One Before I Go by David Lehman

There comes a time in every man’s life

when he thinks: I have never had a single

original thought in my life

including this one & therefore I shall

eliminate all ideas from my poems

which shall consist of cats, rice, rain

baseball cards, fire escapes, hanging plants

red brick houses where I shall give up booze

and organized religion even if it means

despair is a logical possibility that can’t

be disproved I shall concentrate on the five

senses and what they half perceive and half

create, the green street signs with white

letters on them the body next to mine

asleep while I think these thoughts

that I want to eliminate like nostalgia

0 was there ever a man who felt as I do

like a pronoun out of step with all the other

floating signifiers no things but in words

an orange T-shirt a lime green awning

How can you not love a poem that has a line like o was there ever a man who felt as I do like a pronoun out of step with all the other floating signifiers? This poem should be required reading for everyone who has found the truth. Then it should be required for everyone who thinks they have lost it.

All She Wrote by Harryette Mullen

Forgive me, I’m no good at this. I can’t write back. I never read your letter.

I can’t say I got your note. I haven’t had the strength to open the envelope.

The mail stacks up by the door. Your hand’s illegible. Your postcards were

defaced. Wash your wet hair? Any document you meant to send has yet to

reach me. The untied parcel service never delivered. I regret to say I’m

unable to reply to your unexpressed desires. I didn’t get the book you sent.

By the way, my computer was stolen. Now I’m unable to process words. I

suffer from aphasia. I’ve just returned from Kenya and Korea. Didn’t you

get a card from me yet? What can I tell you? I forgot what I was going to

say. I still can’t find a pen that works and then I broke my pencil. You know

how scarce paper is these days. I admit I haven’t been recycling. I never

have time to read the Times. I’m out of shopping bags to put the old news

in. I didn’t get to the market. I meant to clip the coupons. I haven’t read

the mail yet. I can’t get out the door to work, so I called in sick. I went to

bed with writer’s cramp. If I couldn’t get back to writing, I thought I’d catch

up on my reading. Then Oprah came on with a fabulous author plugging

her best selling book.

Another brilliant line and somewhat, oddly sad: I regret to say I’m unable to reply to your unexpressed desires. But now I have a highly original way of apologizing for unanswered email. What is your excuse?

Categories
Standards Technology

What do you want from digital identity

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I removed the last paragraph from my last posting. It added nothing to the discussion and was unnecessarily snarky. Still, doing so doesn’t impact on the message threaded throughout the post that *I’m not supportive of universal (read that ‘federated’) digital identities.

I don’t believe there is a system that can’t be cracked. What I do believe is that there is a tradeoff between the willingness to spend time and energy in cracking a system, and how universally it’s used. One overall, agreed on universal digital identity system that every major financial, economic, government player has bought into seems to me to be a mighty big target. It’s not so much that it represents a widely used identity infrastructure; it’s that behind the infrastructure is some very tasty data.

Additionally, I’m not sure that there is demand for this type of overall identity. In the midst of these discussions, Johhanes Ernst posed the question: why do we want digital identity? Is it for seamless enterprise wide access? Is it to facilitate commerce? Eliminate the existing highly fractured state of security, with implementations that range from heavily robust to wide open?

I personally favor the concept of ’single sign-on’ where I can use the same name and passwords at different sites, without having to re-input my contact information, and without having to remember different connection information with each. Even then, I would most likely only use something like this with sites where the cost of exposure of the data is minimal. Though it would be tempting to want to store my credit card on my machine, and have a remote system handshake with my local computer to exchange the information without me having to do so, I don’t find the fact that I have to re-input the data with each purchase to be an overwhelming burden. Not to the point of storing this information on my machine–whether it is my dual Windows/Linux machine, or my Mac.

Work on enhancing the security of our data exchanges is a goodness; but the farther from my machine I can store sensitive data, the happier I’ll be. In this discussion, rather than focus on separating the specification of a security infrastructure from the implementation, I’d rather discuss separating the storage of the data from the transport.

(Of course, some companies require that you store your credit card information on their machines, but I don’t know how something like InfoCards would eliminate this–unless part of the architecture also provides an ‘on-demand’ request for the card information from the site back to us. )

To answer his own question, Johhanes sees digital identity as a way of empowering people:

So let me tell you what excites me about Digital Identity: it is the transformational power that Digital Identity can bring — assuming it is done right — to empower individuals and groups in ways that are highly desirable but impossible without. Or, in plain language: the new products and features that only can be built with Digital Identity and will be built as soon as we have it. And we will never look back.

I thought this, at first, had to do with authenticity, and establishing that we’re who we say we are. However, from the examples Johhanes lists, this doesn’t seem to be the case. Examples, such as Marc Cantor’s digital lifestyle aggregation, where all of our digital devices work out how to integrate themselves; and Johhanes own company’s software, which …is aware of the user’s immediate situation, and proactively supports them in that situation, instead of being just able to offer a bunch of remote websites that are very clueless about the user and thus not very helpful.

I don’t know that we need digital identity for the latter — I have extensions added to my browser that lets me know when a site has RDF/XML I can examine, or a syndication feed I can link to. I’d rather passively put easily discoverable information out on a site using established ‘hooks’ and then use generic discovery tools to find this data elsewhere, then build something in them reflecting my identity.

I don’t think the power of the internet is based on the concept that eventually, everyone will know your name. I think it’s based on the fact that everyone doesn’t know your name.

*There goes my planetary status on Planet Identity I imagine