Mea Vita (My Life)

Aviation Innovation Through Simplicity

2012-02-05T13:55:00.000-08:00

Instead of trying to solve every possible problem when developing new technology, start with the simplest solution for the most important use case.

Apple

Apple is king at accomplishing this through design and UX. Instead of trying to boil the ocean, they go for the clean and simple solution that will account for the vast majority of use cases.

Amazon & eBay

Two of the biggest dot com success stories of 1990s were Amazon and eBay.

Amazon started off selling only books - instead of everything under the sun. Why books? Because, other than a few specialized products such as jewelry, books are some of the most valuable items/volume that consumers purchase regularly.

When eBay launched their website, they didn't attempt to solve the clearing house problem dealing with the small amount of fraudulent buyers or sellers who failed to deliver the goods or funds, as agreed. There are courts and people's reputations to solve bad service issues.

First in Aviation

The Wright brothers were the first to make a controlled, human flight, in a heavier-than-air powered machine at Kitty Hawk, NC.

How was it possible that two bicycle mechanics were able to invent the airplane where others, before them such Langley and Chanute, had failed? The answer is straightforward, they simplified the problem.

Langley and Chanute tried to solve two key aspects of aviation at once: flight and inherent stability. Inherent stability is a key feature of boats. As a boat rocks back and forth due to wind or waves, it inherently rights itself (so long as it's not flipped or flooded).

The Wright brothers decided to forgo the inherent stability problem of flight and they took a simpler approach to solving the aviation challenge by borrowing from their experience as bicycle mechanics. A bicycle - the most efficient human powered machine - is inherently unstable. It cannot stand up, on its own two wheels, if you let it go.

A bicycle's stability comes from two key principles: the rider continuously shifting balance and the bicycle's movement (centrifugal and gyroscopic forces created by the spinning wheels). Keep your center of gravity over the two wheels while moving and all is well.

Whereas Langley and Chanute wanted inherent stability in their airplane's design, the Wright brothers solved for something simpler in their flying machine. The Wright brothers only wanted lift. They believed that stability would come from the pilot as he shifted his weight and manipulated control surfaces. In other words, the Wright brothers wanted absolute control and they made no concessions to built-in stability.

The Wright brothers were able to solve the airplane challenge first because they solved a simpler problem basing their solution on a bicycle's principle of instability over that of a boats inherent stability.

While simpler doesn't guarantee success in tech or business it's usually a good starting point.

Mac Password Recovery in Three Steps

2012-02-05T06:46:00.001-08:00

Have you ever stored a password for a website or e-mail account in your Mac's Keychain, only to completely forget it when you needed it later?

I forgot that Keychain has a simple feature which will show you any password you've stored in it.

This past New Year's Eve, I was at the childhood home of a high school friend where I was showing him, his mother, and girlfriend how to stream photos, music, and video to their Apple TV from their computers, iPhones, and iPads.

When it came time for my friend's mother to enter the password for her iTunes account she had forgotten it. In the blink of an eye, she opened the Mac's Keychain app, which is in the Applications/Utilities folder. "Go Mrs. G!," I thought to myself. I suspect that she learned this trick from her brother who's worked at the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue. And a valuable trick it is.

Three Steps

1. Once you've opened Keychain, click on the username of the account that you used to login (jmoreno in the above screenshot).

2. Click on Passwords category, since it's a password that you want to recover. You'll have to find the MobileMe, iCloud, iTunes, etc account that you're looking for under the Name column (also, you can enter the account name, i.e. iTunes, Mail, etc, in the search box, in the upper right to narrow down the search).

3. Click on the Show Password checkbox. Keychain will ask you to enter your Mac's account password. The password that you're now entering is the one that you use when running a software update or after rebooting. (You need to enter your Mac's account password since it's used to decrypt the password that you're looking for.) Once you've enter your computer's password the password will be displayed "in the clear."

Old Apple Joke

2012-02-04T21:38:00.000-08:00

We used have an old Microsoft joke that we enjoyed telling when I worked at Apple.

One day, some Apple engineers and Microsoft engineers ended up at the same train station on their way to a conference. After each Microsoft engineer bought a train ticket, they watched and wondered as the Apple engineers only bought a single ticket for their entire group.

On the train ride, just before the train conductor came to punch tickets. The Microsoft engineers saw the entire group of Apple engineers pile into the lavatory. The Microsoft engineers watched as the train conductor knocked on the lavatory door and said, "Ticket, please." They were amazed when the lavatory door opened a crack with a hand holding out a single ticket which the train conductor punched, returned, and went on his way.

On the train ride back from the conference, the Microsoft engineers, never wanting to let an opportunity to pass without copying Apple, bought one train ticket for their group. But, this time, they were puzzled when the Apple engineers boarded the train without purchasing a single train ticket.

Just before the train conductor came to collect tickets, the Microsoft engineers all piled into the lavatory just as they'd seen their Apple counterparts do.

At this point, one of the Apple engineers knocked on the lavatory door and said, "Ticket, please."

Return from Cali

2012-01-30T20:59:00.000-08:00

High Dynamic Range Imaging

2012-01-28T20:59:00.000-08:00

High dynamic range imaging (HDR) is my favorite camera feature that was released in iOS 4.1, last year. HDR allows you to take a photo with a higher contrast between light and dark areas (i.e. dynamic range).

The basic principle is simple. When pressing the shutter button, three photos are taken. One photo is normally exposed, another is underexposed, and the third is overexposed. These three photos are combined, on the fly, to create a single image where the overexposed areas of the normal photo are replaced with the areas from the underexposed image and vice versa.

Instead of areas of a photo being too light or too dark, they come out just right.

One downside is that you can't photograph fast moving objects since there will be noticeable movement in the final HDR image. However, Apple's camera app cannot only compensate for this, sometimes, but it also has the ability to take an out-of-focus or blurry photo and, amazingly enough, correct it. Another downside is when you want high contrast in your photo, since the point of HDR is to reduce contrast.

The iPhone gives you the option to save the HDR image, only, or both the HDR and the normally exposed photo. I recommend always saving both to the camera roll so you'll have the option to pick the best one.

What Are Objects?

2012-01-28T20:49:00.000-08:00

In computer science, there is the concept of objects as it relates to object-oriented programming (OOP) which is sometimes confused with basic data.

For example, Amazon's S3 web service has a concept of buckets which hold objects. But, there's no reason why these objects can't be referred to as files since that's all they really are. Files are a collection of data on a file system. Data can be structured to represent many different things such as records in a database, images on a hard drive, or music on an MP3 player.

What makes an object special is that it is not only data, but has behavior, too. In order to see or act on the data inside an object, it must be accessed through its methods. Generally speaking, this is the only (and preferred) way of reading, writing, and updating an object's data.

This may not seem like a big deal, but it is since, whenever an object is passed around, all of its behavior is passed along, too.

For example, in a non-object world, I could read data from a database, manipulate it, perhaps improperly like incorrectly calculating tax or interest, and then update the database with the bad data.

However, if I pass along an object representing that same data from the database, the methods (i.e. business logic) that wrap and act on that data, protect the data's integrity. How the data is manipulated can be private, like a black box, but how you can access it is publicly described by its application programming interface (API).

I don't need to know how my car engine works or how gasoline is made, all I need to do is plug the gas hose into my gas tank. If I try to stick the diesel hose into the my tank, it won't fit.

The beauty of objects is that they can be plugged into each other and the data just flows. This is very different from previous programming paradigms, such as procedural languages, like BASIC, where each step of the program must be followed in sequence; or declarative languages like SQL where the programmers don't describe the steps to take, rather they declare what is to be accomplished, such as, "show me all the people with the last name equal to Smith."

Special Relativity Time Dilation

2012-01-28T19:52:00.000-08:00

I recently had a conversation where I was explaining why time slows down as you travel near the speed of light.

The explanation is rather simple if you think of light as particles, like bullets, called photons. One beauty of light is that it moves at a constant rate when traveling through a vacuum or medium. It doesn't move faster or slower unless you change the medium it's traveling in.

Thought Experiment

Imagine that you're standing at a fixed distance from a clock. As light reflects off the clock, it strikes your eyes at a fixed rate such that the clock's second hand sweeps at the same rate. Time is ticking away like normal.

Now, imagine if you are moving away from the clock at near the speed of light. Since the photos (bullets) are moving at a fixed rate, it will take longer and longer for each particle, reflected off the clock, to catch up with you. Therefore, you'll experience the sweeping of the clock's second hand at a slower rate. Hence, time appears to slow down - the clock looks as if it's running slower.

But, time isn't really slowing down. The watch on your wrist will mark time normally from your point of view. From the point of view of the clock, which is also marking time normally, it will look as if you're slowing down, too.

Further Reading

While this is a naive application of time dilation, since acceleration and deceleration must be taken into account, it really does appear that time slows down when traveling away from an observer at the speed of light. A more interesting observation is the twins paradox where one traveling twin ages slower than his other, non-traveling twin.

Et Tu, iCloud

2012-01-22T15:53:00.000-08:00

iCloud still has some critical bugs to work out.

In my mind, I considered Apple's iCloud akin to Amazon S3 for the consumer. S3 allows users to upload files which are stored on Amazon's servers in three different places, for redundancy. While Amazon Web Services have had occasional down time, they've never lost S3 files that I'm aware of.

Last Tuesday, my iPhone started running hot and the battery was running down very quickly. After troubleshooting the problem, over two days, by switching between WiFi and 3G, without any luck, I decided to reset my iPhone to original factory settings and restore it from iCloud.

iCloud Benefits

Launched this past October, iCloud stores a backup of your media and data on Apple's servers instead of iTunes. The beauty is multifold – at least in theory.

First is that you don't lose your iPhone backup if your computer's hard drive dies.

Second, is that it's very efficient in that iCloud doesn't actually store your apps or music, in your backup, since Apple already has a copy of these files on their servers. In other words, they don't count music and app backup storage against your allotment of 5, 20, or 50 GB.

Third is the fact that iCloud allows you to share and sync media and files across all of your devices – which happens automatically, in the background. Change a playlist on your desktop and, within seconds, you'll see the updated playlist on your Apple TV or iPad. Buy a song on your iPad, and it's immediately downloaded to iTunes on your desktop or iPhone.

My favorite iCloud feature is Photo Stream. Snap a photo on your iPhone and it's copied to your iPad or iPhoto automatically.

Backup Regrets

Unfortunately, I didn't take all the necessary precautions before resetting my iPhone to factory defaults, resulting in the loss of my iPhone's camera roll containing more than 12,000 photos that I've take, over the years, on my iPhones.

I forgot the 3-2-1 rule of backups: Three backups, on two different media, with one stored off site. In my case, I only had one current backup stored off site, in iCloud, but I failed to make two other backups.

Don't Give Up The Ship

Of course, I didn't go down without a fight. Over the course of several days, I tried every combination of restoring my iPhone that I could think of.

Some of my iPhone restorations required 30 hour sessions of updating and redownloading content in vain, followed by three trips to the local Genius Bar at Apple.

Two days in a row, I left my iPhone at home when I went to work so it could continue downloading, without interruption, on my speedy 50+ Mbps Internet connection since I thought that the 30 hour wait was due to my 19 GB camera roll download.

But, in the end, the final option was to replace my iPhone with a new one, in case it was defective. But, still no luck.

Postmortem

I have 25 GBs of iCloud storage. My backups where a little shy of 25 GB, but there were multiple iPhone backups in iCloud. Surely I would have expected at least one of my iCloud backups to succeed. But, alas, no.

Restore Incomplete

iCloud thought that my 12,000 photos were on its servers, but it just couldn't seem to download them to my iPhone.

After completing each restoration attempt, iTunes also thought that my 19 GB worth of photos where on my iPhone. But, were they really? It seems not.

Needless to say, it was very disconcerting to see the Restore Incomplete alert: Some items could not be restored from the iCloud backup.

Cupertino, We Have a Problem

It appears that there's a bug with the iCloud restore process which causes internal, repeated crashes. As my iPhone tried to restore apps, a process would crash, before the app finished installing, resulting in a repeated download and installation attempt. I suspect that a big chunk of the thirty hours spent restoring my iPhone was due to it redownloading the same apps over and over again. The internal iPhone diagnostics and usage data shows scores of crash logs, each about minute or two apart.

Saving Grace

So, did I really lose my 12,000 photos? Not exactly. While I'm highly disappointed that I can no longer have them on my iPhone's camera roll, nearly all of them are in iPhoto, which backs up to my Time Capsule. My most recent photos that weren't in iPhoto were, luckily, on my Photo Stream, so I copied them into iPhoto.

As a side note, my Photo Stream doesn't seem to go all the way back to when I first started using it. There only seem to be a few hundred photos in my Photo Stream – it's suppose to keep the last 1,000. Hmm.

Still, it's highly disappointing that I couldn't simply recover everything from my iCloud backup. The Apple iCloud team has some work to do.

Life in a Day

2012-01-14T15:55:00.000-08:00

It takes a lifetime to experience life.

But, what if you wanted to experience most everything that life has to offer in a single day?

Life in a Day, released a year ago, covers life around the world on July 24, 2010 in an amazing way.

This crowd sourced documentary, produced by Ridley Scott, opens during the pre-dawn hours where we see what some people experience before most of us wake up in the morning. It then takes you through that Saturday's seemingly mundane, yet, intimate and raw events from the point of view of anyone, rich and poor, young and old, sick and healthy, in developed and developing nations.

On this single day, one question is answered, "What was it like to be alive on July 24, 2010?", and three questions are asked:

1. What do you love?

2. What do you fear?

3. What's in your pocket?

The final moments of July 24, 2010

It's nearly midnight now and I'm running out of time…

The sad part is I spend all day long hoping for something amazing to happen, something great, something to appreciate this day and to be part of it and to show the world that there's something great that can happen every day of your life, in everyone's life.

But, the truth is that it doesn't always happen.

All day long nothing really happened.

I want people to know that I'm here. I don't want to cease to exist.

And today, even though nothing great really happened, tonight I feel as if something great happened.

YouTube

You can can watch the entire 95 minute production of Life in a Day embedded below or on Netflix streaming (turn on Closed Captioning to read the English translations).

Update: I was wondering what I did, myself, on July 24, 2010. Thanks to Facebook's new timeline feature, I figured out, in two clicks, that I had dinner at my father-in-law's.

PS - If you don't have time to watch the entire movie, but still want to experience life - and a great love story - then just watch the first four minutes of Up.

Job Satisfaction With Room Key

2012-01-11T18:04:00.000-08:00

Nothing says job satisfaction like having the press cover your work.

Today, I was happy to see a number of news outlets cover the launch of a heretofore secret project that I've been working on: roomkey.com. While I only had a tiny part in this project, as the product manager, it was a big part of my life since I began working at Wyndham.

TechCrunch

I was also a little surprised to see that TechCruch covered the news too, Six Hotel Giants Team Up To Launch Hotel Search Engine Roomkey.com, Buy Hotelicopter. TechCrunch specializes in covering high tech news and I don't exactly consider hotel industry news high-tech, but when you get the largest companies in the industry together, it's well worth covering.

In a nutshell, Room Key is a joint venture of the world's six largest hotel chains who've created a search engine amongst themselves. After customers visit one of the six partner sites, they may be presented with an opportunity to see comparable hotel rooms from one of the other partners.

Poor Man's Performance Monitoring

2012-01-08T10:39:00.000-08:00

Amazon has been great at rolling out high end (enterprise class) web services which don't require expensive or long term contracts. Instead of signing a contract, Amazon Web Services are "pay by the drink" which literally means that a monthly bill can be less than a dime. You simply pay for storage and bandwidth used.

But, I've noticed one, key, service that Amazon has yet to roll out: website performance monitoring.

CDN

Five years ago, if your website had to deliver large media files, such as audio or video, then your best option was (and still is) a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN distributes copies of files all over the world so that they're as close as possible to the users which means faster download times. The problem with CDNs of the past, like Akamai, is that it's a service for the big boys requiring long term, expensive, contracts. Of course, when you spend thousands of dollars each month you do get enterprise class support and dashboards, but, many smart, lean, companies can develop their own dashboard specific to their needs.

A couple years ago Amazon began selling their own CDN service, called CloudFront, with no contract. CloudFront, like all Amazon Web Services, is "pay by the drink," so that any startup could deliver video and music just as fast as Netflix streaming movies or the Apple iTunes Store. Just like Amazon now offers a CDN web service, I can see them offering a performance monitor web service in the future.

Performance Monitoring

Performance monitoring is a way to monitor the status and performance of a website. Is the website up or down? How long does it take for your website to load for users in New York, L.A., and Paris? Are there any bottle necks causing delays?

There are two basic ways to monitor performance: internally and externally.

External Performance Monitoring

External performance monitoring would be at home as an Amazon Web Service. There are no shortages of companies providing external website performance monitor services and dashboards for hundreds or thousands of dollars per month. The services these companies provide are very complex and many times they offer more than any one company requires. Also, a company paying for these services will require a team of employees to gather and process the performance reports.

External performance monitors usually run automated scripts which follow a critical path, such as logging into an e-commerce website and making a purchase. These scripts can either run on simulated web browsers, in a data center, or on actual web browsers in homes or offices so that they can simulate the "last mile" performance. The latter can be very helpful when companies try to troubleshoot seemingly "strange" problems such as why a website has problems loading only for some customers and not others. Is the problem due to a misconfigured router, a misconfigured DNS server, etc?

Since Amazon already has points-of-presense all over the world, they would have little problem setting up an external performance monitoring service API.

Internal Performance Monitor

Even if a small company doesn't have the financial means to afford an external performance monitoring service, they should still implement simple internal performance measures on their servers. Off the top of my head, I can think of two simple measures which should be implemented from the get-go: web server segregation and code timers.

Web Server Segregation

Static web server resources should be segregated from web servers that serve up dynamic web pages. If this can't be physically done by using separate hardware, then use different host names and web server logs for dynamic versus static resources. If you only have one web server, then simply move all of your static web resources to Amazon's S3 web service.

Monitoring your dynamic web server logs is one way to determine what your customer's UX is like. I use Apache with the following log format:

%h %l %u %t "%r" %>s %b "%{Referer}i" %T

The most import part of this log format, for performance monitoring, is the last part, %T. This shows how long it took for the dynamic page to be requested, generated, and served to the client's web browser. Here's an example from an Apache log:

ool-182e94c5.dyn.optonline.net - - [08/Jan/2012:16:45:59 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 66321 "-" 2

The last number, 2, tells me that it took two seconds for this dynamic web page, which is 66,321 bytes long, to be generated and downloaded to the client's web browser. Historically, that number is less than one second in my logs, so seeing two seconds warrants further investigation which is where code timers come into play.

Code Timers

Code that is executed which could take longer than a second or requires "heavy lifting", such as generating reports, should be timed. All API calls to third parties, i.e. Twitter or Facebook, should also be timed and logged.

Here's the source code for a simple Timer.java utility class based on Apple's WebObjects app server.

The following Java method, which verifies a Twitter user's credentials, is used in actual production code. It demonstrates the timer's simplicity. The key to using the timer is that it's started at the beginning of the method and then the timer's results are logged just before returning from the method. The next step would be to log the high, low, and average response times and report them.

public static String twitterUsernameForUser(User user)

{

Timer timer = Timer.startNewTimer();

String twitterUsernameForUser = null;

Twitter twitter = new Twitter();

twitter.setOAuthConsumer(System.getProperty("twitter4j.oauth.consumerKey"),

System.getProperty("twitter4j.oauth.consumerSecret"));

AccessToken accessToken = new AccessToken(user.twitterOAuthToken(),

user.twitterOAuthTokenSecret());

twitter.setOAuthAccessToken(accessToken);

try

{

twitter.verifyCredentials();

twitterUsernameForUser = twitter.verifyCredentials().getScreenName();

} catch (TwitterException e)

{

e.printStackTrace();

NSLog.debug.appendln("Caught exception. Invalid twitter credentials.");

}

timer.stop();

NSLog.debug.appendln

("OAuthTwitterUtilities.twitterUsernameForUser() elapsed time: "

+ timer.elapsedTime());

return twitterUsernameForUser;

}

But, even if Amazon offers a web performance monitoring service, you should still segregate your web server and time your network API calls.

Two Ships Crashing in the Night

2011-12-24T13:14:00.000-08:00

Video chat is the future of social media.

Social media allows companionship without being present. Generally, media is fixed, meaning that it's recorded on paper, hard disks, etc. But, if we focus more on the social aspect, and less on the media part, then it can also be a live stream without necessarily being recorded such as a telephone call. While there are many aspects of social media that are entirely new, one, in particular, is very interesting to me: random video chat.

I've had several technological epiphanies in my life as I suddenly recognized that a new technology was going to be transformational and innovative.

Epiphanies

My earliest technological epiphany was when I got my first computer - it was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I, first introduced in 1977, and I loved it. I was amazed by it's processing capability. Today, we take for granted the power of the personal computer. But, back then, we marveled at what it could do. I used to use my Model I to help my father bubble sort product serial numbers for his job when I was in junior high school.

My second epiphany was in the early 1980s when I hooked up my TRS-80 Model I to a modem for the first time. I spent the entire night logging onto bulletin board system (BBS) after BBS and I ended up pulling my first all-nighter well before high school.

My third technological epiphany was the first time that I logged on to the World Wide Web. I had been using Internet e-mail since the late 1980s, but I was late to the WWW, in the mid 1990s, since I was on active duty in the Marines and deployed to the Middle East. However, I still remember the first website that visited - it was a triathlon news site.

All of the world's information was instantaneously at my finger tips.

Random Video Chat
This leads to my latest innovative epiphany: Random video chat.

While video chat sites, such as Chatroulette, Stickam, and Tinychat, that first gained attention a couple years ago, have a bad rap on the surface, there's something about them that's amazing on a deeper level.

To paraphrase the French poet Jean Cocteau, fashion produces beautiful things that become ugly over time, whereas art produces ugly things that become more beautiful with time.

Sites like ChatRoulette truly fall into the art category.

On video chat websites, there is no shortage of men exposing themselves. I'm guessing that 90% of the visitors to these types of sites are male and it seems like a big chunk of them broadcast their crotch, as if there's much of a chance of any woman stopping to watch and partake in the show.

While these sites do have an ugly side, there's an interesting, hidden, aspect that can be very engaging and entertaining.

If you give it a try, you can make a connection with someone – a connection that's on par with a chat at the bar or cafe. The fascinating part is that the conversation can take place with people from all over the world in virtually any setting such as the living room, bedroom, classroom, or car to name a few that I've participated in.

In literally less than a second, someone has popped up on your computer screen as the both of you make a decision to stay or "next" each other. No account needs to be created, it's anonymous, and instantaneous – no need to follow, friend, or subscribe - it's just you and a random partner, mano a mano.

Most connections last less than a second, but it's not unheard of for a conversation to last many, many hours.

I'm guessing that the average age on these sites is late teens to early twenties. From time to time, I've received some unpleasant reactions when these young adults see me: the old man.

Virgin Experiences
After nexting dozens and dozens of men's crotches and being nexted, myself, I discovered that I could do better if I didn't have my camera on, after all, I'm no spring chicken. At this point, I could engage people in a conversation before turing on my camera.

One of my first chat experiences was explicitly shocking with a college senior at large midwestern university. I could see her, but she couldn't see me, so it was a one way video chat without voice as I told her about my former girlfriend who attended the same university. After I figured out how to turn on my microphone, I could talk to her and she'd type back, but she couldn't speak since her roommate was sleeping.

She was a very conservative and bright religious Muslim who grew up in the U.S. and never drank alcohol. But, she suffered from a pseudo preacher's kid syndrome due to her ultraconservative lifestyle. I was shocked when she asked me, a faceless stranger, to tell her what to do. She was, by no means, teasing me, with - she was 100% serious, trust me on that. (Suffice to say that we didn't go there and nothing happen.)

I was thinking that her story wasn't real - this was all too fast and easy - but her info all checked out via Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. Where were websites like this when I was a young, single guy???

Innovation
Social video chat is the very definition of innovation, which is anything that reduces the cost of a transaction in terms of time or money – live and in person. No longer is it necessary to visit single's bars or dating sites that lead to so many dead end first dates. Now, you can experience personal connections in any safe and personal environment of your choosing.

The one night stand, perfected in the 20th Century, has now evolved into the one hour stand with video chat, "Don't worry, Baby, I'll still respect you in 60 minutes."

Memorable Experiences
Without a doubt, my first experience was unique, but I couldn't help but be intrigued.

My next stop was a classroom in Scotland as several students were huddled around a laptop during a class. We chatted for about 30 minutes until class ended.

I chatted with a high school student who was poolee in the Marine Corps Delayed Entry Program. We spent some time talking about the Marines as I related my experiences to him.

I briefly talked to a student in Singapore who had his name, Darren, tattooed on his wrist. He complained to me that, after "nexting" hundreds of people, he'd only seen two women, but I don't think he was giving up.

I actually found some people my own age who were sitting in their kitchen in Iowa drinking beer… rather, they had already drunk a lot of beer.

Watching my wife and her former college roommate try it out for the first time was priceless as guys would shower them with complements so they could talk to two women. For some reason, the guys from Turkey were the most polite.

Random Tech Support
By far, my most rewarding experience was with a 32 year old women in the Netherlands who was a school teacher. She was a little unhappy since she had recently switched from her Windows PC to an iMac and, when she synced up her iPod to the new iMac, it had erased her iPod music library.

We chatted for a bit as she imported her CDs into iTunes. She was a little frustrated poking around her new computer since she couldn't find the backspace key. When I told her that the trick to backspace on the Mac was to hold down the FN key when pressing the delete key, she promised to name her first kid after me, Joe "Backspace."

Cheating?
So, is it cheating if you're in a relationship and seeking social interaction in a video chat? That all depends on the rules with your significant other. Is it cheating to go to a bar and talk to another patron? Probably not, as long as it's platonic. As a matter of fact, video chat is definitely safer, cheaper, and faster than physically visiting a bar or cafe. The only downside (or maybe it's an upside) is that it's random and anonymous. But, things probably won't work out if you live in China and find your soulmate in Timbuktu.

Video Chat's Dark Side
Random video chat doesn't come without a chilling dark side that goes far beyond the plethora of penises. While consenting adults are free to do as they please, it seems that people, especially the ladies, either forget or don't care that their video chat partner can easily record their interaction for nefarious purposes.

Even more chilling is that any child can log on to these video chat websites simply by attesting that they are over 18 with a simple check of a box. While the interaction is random and probably too distant for the possibility of a physical interaction, it's still frightening to think about how impressionable children can be.

The Future
Video chat offers a lot of possibilities. I've met many foreigners who were simply interested in practicing their English. It's also a great way for socially awkward people to learn how to speak to others. But, here's a newsflash for the guys: You'll increase your chances by being respectful, rather than rude, to to the ladies. Instead of clicking next a couple thousand times and greeting women with, "Show me your boobs!", try treating them with dignity and you'll be surprised at the results.

I think Patti Stanger should use these random video chat sites to screen her guys before appearing on Millionaire Matchmaker. She'd get a quick indication of how her client candidates treat the ladies.

Why?
Why do they come? What do they want? Well… why do we sit at the hotel bar, when on a business trip, instead of taking our drink back up to the room? We want to be social... we want to be a part of something bigger than ourselves.

It's rather amazing to drop right into someone's personal life for a private conversation only to never hear from them again. But, if you want to try it out for yourself, you can't be shy or thin skinned. After all, it is the Internet and anything goes.

It should only be a matter of time until Facebook rolls out video chatrooms amongst friends.

Partial Panel Failure in IMC

2011-12-18T13:59:00.000-08:00

One of the obvious differences between flying a plane and driving a car is that you can't simply stop when you have a problem. Running out of gas or having an instrument failure is serious.

I recently flew down to Annapolis, from northern New Jersey, for a couple days of board meetings. It was raining and I was in the clouds at 4,000' with a 30+ knot headwind slowing me down for more than 90 minutes. About 20 minutes outside of Lee Airport in Annapolis, my glass cockpit panel ("digital dashboard") had a partial failure, at night, in IMC (the clouds). Since the panel is digital with diagnostics, as the attitude and heading indicator tumbled, it recognized the failure and displayed a warning message followed by two big red "X"s.

Mayday?

As much as I love high tech, avionics failures like this aren't completely unexpected so I have traditional backup instruments. It took me a few minutes to confirm that the digital airspeed and altitude indicators were working fine since they displayed the same readings as my analog dials. As unnerving as this failure was, it didn't represent an inflight emergency.

Rather than rely on my autopilot, I "hand flew" the plane as air traffic control vectored me for the approach into Annapolis. The clouds were lower than I'd liked, but when I broke through them and saw the airport, I set myself up for landing. It took me longer than usual to get down to the runway, in the dark, so I decided to "go-around" since it's a shorter runway than I'm used to using. On my second attempt, I landed, albeit, I used up almost the entire runway since stopping in the rain took longer than normal. Unfortunately, during most of my time in Annapolis, it was pouring.

Cleared for Takeoff

When I departed Annapolis, two days later, I was hoping that, somehow, the panel problem would have resolved itself. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. But, since all of the backup equipment was working fine, I could fly home under instrument flight rules. Even better was that there wasn't a cloud in the sky as air traffic control vectored me over downtown Annapolis.

Going Solo

I called the glass cockpit manufacture who pointed me to several authorized resellers in northern New Jersey and I chose a reseller based at Sussex Airport. Yesterday's flight from Morristown to Sussex only took about 20 minutes.

Since Sussex Airport doesn't have a manned control town, pilots have to announce where they are. When I was about 12 miles away, I could hear steady chatter as pilots were announcing their positions. But, one voice stood out since it sounded like a young girl. She was obviously taking off and landing, repeatedly. Just as I was about to enter the traffic pattern, she announced her position and I saw her about a mile in front of me. This was helpful – I had never flow into this airport so I didn't know where the landmarks were to make my turns.

A typical landing pattern is entered at 45° to the runway and flown parallel to the runway, but in the opposite direction of landing, followed by a left turn perpendicular to the runway, and then, finally, another left turn, to line up with the runway. Trailing another plane, into an unfamiliar airport, makes things easier – just like following another car's taillights, in the dark, on an unfamiliar road.

As I followed the young pilot in front of me, I heard someone from the ground give her some words of encouragement. It turned out that she was a student pilot on her first solo flight. No matter how old your are, your first solo flight is both exciting and stressful since it's the first time you're flying an airplane without anyone else aboard. It's just you and your new skills, all alone in the plane. Actually, your "first solo" isn't just one take off and landing, but rather it's three in a row and it's something you'll never forget.

Repairs

Ironically, I had to go to an "old school" airport for my high tech repairs. Even though Sussex Airport is only about 90 minutes from Manhattan, I definitely felt like I was at an airport deep in the country.

Of course, high tech, being what it is, meant that we couldn't reproduce the problem with the glass cockpit panel at the avionics shop. Now I'll have to wait until the problem happens again. But, I did have an opportunity to have the repair tech troubleshoot an intermittent VOR. Turns out that repairing the VOR was a simple fix which involved simply re-soldering a ground wire.

While the repair tech worked on my avionics, I had a lengthy conversation with an older pilot who turned out to be the grandfather of the 17 year old high school girl who I had followed into the airport. Her family had come to the airport to watch her solo. She initially planned to attend the Air Force Academy, but when she found out that she had to wait another year to qualify for a Congressional nomination she visited Embry-Riddle, in Florida. Embry-Riddle, also know as "The Harvard of the Sky" specializes in aviation and aerospace engineering. Her grandfather told me it was a no-brainer for her. It looks like her future holds a career in aviation.

iTunes Match: The Curve Jumping Cloud For Consumers

2011-11-14T18:16:00.000-08:00

Apple launched iTunes Match, today. They were shooting for an October release, but they missed it by two weeks. I didn't really think about iTunes Match features until just now, when I tried it out.

I downloaded the iTunes 10.5.1 update and let iTunes Match run while I cooked dinner. It took about 45 minutes – I wasn't really paying attention. During that time, it scanned my iTunes library to determine which of the 2,400 songs it had on its servers. Then, iTunes Match took the songs that it didn't have on its servers and uploaded them. Fortunately, I have a blazing fast ISP, so uploading about 400 songs took less time than the entire iTunes music library scan.

I Get It

Once iTunes Match was done processing my library, I "tuned it in" on my Apple TV. I didn't really know what to expect, but there on my Apple TV were all my songs nicely arranged into my playlists.

I created a new iTunes playlist on my computer and copied some songs into it. In the time it took me to move my hands from my computer keyboard to the Apple TV remote, I noticed that the TV screen flickered and the new playlist that I just created showed up on my Apple TV. Ok, now I get it.

Prior to iTunes Match, it was a bit inconvenient to push my music from my iPhone or iPad to my Apple TV; and it was also a minor hassle to keep iTunes open on my laptop so that the Apple TV could "see" my music and playlists.

Missing In Action

Some songs, though, seem to be missing and I'm not sure why. I have some voice memos that I've recored which obviously shouldn't be uploaded, aka, "This item is not eligible for iCloud."

But, I also have some songs, such as a store bought Tchaikovsky CD that I imported into iTunes 10 years ago, that weren't uploaded. The song titles show up on the Apple TV, but they're grayed out. In iTunes, next to the track name, it displays an iCloud icon with an exclamation point indicating, "This item was not added to iCloud because an error occurred." The songs are on my computer, but it's not in iCloud. I'll have to investigate some more.

Update: A former coworker from Apple just read this blog post and tweeted me the solution to my problem: "Set view options to show iCloud status column. Sort by status. Select all 'Error'. Right click to reupload." Sure enough, that did it. I now see my missing songs in iCloud and on my Apple TV.

Piracy Big Brother?

So, does Apple and the RIAA now know which of their users have pirated songs? No, it's not that simple. Nearly all of my iTunes library is either composed of songs that I bought from the iTunes store or imported from my CD collection. In the case of CD imports, iTunes Match has no way to know if the CD import was from music that I owned or "borrowed" from a friend. Of course, Apple could listen to songs that are uploaded, which aren't recognized, and determine that, perhaps, they're a concert bootleg; but that would surprise me. It would be the equivalent of Gmail reading the e-mail on their servers to gather business intelligence.

Cloud Computing

"Cloud" has become the hot buzzword in tech since 2006 when Amazon launched their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which allowed users to turn on a computer with the click of a mouse (ok, technically, they're not turning on a physical computer, rather, they're launching a virtual machine but it does the exact same thing as a computer and it's indistinguishable).

Amazon's EC2, along with a handful of competitors, are true cloud computing systems. Other systems, like iCloud or Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) are actually cloud storage systems - there's no real computing going on. But, that doesn't mean that they're not useful. On the contrary, they're tremendously useful.

So, what is the cloud? Simple: cloud, quite literally, means Internet, as in you're reaching out over the Internet for computing power or storage or fundamental web services such as DNS. And, you're reaching out via an API, which means that other computers can talk to and access these services without human intervention.

Abstraction: The Cloud For Consumers

Since modern computing first began during WW II, with the Mark I, layers of abstraction have been added, one on top of the other, in order to manage and reduce complexity. Each layer allows more "everyday" users to access computing power without requiring a detailed technical understanding.

Many times, when a new layer of abstraction is added, there's some resistance from hard core programmers since each layer removes some control that they once had.

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was one of the first programmers to encounter this resistance when she took her library of software routines and bundled them into the first compiler. The compiler ran slower and it was less efficient than writing pure machine code. Claims of code execution inefficiencies were a somewhat valid claim since computing power was not cheap 60 years ago. However, the true expense, since then, hasn't been CPU power, but, rather brain cycles. It's much better for a computer to step through some inefficient code than to have a human take a chance at creating bugs. As my former boss at Apple used to say, "Code you don't write is code you don't have to debug."

Rather then just create another cloud storage solution, Apple has completely removed the ambiguity of the file system just as it did with iTunes and iPhoto. When you import media into Apple's "iApps", you don't need to concern yourself with where, on the file system, the file actually resides. There's no need to know if your files are located under ~/ghopper/Music/iTunes... or c:\Program Files\... With iCloud, you don't have to know which folder your content is located in, iCloud handles that for you.

Hockey Stick Curve Jumping

There are incremental improvements and then there are revolutionary improvements. The latter are improvements that's aren't just twice as good, rather they're ten times better which usually involves a paradigm shift.

The ice trade is a perfect example of revolutionary technological improvements. In the late 1700s, only the rich had ice since it had to be harvested in the winter and then shipped and stored like granite or marble with a short shelf life. Frederic Tudor was Boston's "Ice King" and he made his fortune by harvesting and shipping ice to places that would not have otherwise had it such as the Caribbean and India.

Innovation during Ice 1.0 revolved around making sharper saws to cut the ice and inventing insulation, other than hay, to keep the ice from melting. But, if you worked in the ice business in the late 1800s, you needed to pay attention when refrigeration technology came along.

With the advent of electricity, ice harvesting was no longer necessary. In Ice 2.0, warehouses could make ice during the summer and send it out for local delivery. This is, in it's truest sense, a curve jumping disruptive technology. If you were still sharpening your saw while ice was being made using refrigeration, then you would have missed the boat.

Looking back, it isn't hard to realize that Ice 3.0 was the invention of the personal ice maker, aka, our home refrigerator. If warehouse refrigeration companies didn't start making home refrigerators in the first half of the 20th Century, then they were probably left behind.

Technology & Innovation

So, how in the world does the ice trade tie in with Apple? Both involved clear, revolutionary, jumps in technologies, i.e. a 10x improvement over the previous way of doing business. Instead of harvesting ice, we make it at home. Instead of entering cryptic commands into a text editor, we use a mouse to drag and drop icons.

After all, what is technology? The answer is relative. Do we think of the wheel as technology? You could say that technology is anything that was invented after you were born. You can think of it as a synonym for magic and, nowadays, when it breaks, you have to throw it away and get a new one because it can't be fixed. (I'm paraphrasing Strong Bad.) As Grace Hopper once said, "Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems."

Think Apple

At Apple, we philosophically thought of innovation as the intersection of imagination and reality. But, more pragmatically, we believed that innovation was anything new that reduced the cost of a transaction, either in terms of time or money.

Brady's Life With Duchenne Muscular Dystorphy

2011-11-08T19:27:00.000-08:00

Brady Sherman's one of Jerry's Kids, he was born with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. He's an exceptionally bright kid who loves all things mechanical and military, especially aviation.

I've known Brady since before he was born. His mother is my wife's best friend and college roommate.

Brady was diagnosed with DMD when he was a toddler so we all had an inkling for his life ahead which averages late teens to early 20s.

Personal Memories

One Christmas, when Brady was about five or six, he got his first two-wheeler bicycle. We worried that he might hurt himself. When Brady was ridding his new bike he, like all kids learning to ride, fell over. As the bicycle rested on top him, he made it very clear that he was uninjured. With his arms outstretched, lying face down, he professed, "I'm O-K!" We got a good laugh out of the fact that he issued this decleration with the force and effect of MacArthur's, "I shall return."

We took Brady for a flight in my plane this past summer. Since he's been in a wheelchair for the past few years, it took two attempts to get him into my Cessna. The first attempt was with his mother and I trying to lift him into the front copilot seat. Brady was a little anxious about the thought of being lifted into the plane so we tried again, about a week later, with his father and me.

When you have no use of your legs and suffer from muscle degeneration, falling is a big deal. A very big deal.

Fortunately, his dad and I were able to lift him into the plane and we went up for a flight. He got a thrill out of flying the plane when I let him take the controls. But, he only flew the plane for a few minutes. Like most people who take the controls for the first time, including me, we don't really know what to do and a short time is more than enough.

Joking Around

Brady loved a good joke, even when the joke was on him. Several years ago, my wife, Laura, and I were over the Sherman's house for a Christmas Eve party. The party was still going strong well past 11 p.m. Brady was getting very upset as he kept trying to end the party and throw everyone out. As we all know, Santa Claus will skip your house unless everyone's asleep. Years later, I still teased him about that and he always smiled and chuckled.

I taught Brady how to stick one finger in your nose while licking the other finger and then touch the licked finger to someone's face. "Watch how wigged out they'll get," I told him. We all got a big kick out of it when it tried it on his dad a few minutes later. (Well, maybe all of us except dad.)

Wishes Granted
Brady's wish was granted a couple years ago by the Make-A-Wish Foundation when he and his parents were flown to Normandy, France for a battle field tour. That's a memory to last a lifetime.

My first paid journalism article was about Brady and the training he and his family went through when they got their yellow lab companion dog. I was amazed at how well trained that dog was and how much assistance he gave to Brady.

This Morning
Yesterday, Brady fell as he was being lifted out of his wheelchair and broke his leg. He was treated and he went home with his parents. His dad slept next to him last night. This morning, Brady's breathing was very shallow and his parents couldn't wake him. Laura called me at work and told me that Brady was dying as he was being rushed to the hospital while CPR was being performed in the ambulance.

The doctors were unable to to resuscitate him.

Brady passed away this morning aged 14 and a freshman in high school.

We all thought that this moment was still years away. None of us can process this. It just doesn't seem real. He was just a kid.

While I, like most everyone, worked hard to get where I am; I too often forget that I did nothing to be born. I didn't earn being born – it quite literally befell me.

I need to be reminded that I won the birth lottery on many different levels... where and when I was born, my good health, and so on. Steve aptly described it: Life is fragile.

Last Shots
I clearly remember the last time I saw Brady. It was Saturday, September 3, when I snapped this photo of him watching Black Hawk Down. Brady loved the military and he knew more about it than any other kid I know.

Raw Emotions
Tragedies like this leave emotions very raw as waves of grief come and go, followed by anger and then laughter at fond memories.

Brady's mother best expressed one of these extremes, tonight, on Facebook, "Fuck you Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy."

Brady's final life experience was in his own bed, in his own home, under the same roof with two parents that loved him with every fiber of their existence.

But, as comforting as that sounds, at this point, I can't cry hard enough.

SMS is Dying, Viva SMS!

2011-11-03T04:31:00.000-07:00

My love affair with text messaging started when I arrived in Nairobi, Kenya in May 2005. I was amazed that the wireless carriers in East Africa were so much more advanced than in the U.S. What I found particularly useful was that they could text money to each other using SMS - no apps required. As soon as I returned to the U.S., I created a proof of concept, using a GSM modem, and partnered with an angel investor as we tried to raise funding from Tech Coast Angels for the now defunct Acasero.

This morning, I was very pleased to see that Amazon announced a new web service which allows anyone to send text messages from a short code. Sending an SMS from a short code, which is a five or six digit phone number, is not an inexpensive proposition. It will cost a company at least $1,000/month not including the metered costs of sending each text message. I've covered the details in this white paper that I wrote a few years ago. But, with today’s announcement from Amazon, that cost is literally reduced to pennies.

SMS is Dying
The wireless carriers' approach to marketing SMS is what I call "bad." RIM has gotten around it, for years, by allowing direct messaging from Blackberry to Blackberry. Now, Apple's iOS 5 has done something similar by allowing text messages to be sent over the data portion of device's payment plan vice the SMS portion. The wireless carriers have priced themselves out of the market when you consider that it would cost about $6,000 to download a 4 MB song if wireless data cost as much as SMS.

Viva SMS
Yet, even though SMS is dying, it's still very useful in both developed and developing countries. It will continue to serve a niche for many years to come. The key strength of SMS is that it's a push (event driven) messaging system compared to e-mail which generally has to poll a server (even with "push" e-mail utilizing the IDLE command, it's still not a responsive as SMS).

So, now that SMS is available to the masses via a short code, what are some of the possibilities? I can think of a few, very marketable, ideas.

I'm Dreamin' of a White Halloween

2011-10-29T19:52:00.000-07:00

It's been just over a month since I moved from Carlsbad, California to Rockaway, New Jersey. My first week here was hot, with highs around 90°. By the end of the second week, it had rained 13 days in a row. Of course I complained about the rain – until today.

The leaves are just beginning to change colors and many remain green, after all, it's still October. So, I really poopooed yesterday's weather reports of snow. Okay, maybe snow flurries, but when I heard forecasts of possible snow accumulations of several inches, I just brushed it off, "Ain't gonna to happen." Obviously, I couldn't have been more wrong.

This morning, it started snowing. It was in the mid-30s, so the flakes clumped up into postage stamp sized clusters. As the day wore on, I figured that it would warm up and turn to rain. I'd seen this movie before, especially as a kid growing up on Long Island, hoping for a snow day. At most, I expected a light dusting – it'll all be melted by late afternoon, I thought.

I moved my car out of the driveway and parked it on the street and then ran an errand in my wife's VW Bug. I was at CVS for about 10 minutes when they lost power. The store was now running on battery backup and the employees started ushering the patrons off the premises. We could make an immediate purchase while the cash registers and credit card machines still had battery power. I quickly bought two ice scraper brushes for the cars. By the time I got back to the Bug, it had an inch of snow on it.

No sooner did I brush off the windows and head out of the parking lot than I could no longer see out of the side and rear windows. Every time I accelerated, the traction control kicked in for five to ten seconds. Even more unnerving was the fact that, as the car would slide and skid sideways - ever so slowly - I'd hit the breaks and hear the antilock system clicking away for what seemed like an eternity, "Please stop, please stop, please stop."

When I got home, I parked the Bug in the driveway. As I started shoveling snow, I could hear the cracking of tree limbs, every five to ten minutes, as they came crashing down all around the neighborhood. I couldn't figure out why this seemed so strange – but something was very "different" which was causing all these limbs to fall.

It wasn't until a few hours later when I realized why so many trees were collapsing. Normally, in the winter, when it snows, trees don't have any leaves. Not only are the leaves still on the trees, but most trees still have live, green, leaves. It wasn't just the combined weight of the snow and leaves that caused the tree limbs to snap. It was also the fact that the healthy, green leaves, significantly increased the surface area of the limbs. More surface means more snow sticking to the trees, which, in turn, means the trees now need to support a heavier load.

Although there are no trees on our property, our backyard now has more than its share of limbs, courtesy of our neighbors. On top of that was the fact that the snow was very wet and clumpy and it seems like more limbs came down than would have fallen during a hurricane. (Speaking of hurricanes, it's still hurricane season here.)

Operation Driveway

After shoveling the driveway – which is a task I can't recall doing in over 25 years – it was time to move my Honda Accord from the street to the driveway. I was leery about leaving it parked on the street because of the passing snowplows plus the fact that the street in front of the house is a very steep hill. I watched several cars slide, skid, twist, and turn down the hill. They were getting way too close to my car. It seemed like it was only a matter of time before one of them would slam into my car if I left it parked on the street.

I was sure that the SUV, in the following video clip, would skid into the back of my silver Accord after watching it make several failed attempts to enter their own drive way. Fortunately, they finally gave up and parked on the street.

However, after multiple attempts, I, too, failed to get my car back in the driveway. I drove around the block three times. Each time, as I came down the hill, I simply could not turn into my driveway – the car just kept skidding straight. It certainly didn't help that the driveway is extremely narrow and it's surrounded by retaining walls on both side.

All that I could do was leave my car parked in front of the house. About once an hour, a snow plow made a pass. With each run up and down the road, they've built up a protective wall of snow around my car. It'll be a pain to shovel out tomorrow, but, for now, I welcome it. I'm guessing that about six or seven inches of snow has fallen, so far.

Next Step

My next step is to meet my neighbors and become friends with them. Two neighbors fired up their snow blowers and each plowed about half a dozen driveways; and then they plowed the sidewalks. I need to get on their to-be-plowed list.

Steve Jobs's License Plate

2011-10-27T19:55:00.001-07:00

Yep, it's true that Steve Jobs used to drive around without a license plate. I've seen it, touched it, and photographed it.

But I think the license plate loophole theory is wrong. Otherwise Steve would have had temporary paper tags on his car (or, perhaps, he just didn't display the tags). Steve may have just driven around without ever registering his car - or, maybe, he simply didn't attach the license plates to his car. I doubt that he was getting a new car every six months. But, that's what's being reported – so, maybe it's true. I just find it hard to believe.

Walter Isaacson asked Steve about his license plate. From the horse's mouth...

I [Isaacson] said, "Why don't you have a license plate?" He said, "Well, I don't want people following me." I said, "Well not having a license plate is probably more noticeable." He said, "Yah, you're probably right. You know why I don't have a license plate?" I said, "Why?" He said, "Because I don't have a license plate." I think he felt the normal rules just shouldn't apply to him.

Insanely great life.

2011-10-05T19:15:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Steve.

Working For The Man

2011-09-24T19:21:00.000-07:00

My wife and I have moved from Carlsbad, CA to Parsippany, NJ. In June, my former mentor from Apple, Stas, who is now a VP at Wyndham, in New Jersey, called me from out of the blue and offered me a job working for him. The opportunity to work with Stas, again, was enticing enough to accept the job.

The company flew me out to interview for a senior product manager position. The interviews went very well and they decided to upgrade the job requisition to director. It took a few weeks to get the new position approved by HR – but when the official offer came through it was a no-brainer.

My wife, Laura, flew out to New Jersey a couple weeks ago to find a place for us to live. Not only did she find a fine home, but she managed to get some great furniture from our friends and family in New Jersey.

Private Pilot Instrument Rating
Laura flew out by herself because I had a summer goal that I wanted to achieve: earn my pilot instrument rating. Last year, I was bitten by the aviation bug and I received my private pilot's certificate (license). In February, I bought a Cessna-182 Skylane. One of my big concerns, when flying around Southern California, was getting stuck somewhere because clouds or fog moved in. As a private pilot, I can only fly under visual flight rules which means no flying through the clouds.

Cessna was due to release a new, web based, instrument rating course in June, which I had been eagerly awaiting. Unfortunately, the course, which is very formal, was delayed until the very end of August. After looking at the course, I realized that I simply didn't have enough time to get through it. Rather, since the training was self paced, I realized that I wouldn't have the self-discipline to stick with it to reach my goal before the end of summer.

I took a look at my other options for completing my instrument rating and came across a ten day course. The ten day course, offered by Pilot Instrument Courses (PIC), is a fairly intense course which sends a flight instructor to you with a simulator. The simulator can be used for ten or twenty hours of training and the rest of the required flight hours are done in the airplane.

I signed up for the ten day PIC training and the company sent out an instructor about a week later. While ten days may seem like a very short time, we probably squeezed in 80 hours of training over that time. My instructor, who set up the simulator on my dining room table, would come over around 7:00 or 7:30 a.m. and we'd train until about 5:00 p.m. (we'd fly the sim in the mornings and my plane in the afternoons). He'd then go back to his hotel and I'd study and fly the simulator in the evenings.

The training worked out better than I expected. The only distraction I had, once the training began, was that San Diego lost power at the end of the first day of training. Over the next couple days, I'd have to trouble shoot two Adjix servers that went down due to the power outage.

As a side note, if you're ever looking for a place to eat when the power is out then I'd recommend going to the hospital. It's the one place that always has power and a cafeteria. It worked out very well for my instructor and me.

Check Ride
Last Saturday, after completing the training along with passing the written and oral test, I had my practical test (check ride) up in Riverside, CA. The skies were incredible busy. Right off the bat, we were put into a holding pattern by air traffic control (ATC) for 10 to 15 minutes at 7,000 feet with another plane below us at 6,000' and a third one in holding at 4,500 feet.

Everything went well during the check ride except for my precision approach which required keeping the plane on a specific glide path while landing. While making my approach an ATC supervisor came on the radio and directed all aircraft to maintain radio silence while they vectored a Southwest Airlines plane that was finding its way through congested traffic. Unfortunately, I let this distract me and I wasn't able to maintain my precision approach within practical test standards. So, I was denied my instrument rating on Saturday.

While this was highly disappointing, I went back up with my instructor Saturday evening to practice my precision approaches again. I then scheduled another retest for 8:00 a.m. Sunday morning.

Fortunately, I only had to demonstrate the precision approach, on Sunday, for the retest and it went well. I was issued my instrument rating. Now I can fly through clouds!

Ferrying My Plane Coast To Coast
My next challenge was to fly my plane to New Jersey. Although my plane could fly for more than six hours on a full tank, you're really limited by how long you can go between bio-brakes. Also, I didn't want to make this flight alone since I had only received my instrument rating the previous day. As luck would have it, I had a buddy, Gus, who is a former commercial pilot and former flight instructor, so he went with me.

We left this past Monday afternoon and planned out three hour legs. We did one leg on Monday and stayed in Payson, AZ. On Tuesday, we flew two legs and spent the night in Anthony, KS. Anthony is a tiny town about 60 miles from Wichita. My plane was the only one at the airport. Landing at the Anthony Airport (KANY) was like going back to 1945.

In Anthony, KS, the FAA directory (A/FD) said to call 911 in order to get fuel. At the airport, they listed a seven digit phone number for police dispatch. When I called, the dispatcher sent out a police officer to unlock the fuel pump. I pumped the gas and gave him a check made out to the the City of Anthony. They said that they send out an officer about three times per month to refuel aircraft. Very remote yet friendly town. They even had a courtesy car, that we used, at the airport. It was the only car there – when I opened the door the keys were on the floor. The police office told us that we were free to use the courtesy car – no paperwork involved.

Spontaneous Stopover
The next night we stopped just north of Cincinnati. Gus, my mentor/copilot, did the route planning since he had experience ferrying small planes back and forth across the U.S. When he said that we would be making our next stop around Cincinnati, I told him that we had to land at Butler County Airport since it was just a few miles from my college buddy, Andy, and his family – Andy's son is my wife's and my godson.

Andy's wife took the kids to the airport and she told me that they were ready to explode with excitement when they saw our plane on final approach, land, and taxi to our tie down spot. We were fairly tired when we landed at Butler, so it was great to stay at their house and get a home cooked meal.

After leaving Cincinnati, we made one final stop at Scranton, PA, before reaching our destination: Morristown Municipal Airport. Some rain had moved into the Tristate area, and there was quite a bit of traffic. The speed at which the air traffic controller spoke was blazing fast as he vectored us in a few circles while waiting for the traffic congestion to clear up.

My New Home
We landed at Morristown, I signed the paperwork for my hangar lease, and was reunited with my wife. Laura and I had spent many months apart, when I was deployed overseas with the Marines, but this time, with all that had happened in a short fortnight, it seemed like we had been apart for 10 weeks.

We'll be living in a hotel for the next three weeks until our house is ready, but, so far everything is going as planned. I'm amazed at how it's all come together. Sooner or later, we'll go back to California; but, in the mean time, New Jersey is our home.

Adjix Server Problems

2011-09-11T19:58:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy weekend for Adjix. I'd love to describe the details, but Dave Winer does an excellent job in the first two paragraphs of today's post.

How We Knew Steve Jobs Wasn't Returning: End of Life Thoughts

2011-08-29T21:18:00.000-07:00

When Steve Jobs took his most recent medical leave, in January 2011, we knew that he wasn't coming back. This was obvious from the letter that he sent to Apple's employees. Unlike a tweet, that's casually written, his medical leave message was very carefully worded. The key was in the last paragraph:
"I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can."

If Steve had any realistic expectations of returning, that sentence would have read, I love Apple so much and I'll be back as soon as I can.

Hope is a dirty word for people like Steve Jobs.

It's very sad to think that, even though the end may not be days or weeks away for Steve, it's clearly very near. If there was a reasonable chance of his return then his resignation wouldn't have been effective immediately. Another tell is the fact that he mentions life in last week's resignation letter:
"I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple."

End of life issues are never easy to confront. It changes how you perceive reality.

End of Life
When I was young, I used to look at the elderly and think, "Don't you wish that you were young so that you could see what the future holds many decades from now?" Then, I was diagnosed with late stage, wide spread cancer which had metastasized. My perception of the elderly immediately changed to, "If only I could have a chance to experience life for as long as you have." My insight into life was a complete paradigm shift.

When facing your own end of life issues, you think about some things that you never considered such as where, when, or how you want to die. For me, it was on a hill overlooking the San Clemente Pier at sunset.

Some end of life thoughts are strikingly odd. For example, when looking at a bug on a bush in the backyard I was struck by the realization that these "lower" forms of life could outlive me.

Revelation
One epiphany that gave me some relief was the fact that everything in the universe has a life cycle. Death, as final as it is, is completely normal on an absolute level. It doesn't matter if you're religious or atheist – you can simply look at everything – living and non-living – from plants and animals to the stars and planets and realize that at some point in the future they will no longer be around. It's simply the way of the universe.

Fortunately, for me, my story ends, literally, with a cure for cancer. But, as robust as life is, Steve Jobs reminds us that "life is fragile."

Carpe diem.

Gray Listing Spam Blockers

2011-08-29T20:58:00.000-07:00

Large e-mail service providers, such as Gmail, have the ability to crowd-source identifying spam since they have millions of users which results in few false positives. But, what do you use if you're a small time e-mail service provider?

A poor-man's technique to stop spam is called gray listing.

Here's one implementation of how it works...

If the gray listing e-mail service provider hasn't received any e-mails from the sender recently (say, within the last two weeks) they will tell the sender's mail server to try again later. This isn't a problem since the e-mail protocol (SMTP) is designed to keep trying for a couple days before giving up.

As long as the sending mail server waits a small amount of time (say, ten minutes) before trying again, then the e-mail will go through on the second attempt. If the sender has recently sent an e-mail to the recipient's e-mail address then the e-mail goes through on the first try since the sender's e-mail address is on the gray list. (The e-mail is black listed first, then it's white listed. Black + White = Gray)

Because of how this works, users sometimes notice the first two e-mails, sent from the same person (who hasn't sent an e-mail in the past two weeks) may be delivered out of order if the e-mails are sent within a few minutes of each other. (I've personally seen this happen, but it's rare.)

The reason that gray listing works so well is that spammers rarely configure their servers to try to deliver an e-mail more than once. If spammers did configure their e-mail servers to try multiple times then their spam servers would be overwhelmed.

Last Day At Apple

2011-08-26T10:04:00.001-07:00

I wonder if Steve Jobs had his photo taken in front of the 1 Infinite Loop HQ like I did on my last day at Apple in 2007?

Here's to the Crazy Ones

2011-08-24T18:28:00.000-07:00

East Coast Earthquake

2011-08-23T14:20:00.000-07:00

Did you hear that there was an earthquake on the East Coast, today? Kind of hard not to hear about it.

I saw this post about the earthquake devastation in D.C. which made me laugh.

At first, when I heard all the brouhaha, I rolled my eyes and said, "Oh, please, it's only a 5.8."

But, in retrospect, I doubt that East Coast building codes are up to California's standards when it comes to earthquake-proofing their structures. On the other hand, California, which has never recorded a hurricane, would do poorly in a storm of that magnitude. It just depends on what you're used to.

The Good, The Great, and The Bad Business Models

2011-08-18T22:16:00.000-07:00

Lately, there's been a lot of complaining about AT&T because they "streamlined" their text messaging plans. In other words, they removed their cheapest plan thereby raising the rates for the casual "texter."

There are three basic business models when it comes to pricing technology over time:

1. Good: Lower your prices as your technology costs decrease like Amazon Web Services (pass along the savings).

2. Great: Keep your prices the same, but add new features like Apple (innovation).

3. Bad: Increase your prices, even as your costs decreases, without adding new features like AT&T (elasticity and conversion costs).

A college buddy, who worked for a large telecommunications company, explained the wireless carrier's business model best: Squeeze every possible penny out of every single customer.

It reminds me of the last time I ordered a home land line. The cost for caller ID was $7.99/month, but, the operator told me that this feature would be increasing to $9.99/month, for all customers, in two months. Seriously? A 25% increase just to display a 10 digit number on my phone?

From 2005 to 2009, as the costs for delivering text messages decreased, the wireless carrier oligopoly raised the prices to send or receive a single 160 character text message from 5¢ to 25¢. No new features were added – the wireless carriers simply realized that they could keep upping their prices.

It was the iPhone that brought visual voice mail to market and it was when Google Voice relaunched Grand Central that we had the ability to send and receive free text messages using both your phone and computer. These two simple features could have been implemented by the wireless carriers years earlier.

Continually raising prices to see what the market will bear is a perfectly legitimate business model, but it really ticks off the customer. Like a big, faceless, bank, you almost hope that these companies will fail. I say almost, because any punishment, fine, or bankruptcy will be passed along to the customer.

We hate these businesses only as long as poetic justice doesn't come out of our own pocket.

Scrolling In Mac OS X Lion

2011-08-18T13:07:00.000-07:00

One of the first things that people notice when upgrading to Mac OS X Lion is that scrolling works the opposite way that it used to worked.

Without a doubt, this will seem backwards – at first. Most people have said that it takes several days to get used to the new format. But, why change a paradigm that's work for the last quarter century?

The answer is simple and most people haven't really noticed that this is the exact same way that scrolling works on the iPhone. Before Lion, if you wanted to scroll down a web page, you'd have to grab the scroll bar and pull it down. The metaphor was that you were pulling the window down the page to view the content "below the fold."

Now, the metaphor has been changed to match the iPhone and a layer of abstraction has been removed. Instead of pulling a window down to view the content, you now pull the content up to see it. No more window model – it's just you and your content.

Give it several days to a week to see if you get used to it – it's like learning to drive on the other side of the road. If you use the iPhone, then you'll probably get used to it and not notice it in the same way that you never noticed that the iPhone worked the opposite way.

But, if you really can't stand it, you can change the settings back to always display scroll bars in the General part of System Preferences.

Bark for Your Rx

2011-08-16T20:48:00.000-07:00

Tonight, my wife asked me to get a pill for her that was in the kitchen which reminded of a funny story...

Several years ago, my wife and I were were in the kitchen just before bedtime. I had taken out a pill for the dog and put it down next to the kitchen sink. It took me about 30 seconds to get the peanut butter from the pantry so that the dog would swallow the pill. When I turned around to pick up the dog's pill, it was gone.

As my wife was putting down a glass of water, I asked her what she did with the dog's pill. Yup, you guessed it, she mistook the dog's pill for her own and swallowed it.

I called the San Diego Poison Control Center while my wife tried to "retrieve" the pill.

If you haven't had the opportunity to call the Poison Control Center then be prepared to answer a lot of questions – this is not an organization you call anonymously. But, it's more than worth the time it takes to answer their questions in exchange for the service they provide.

It turned out that there was nothing for us to worry about since the antibiotic that my wife swallowed was meant for a dog that weighed about a dozen pounds. There were no shortage of jokes about this incident that night.

I Love Big Government (Sans the Debt Ceiling)

2011-07-29T17:15:00.000-07:00

I love big government! Seriously, I do. And I bet that our country's forefathers would love it too.

Just think about everything we have, today, that's paid for by the federal government through our taxes. I'm talking about the really useful stuff. We can drive across town or across the country without paying a penny to the federal government for using their roads – it's already been paid for. (Hmm, is this socialism? Should all roads be toll roads?) Think about potable running water, electricity, air traffic controllers, original funding for the Internet, bridge and building inspectors etc, etc. – I'm talking about our entire county's infrastructure and capacity. These are good things.

What we hate (and I'm speaking for our forefathers, too) is inefficient, ineffective, government waste. Pick your favorite government agency that you love to hate. You don't have to dig too deep to see the "rusty cannon" syndrome: Doesn't work and can't be fired.

Think about the stereotypical federal or state employee who religiously works only 9-5 (actually 8-4) and not a minute more. They're just "putting in time." I've seen this first hand – at 4:03 p.m., they are gone; like lemmings off a cliff. Not all of them, but enough to notice without looking for it. Left behind, after the bureaucrats head out the door, are the contractors. While you might think that the contractors are working late for the money, many are on a 40 hour per week budget. To go over that budget requires prior, written, approval. Long story short, the contractors end up eating their costs, in the short time, to keep their consulting gig in the long term.

When I worked at Apple iServices' iConsulting division, I was on a project at a large federal agency in the D.C. area. One day, at lunch, an Apple coworker of mine, who also happened to be a former Marine, pointed out how dull and depressing it was in the government cafeteria. The atmosphere was the complete opposite of the excitement and electricity we felt at Apple's Cupertino campus cafeteria (Caffe Macs). Keep in mind that I'm not talking about the Apple of today, either. I'm referring to the Apple of ten or twelve years ago when the stock price dropped in half, literally, overnight, during the Dot-com crash and the stock price continued down from there. Those were Apple's dark days, before iTunes, iPod, and the digital hub strategy. That was a time when Apple was 25x smaller than it is today.

Politicians

Never mind politicians – they're too easy of a target. And, believe it or not, they are some of the smartest people in the context in which they operate. There's just no easy way to win an election in order to get a job in politics, at any level, from municipal through federal. Don't get me wrong – politicians are not blameless – but they really do have to work hard, from time to time – at least to get the job. Keep in mind that they get their job because we, their constituents, gave it to them. If you don't like your duly elected politician then blame your co-constituents.

In the U.S., bigger is better. I've lived off the economy in dirt poor developing countries and seen, first hand, what bad infrastructure and maintenance looks like. In these countries, you can tell the no-bodies from the some-bodies in each village because the person with the most body fat is the leader. More power equals more food. While money is good, food is better. You can't eat money. These developing governments, at all levels, are brittle and, just like the recent Arab unrest we saw earlier this year, it doesn't take much to go from order and rule of law to riots and insecurity.

No American citizen wants to sacrifice any of their own entitlements to reduce the deficit. Boaters would hate a new tax on their boats, pilots would hate to pay user fees at airports, and hard working, salt of the earth, commuters would hate car and gas tax increases. Why not tax the upper class at a proportionally higher rate? Well, that is what we do and the rich can still make a good argument, in their defense, at least in theory.

Solutions?

What's the solution to reduce the national debt? Practically speaking, there probably will never be one. The solution will be death. It's no different than when a person overextends themselves with mortgage and credit card debt. You either generate more income, tighten your belt, or declare bankruptcy. The problem is that, unlike an individual, the U.S. can't get bankruptcy protection and the other two options are just as unlikely.

Throughout history, every singe currency eventually becomes debased. You'd be hard pressed to find a compound interest calculator that can compute how much a dollar would be worth 1,000 years from now at 3.6% interest (the current rate of inflation). The result is so large that it "does not compute." We're literally talking about more money than the world has ever seen. (If you really must know how much a dollar would be worth at 3.6% interest over a thousand years, the answer is $2.3 quadrillion. But we're "only" talking about the "short" quadrillion scale.)

How much is all the money in the world? Around $50 trillion – or 45x less than the compounded interest of $1 a thousand years from now. Could you really see today's U.S. dollar being worth more than 45 times all the money in the world?

Perhaps Bitcoin – or something similar – will replace the U.S. dollar over the next few decades. After all, most countries use a fiat currency and Bitcoin aims to be a currency that's the equivalent of an electronic gold standard. Whatever currency replaces the dollar, hopefully, it will be a peacefully planned transition like the Euro.

My point is that working for a company that's flirting with bankruptcy, declining market share, and relevancy was still an order of magnitude better than working as a bureaucrat for the federal government.

Don't Forget Your Pilot's Guides!

2011-07-29T12:18:00.000-07:00

I recently upgraded my airplane's panel with an Aspen EFD1000 along with some other engine and transponder avionics. Now, instead of "steam" (analog) gauges, I get many of the benefits of a glass cockpit.

Since nearly all of the avionics have been replaced in my plane since it was built, the original airplane manual, which must always be on board the aircraft while in flight, is no longer current. The simplest solution to this problem is to carry the pilot's guides for all of the equipment that's been installed over the last four decades. Obviously, this can be bulky since it includes manuals for the autopilot, GPS, radios, PFD, transponder, engine monitor, tachometer, etc.

iOS to Lighten the Load

Since I never fly without my iPad and iPhone I realized that I could add the pilot's guides – which are all available in PDF format – directly to my iPad and iPhone.

There are two simple ways to add a PDF to your iPad or iPhone so you can read them in the iBooks app:

1. E-mail the pilot's guides, in PDF format, to yourself as an e-mail attachment. When you receive the e-mail on your iPad or iPhone open the PDF attachment, click on the arrow in the upper right, and select Open in "iBooks" which will copy the PDF to iBooks. I've created another "collection", in iBooks, called Aviation, in addition to the two default collections (Books and PDFs), and moved my pilot's guides into this new collection.

2. Drag the pilot's guides, in PDF format, to your iTunes library. The next time that you sync your iPad or iPhone with iTunes, check that each PDF manual is selected under the Books tab, in iTunes, to be sure that it's transferred to your iPhone or iOS.

More Than You Bargained For

The beauty of having these PDFs on both devices is not just that I have two copies with me when flying, but also that I can bookmark pages on one device and those pages will be bookmarked on the other device after syncing with iTunes. Also, most of the hardcopy pilot's guides tend to be printed in black and white by the manufactures to save costs, but the PDFs are in full color.

Additionally, I can run a text search to find what I'm looking for in case I hadn't already bookmarked it. So, how do I lean out my airplane's engine, during cruise, to 100° rich of peak? No problem, it's a snap to find that page in my pilot's guide since I've bookmarked it.

But why stop with my pilot's guides since I also bought the FAR/AIM in the iBookstore, too? The only feature that's missing for the PDFs is that you can't highlight text, as you can in a regular iBook. So, my FAR/AIM, which is not a PDF, but, rather, a genuine iBook, is not only well bookmarked but also "highly" highlighted.

Apple's Worst Product Design (and it's not really that bad). Due to Steve Jobs Attire?

2011-07-19T12:54:00.000-07:00

Without a doubt, I believe that the mic on the earphones that ship with iOS devices is currently Apple's worst designed product.

When I worked at Apple, high praise was, "This doesn't suck too bad." And, that's true, for the most part, about the earphone mic.

However, this problem is not an issue of sound quality or intended functionality. I love how a single click on the middle of the mic can either answer or hangup a phone call - or how it will pause and resume music. Two clicks of it will skip to the next song. I also love how convenient it is to have the volume adjustment on the mic too.

But, what I can't stand is the mic's industrial design. Its poor functionality reminds me of the old hockey puck mouse that shipped, for so many years, with the original iMac.

The problem with the design of the mic on the earphone cord is that it has tiny, right angle, edges that are about a sixteenth of an inch. While this is a tiny lip, it's a huge pain when trying to use the earbuds while speaking on the phone and turning your head because it constantly gets caught on my shirt collars and pulls the ear buds out of my ears. Obviously that's a distraction we can do without while driving.

The solution to this problem is obvious: simply taper the edges of the mic. It seems like a simple fix.

I wonder if Steve Jobs is overlooking this problem since he always wears an uncollared mock turtleneck shirt?

Harry Chapin - Thirty Years Later

2011-07-16T00:01:00.000-07:00

Thirty years ago, today, Harry Chapin died on the Long Island Expressway. He's probably best know for Cat's in the Cradle - which is one of my favorite songs. Ten years ago, this song was ranked number 186 of 365 on the RIAA list of Songs of the Century.

Harry Chapin was driving in the left lane on the LIE near exit 40 in Jericho when he put on his emergency flashers because of either a mechanical or medical problem (possibly a heart attack). After veering into a couple cars he was rammed by a tractor trailer. The official cause of death was a heart attack, but it couldn't be determined if it happened before of after the initial car accident.

Harry Chapin would have been 68 years old if he was still alive. Last summer, I was back in my hometown (Huntington Station, NY) helping my former sixth grade teacher, Ms. Cooke, scan her 30+ years worth of student photos into Facebook. As soon as I mentioned to Ms. Cooke that I was planning to stop by the local cemetery to visit Harry Chapin's grave, she pointed to the following framed concert poster that hung on the wall in her condo. Harry Chapin died while he was driving to this concert.

Tonight, at 8:30 p.m., there will be a celebration at Hekscher Park to honor his life and work. People are encouraged to bring canned goods to be donated to charity.

Running with a virtual buddy

2011-07-04T14:05:00.000-07:00

Today, I went running with my virtual running buddy. I've been using my Garmin Forerunner GPS / heart monitor since 2005, but I've never used the running buddy feature before today. It's a cinch to configure - you just tell the unit what pace and how far you want to run. During your run, you can see how far ahead or behind you are compared to your running buddy.

I'm a big fan of using heart rate monitors during runs since it'll tell you your exact effort level. If you're sick or not well hydrated, that info will reflect in a higher heart rate compared to a typical run.

My resting heart rate is average: 65-75 beats per minute (bpm). But, my max heart rate has always been high - well over 200 bpm. Today, on the long, steep, uphills around mile three of my four mile run I pushed my heart rate up to 207 bpm, yet I still kept falling behind my running buddy. I had built up a solid one tenth of a mile lead at the beginning of my run knowing that the uphills were coming, but I ended up giving back all of my lead, plus I fell behind my running buddy by a tenth of mile. Luckily, the last three quarter miles of the run were down hill and I managed to sprint it and beat my running buddy by about 75 feet.

When I first started using a heart rate monitor in 1995 I was concerned that my high max heart rate was an issue. But, it turns out that it's not. Just like a person's height, your max heart rate is mostly a factor of hereditary. Statistically, your max heart rate will drop about one bpm/year as you age throughout adulthood. However, your resting heart rate is a factor of fitness - so, the better shape that you're in, the lower your resting heart rate. Less heartbeats equals a longer life - all things being equal.

Carlsbad to L.A.

2011-06-20T20:44:00.001-07:00

This weekend I flew from Carlsbad to La Verne, in L.A., to visit a high school classmate. It was a perfect opportunity to snap some great photos since there wasn't a cloud in the sky.

This was my first flight where I preprogramed the flight planning navigation system for my route and used the auto-pilot tied to the GPS steering. It's an amazing way to reduce the single pilot work load. You can just sit back and relax... while keeping an eye out for nearby airplanes.

Father's Day Special: How to Shave Like a Man

2011-06-19T09:20:00.000-07:00

Most every guy in the world learned how to shave from his father. When I joined the Marines at 18 years old, what I learned from dad didn't change, but what did change was the fact that I was now required to shave every single day.

Running a razor over your face once a day, every day, will give most men razor burn. Luckily, the shaving technique that my father taught me, which most women already seem to know, is to replace your shaving cream with the type of skin cream that you find in a simple jar of Noxzema.

The key component in this type of skin cream is menthol. This ingredient, which comes from peppermint and other mint oils, literally has the same cooling effect on your skin as ice.

The Shaving Secret
1. For starters, you'll need a cheap, stiff, shaving brush. This is one time when cheaper is better, so don't use a high end, soft as silk, badger hair, shaving brush, since Noxzema doesn't lather like traditional shaving cream.

2. Simply apply the Noxzema skin cream to your face, with the shaving brush, like you would any other shaving cream. While shaving your face, you'll notice that you can get a closer shave with less of a burn.

3. Here's the real secret to preventing razor burn: When you're done shaving, put another coat of Noxzema on your face. Let this coat dry on your face, for at least a couple minutes, before jumping into the shower to wash it off. This post-shaving coat makes a huge difference at reducing razor burn.

Bonus: To get the closest possible shave, shave in the shower with a fog free mirror. This will leave no whisker uncut.

I've tried many different types of shaving creams over the last 27 years, from aerosol cans and old fashion shaving soaps, to high end products; but none provide the same level of comfort as a basic jar of Noxzema skin cream. So, give it a try – it just may change the way you shave.

Evolution of Computer Languages

2011-06-13T22:21:00.000-07:00

It's interesting, yet not unexpected, to see how a next generation computer language becomes everything the previous generation wanted to be.

Java became what Ada wanted to be (write once, run anywhere), and JavaScript has become what Java applets wanted to be (web browser executable code).

Apple Languages

Over the last 15 years, or so, Apple has tried new languages while never giving up their tried and true Objective-C. One nice thing about Objective-C, which eased its learning curve, is that it's a superset of ANSI C. Most any ANSI C code will run in Objective-C.

Apple's current Cocoa API goes back to the birth of NeXT in the late 1980s. In the early days, app kit and foundation kit, which carried over into Cocoa, were the bees knees. If you didn't code on NeXT technology before 1995, then you probably didn't write object oriented code, commercially, until Java was released by Sun Microsystems. If you've ever coded in Objective-C, then you've probably figured out that all of those classes beginning with NS came from NeXTSTEP.

In the late 1990s, Java was too big for Apple to ignore, so they integrated it into WebObjects 3.5. Java and Objective-C are very similar. Java code is almost a one-to-one mapping to Objective-C and the two languages can be "bridged" such that code written in Java can be automatically and seamlessly converted to run in Objective-C and vice versa.

Trivia: The communication between Java and Objective-C is handled by a Java to Objective-C Bridging Specification, aka a .JOBS file. Get it?!?

War of the Languages

The best feature of Java is that it's a strongly (static) typed language.

The best feature of Objective-C is that it's a weakly (dynamically) typed language.

This type of thinking can lead to holy wars between coders as they argued which language was better. To avoid sending mixed messages, Apple made it clear about a dozen years ago that Java was Apple's server language of choice, while desktop apps would be developed in Objective-C.

Apple did experiment with Java desktop apps when Mac OS X was released ten years ago by integrating Java into the operating system. But Java, just like Flash, isn't a good desktop environment for many reasons. If memory serves, I believe Steve Jobs referred to Flash as a CPU hog and Java as a pig. Both Java and Flash run inside virtual machines which is a completely isolated operating system within your own operating system. It's literally the equivalent of speaking to someone else through a translator. The virtual machine must first be loaded and then translate the Java or Flash code into machine language at run time. Compare that to Objective-C which can be compiled directly into machine code that runs natively.

It seems strange that a language developed almost 30 years ago is still cutting edge, today, until you realize that Unix has been around since 1969.

What Happens When You Give Apple A Good Idea?

2011-06-12T21:17:00.001-07:00

Last year, an iOS developer created the "WiFi Sync" app which allowed the iPhone and iPod touch to sync wirelessly with iTunes over WiFi. Unfortunately for the developer, Apple rejected his app and then implemented the same WiFi sync feature which Steve Jobs announced at last week's WWDC keynote presentation.

There's no way that Apple can say they didn't know about the WiFi sync app. AppleInsider reported that the developer was told by Apple that the app didn't "technically break the rules" and that Apple engineers "were quite impressed." Should Apple get away with this?

In many ways, the App Store is a just store, like amazon.com or drugstore.com. Vendors can present their products to the store and the store can stock their shelves with the vendor's items or reject them. It seems that this WiFi Sync incident is the equivalent of asking Walmart to sell your widget and then, after they turn you down, they manufacture and sell the widget themselves.

Vendors are free to sell their products elsewhere if they're turned down. So, where does an iOS developer take their app when it's rejected by Apple? You can either port the app to another platform, such as Android, or you can sell it at Cydia, which is a store for jailbroken iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches.

But, there is still one very interesting question: Why did Apple reject the WiFi Sync app in the first place? Apple has never had a policy of not introducing new features for fear of making third party apps obsolete. In one swoop, last week, iOS 5 made not only a few apps, obsolete, but it also antiquated entire categories of third party apps.

Apple’s Unsolicited Idea Submission Policy

When I worked at Apple, we highly discouraged people from telling us their ideas. There are practical legal reasons for this: history has no shortages of two parties simultaneously inventing the same thing at virtually the same time. When I was in college, my roommate told me that he had an idea for a laptop keyboard that was backlit so you could, as I'm doing right now, type in the dark. Lo and behold, Apple was the first company, that I'm aware of, to sell such an invention and I never communicated my roommate's idea to anyone else.

Apple's idea submission policy basically says:

Don't send us your ideas. If you do, their contents will automatically become Apple property and you will receive no compensation.

Click to see Apple's full policy

So, legally, this WiFi Sync incident might not be any different than the Walmart scenario. But it just doesn't feel right. It feels very... Microsoftish.

Tricks I Learned At Apple: Steve Jobs Load Testing

2011-06-09T18:53:00.000-07:00

When I worked at the Apple Online Store, we would never load test the live website. There was rarely a need. However, it was always an interesting experience to turn the store back on after Steve Jobs walked off stage following one of his keynote presentations. As part of our postmortem, once the store was back online, we'd ask ourselves where the servers were constrained: CPU, network bandwidth, disk I/O, or memory? While it's hard to predict exactly how the entire system would behave in the real world, we had a good idea, before we flipped the switch, thanks to our thorough testing strategies.

Load Testing
Many companies use load testing software to see what kind of load their web app can handle. A common, but flawed way to load test a web site is to bring it online and then turn on the load testers. The problem with this technique is that it doesn't give you any idea of how the website will perform if it goes down while it's live. When a website, that is in production, goes down, it must be brought up while under load and things will behave very, very differently. For example, it was discovered, when the iTunes Store first launched, that one of its trusted WebObjects components wasn't thread safe and this bug only presented itself under very heavy load.

Cutting My Teeth
When I first joined the Apple online store, I was paired up with an experienced software engineer so that I could get up to speed on the code repository, build process, and unit and component testing. Since the online store was already live, we would never roll out new code without first testing it and gathering detail metrics.

My first task with my coworker was to implement a simple web service which retrieved product information, in the form of a plist, over the network. A simple service like this could normally be written in a day or two, but it took us most of the week as my mentor explained each step to me while we pair programmed our way through the process. (Although we pair programmed, our software methodology was Agile/Scrum, not Extreme Programing. Each team used whichever development technique they agreed on as long as they could stay on schedule. The teams I worked with were fortunate to have formally trained scrum masters who were supported by management.)

Before writing any production code, we'd write our unit tests. All software engineers should be taught to write their API unit tests first – it's a good discipline to learn. Next, we coded using WebObjects/Java with Eclipse/WOLips and we always ran the app in debug mode with key break points so that we could step through the code. I've frequently seen too many software engineers, elsewhere, who just code away as if they're throwing something against the wall to see what sticks.

As soon as we checked in our code, the repository would automatically build all of the applications and run the unit tests against them. If you broke the build everyone on the team, plus a project manager or two, would receive a notification e-mail identifying you as the culprit.

Token

We had one, highly specialized piece of software code which could only be checked out, worked on, and checked in by a single engineer at a time. You were only allowed to touch this piece of code if you possessed a physical token. In our case, the token was a Darth Tater doll, which had to be conspicuously displayed on the top of your cube or bookcase.

Gathering Metrics

Once our service was code complete, bug free, and checked into the repository we began component testing to gather metrics on the new code. This is another step that's commonly overlooked in novice teams. I suspect that this "gather metrics" step isn't included in The Joel Test because Joel Spolsky's product was a desktop app and not a web app under heavy load (or, perhaps it's implicit in Spolsky's "Do you have testers?" step).

Before we could even consider including our code in the live code branch, we would hit it with many millions of requests. At Apple, we had very sophisticated caching algorithms which could store any number of entries we wanted, depending on our goals. Did we need a cache with only 500 products in it or 50,000? After a cold start, would we need to "warm up" the cache with specific products? How long should we wait, after no hits, before removing a product from the cache to free up memory?

As a side note, our caches were always hash tables. The beauty of a hash table is that it has a Big O notation run time that's constant: O(1). When you're asked, during a job interview, which is the fasted lookup function, don't, as is very common, say, "a ~~B-tree~~ binary tree." Perfect hash tables always win, hands down.

Tweaking and Done

We would tweak our code until we had acceptable metrics. Our metrics would measure how much memory the cache used and how long it took for each service request/response to be fulfilled. Depending on our needs, we might shoot for a goal to have 99.7% of our service requests returned within 35 ms, while 95% were returned within 10 ms with no single request taking longer than 50 ms.

These tests were run against a copy of the live database in a production environment. It's not a perfect indication of how the web app would perform once it was live. But it doesn't take long for this to be a great way to set expectations.

At the end of our sprint these metrics would be demoed as part of the Agile definition of "done." The code was now ready to be checked into the QA branch for functional testing before going live.

Push Notifications on the Cheap

2011-06-09T15:28:00.000-07:00

One of the problems with feed updates, such as an RSS or a podcast feed, is that they're not real time. Each client, that subscribes to a feed, will continuously poll the server for updates (usually every thirty minutes). The two leading solutions to solve this problem are rssCloud and PuSH.

Real time notification can be somewhat of a challenge due to the fact that most clients are behind a firewall. Punching a hole through a firewall is too much to ask of the casual user, plus it could potentially open the client to security issues.

Even for a client that has solved the problem of negotiating the client's firewall, there's still a bandwidth issue. Each push notification server must maintain a connection with its subscribed clients so that it can notify them of updates; this is usually done via a socket which is a constantly-open IP connection. The problem with this is that there's a bandwidth cost to keep this connection open.

Push Without The Bandwidth Overhead Costs

A workaround that I'm visualizing can avoid any unnecessary bandwidth push notification costs charged to the publisher/aggregator by simply using Amazon's Simple Emil Service (SES). Here's how it would work:

1. The client app would be configured to check a client's e-mail address for notifications.

2. Notifications would be sent to subscribers using SES.

3. When the client received the notification e-mail, it would then ping the publisher to receive the update.

The cost benefit of this is realized by shifting the notification bandwidth channel from the client and publisher notification server to the client and their mail server. Most data centers will charge their customers based on bandwidth, so there's a cost for a publisher to maintain a push notification channel with all of their clients. But, there is no cost for a client to maintain a connection with their mail server. In the past, new e-mail notification relied on client polling (usually once per minute). However, most modern mail clients now rely on the IMAP IDLE feature for immediate notification. New notifications would be received within a few seconds by having the subscriber's client implementing IMAP IDLE.

The e-mail account notification could be implemented two different ways. The publisher could maintain their own e-mail account which all of the clients check or, each client could maintain their own e-mail account. The former option would only work with a small number of clients. The latter option allows the publisher to manage traffic by pushing out notifications over a short timeframe to manage the "thundering herd" problem if scaling is an issue.

While this is not the most elegant solution, it eliminates all unnecessary bandwidth overhead costs involved with maintaining a notification channel. The only costs incurred by the publisher are for bandwidth used to publish the notifications and updates.

Discouraging People From Joining Your WiFi Network

2011-06-09T06:12:00.000-07:00

Have you ever taken a look at all the personal wireless networks around your home? If you live in a house, you might notice a couple of your neighbors' networks. But, if you live in an apartment or condo, you could easily be within range of ten or more wireless networks.

Each wireless network can be given a specific name to identify it. For security reasons, wireless networks can also be configured to not broadcast their name, but people rarely do this on home networks.

Since your network is broadcasting its name, people can see it. If your network requires a password, then they can attempt to join it by repeatedly trying different passwords.

To avoid this, I've given my home wireless networks names to dissuade people from joining them by naming them with financial rates to look as if they're metered: $4.95/minute is the name of my Airport Express network, and my two home base station networks are named $9.95/minute and $12.95/minute.

Over the years I've had a number of guests over to my house who would try to join my neighbor's wireless networks before asking me the name of my network. They've always had a good laugh when I told them the name. They usually comment that they were trying to access all of the other networks and stayed away from the $12.95/minute network just in case it could some how run up a bill on their device.

Greedy Cupertino Government?

2011-06-08T12:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Steve Jobs made a surprise appearance before the Cupertino City Council to present his vision of the new Apple campus to be built on the land that used to belong to HP.

Today, a friend of mine asked if anyone was put off by the Cupertino City Council members because they seemed greedy by asking Steve Jobs for favors.

At first, I just attributed the city council member's question to the fact that they were amateur politicians. There are several different models that city governments follow. Here, in Carlsbad, CA, the mayor is part of the city council (the chairman of the board, so to speak) and draws a base salary of about $18,000. After adding in payments for meetings attended, he or she ends up earning around $23,000/year for being the mayor of Carlsbad. The main responsibility for the day to day operations falls on the city manager, who you can think of as the CEO. The current Carlsbad city manager earns around $220,000/year.

My point is that the city council is usually a side job for many municipal governments making the members "part time" politicians.

At yesterday's city council meeting, one of the members asked if it would be possible for Apple to outfit the city of Cupertino with WiFi. Unfortunately, the city council had no bargaining position. Steve Jobs responded by pointing out that citywide WiFi is the responsibility of the city – that's the reason Apple pays taxes to Cupertino.

This question didn't quite come from left field. It was preceded by a question about how the citizens of Cupertino would benefit from the new Apple campus. But, was this really just a star struck, impromptu request for a favor from the council member? Probably not. There was also a subtle message in this question. Apple's friend and competitor, Google, is known for being a very giving company. From time to time, they have worked with organizations, such as airports, to set up free WiFi.

By asking this question, the city council member was really saying, "Hey, did you see that Google is bringing their next-generation Internet service to Kansas City, KS? Apple should do the same for Cupertino!" It would certainly look good for that council member, during her next campaign, to say that she was personally responsible for getting WiFi throughout Cupertino.

But, the key thing about Google is that they are, first and for most, an advertising company. They've learned how to put tasteful ads in search results, personal websites, e-mail, etc. They understand the advertising industry like no other high tech company. Google's understanding of advertising is one of their core competencies that is a key part of their free WiFi, etc, strategies.

Until Apple runs into a hurdle that requires the city government to act, they'll probably receive no favors. Of course, it will probably never come to this. Jobs made it clear that Apple will stay in Cupertino as long as they're welcomed with open arms – otherwise, it's off to Mountain View.

Soldiers Complain About Extra Baggage Fee

2011-06-08T09:05:00.000-07:00

This article about Soldiers' $2,800 in bag fees spark outrage is bugging me; not the part about Delta Air Lines charging an extra fee, but, rather, why the soldiers ended up in this situation.

Since these soldiers are traveling under orders, they'll be reimbursed for their expenses. I experienced the exact same thing the last time I deployed overseas. It's the cost of doing business.

Perhaps Delta could have handled things better at check in, but these soldiers are ticked off and playing their military service card to receive some benefits. But, their frustration is misdirected because they may have been misinformed by the military regarding how many bags they could check, the Stars and Stripes reported. Keep in mind that Delta has to pay the extra fuel expenses to haul the extra baggage and it's a lot of heavy, dense, sea bags, duffel bags, and weapons cases. When I last deployed with my military unit on a civilian carrier, I was concerned that the airline would bump some baggage to a later flight, when we checked in, because we had so much.

Problems and Solutions
After watching this video, I see two problems. First, is the minor issue that these soldiers are protesting while wearing their uniform which is a no-no.

But, more importantly, these military members have to pay these fees out of their own pocket until they are reimbursed after filing their travel claims. Realistically, it's probably not a big deal for the author of this video since he's a staff non-commissioned officer. But, for junior military members, $200 is a very noticeable chunk of change.

The real problem is that the military doesn't routinely provide service members with advance pay to cover these expenses. The military expects its service members to pay out of their own pocket for things that "come with the uniform", sometimes without reimbursement even if it was a reasonably necessary expense. The most common case is that the military rarely reimburses service members for personal fuel expenses when they use their own vehicle to attend meetings, conferences, etc.

If you're upset, then direct it toward the Department of Defense. The DoD should take better care of our sacrificing service members during routine overseas travel.

iOS 5 Just Increased Apple's Addressable Market By 5x

2011-06-06T23:01:00.000-07:00

During this week's keynote address at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), Steve Jobs pointed out, with the introduction of iCloud, that Apple's iOS devices, such as the iPhone and iPad, can be standalone devices. In other words, you no longer need a personal computer to configure, set up, or update Apple's mobile devices.

This is more than just a great convenience and I don't think many people get it... yet.

Wall Street
Wall Street, as predicted, always wants more. Yesterday, investors were looking for a pleasant surprise like an iPhone 5. But it wasn't to be and Apple did its best to set expectations with last week's "preannouncement announcement" that this year's WWDC was all about software.

Investors were looking for things that Apple could sell and the most expensive WWDC announcement was that the next operating system version, Mac OS X Lion, which will cost $29.99. Apple also announced that iTunes Match will cost $25/year but everything else was free. On top of that, Apple will stop charging for MobileMe; so that's even more lost revenue.

Growing Market Share
In order for Apple to continue growing, it needs to sell more things and their best bet is to expand their market. Otherwise, just like the iPod, the iPhone and iPad market will become saturated. While Apple is great at making their own products obsolete, they still need to get bigger and iOS 5 is their answer.

In 2005, when you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting someone listening to an iPod in the U.S. and Europe, I had the opportunity to live in East Africa. As an Apple employee, living in this poor part of the world, I was stuck by two things. First, was the obvious lack of iPods being used by any of the locals. Second, when it came to technology, their life revolved around their mobile phones. I was amazed at the advanced state of East African Cell Phones. They were texting well before it was popular in the U.S.

Leaping the Digital Divide
In a developing country, a $1,000 personal computer is nearly a year's pay when living on $3/day. But, poor doesn't mean that they don't want high tech solutions - I can't afford a yacht, but I'd still like one. The beauty of mobile phones is that even the poorest of developing countries already have the wireless infrastructure in place.

I can easily see people in developing countries skipping over personal computers, much the way they skipped over land lines, and acquiring standalone networked mobile devices, such as iPhones and iPads running iOS 5. Also, many of these people are unbanked, but with services like PayPal and Square, they can find ways to keep their money safe. It may sound strange, but, it's no stranger than when I saw Maasai, who lived in mud huts, pull out their cell phones to text money to each other... and that was six years ago.

The iPhone 4 is hot!

2011-06-06T21:11:00.000-07:00

While driving one warm, sunny day, my iPhone 4 was sitting next to me on the car seat. There's nothing unusual about this except that it was in direct sunlight. Even though the inside of the car was cool, thanks to the air conditioner, it was too much for my poor iPhone which temporarily overheated.

While the phone was cooling down the only thing I could do with it was make an emergency phone call or take a screenshot. About 20 minutes after moving it out of direct sunlight it resumed normal operations and all was well.

iPhone needs to cool down before you can use it.

Is Social Media Really New?

2011-05-31T12:27:00.001-07:00

After the spectacular LinkedIn IPO a lot of people have been asking if this social media company is really worth almost $8 billion or could this be another bubble? For that matter, what, exactly, is social media?

While participating in a strategic planning meeting, recently, I was asked, "What will communications look like in 2020?" After some thought, my answer was, "social media." Social communications, just like mass communications, has been around since the dawn of civilization, however, the media used to convey social communications is very new.

Mass media (the medium, not the industry) began with the printing press which was invented in the 1400s. As a result of technological advances, mass media exploded in the first half of the Twentieth Century with radio and T.V. and it continued growing with the adoption of the Internet.

Social media, however, is truly a new media. Whereas mass media is a one-to-many method of communications that is one way, social media is a two way, many-to-many, communications channel.

Social media, like many new, unexpected, forms of communication, was first looked upon with skepticism. We saw skepticism like this in the mid 1990s as cell phones became popular. The first few times I noticed people talking on cell phones in public, even when polite etiquette was followed, my reaction was, "What's so important that you have to talk now?" Yet, today, talking on a cell phone in public is not a big deal. However, in the case of new media, many still have the same reaction when everyday-people blog, tweet, and use Facebook on a daily basis.

Why does someone need to "tell the world" what they're doing when it's as mundane as, "My cat just rolled over?" In the case of social media, this could easily lead to a conversation between cat lovers who didn't know each other. Everyone enjoys spending some time engaging likeminded people. Social media simply extends the social conversations that we have at the water cooler, on the phone, or during dinner, and moves them into cyberspace.

While specific media and technologies may come and go, such as the 8-track, telegram, or the fax; other, more fundamental forms of communication are here to stay. However, new forms of media do not quickly replace the old ones any more than the telephone has replaced radio communications, or that e-mail has replaced "snail mail".

The Return of Mr. Spock

2011-05-29T16:41:00.001-07:00

I saw a clip The Return of Mr. Spock video on This Week in Tech (TWiT) with Leo Laporte.

But, I still think this one if funnier.

Souplantation Express

2011-05-26T13:04:00.000-07:00

For lunch, today, I tried the new Souplantation Express in Carlsbad. I've been to other Souplantation buffet restaurants, many times, but the Express version is a bit different.

For starters, it's much smaller than a traditional Souplantation restaurant and instead of making your own salad, the employees make it for you. The process will remind you of a Subway restaurant as you slide down the serving line and your order is handed off from employee to employee.

Expectations
Since this employee-serve model is so different than the tradition self-serve model, I wonder why they chose it since the benefits are not obvious to the customer. Perhaps there's a business savings?

The gold standard for service expectations at Souplantation Express has been set by the traditional Souplantation. Anything that's of lesser quality will dilute the Souplantation brand, at least in the short term.

Getting Used To It
Most people, who walk in the door of the new Souplantation Express, for the first time, are surprised to see that it's not a traditional self-serve buffet and things may seem to move slower (perhaps naming it Souplantation Mini would have better set expectations).

The Souplantation Express is prefect for call-in orders to-go. But, it'll take a little getting used to if you're going to go through the serving line, yourself. It reminded me of when McDonalds first opened their fast food restaurants, with drive-thrus, in China. Locals didn't understand exactly how they worked and, after driving through and picking up their meal, they'd park, get out of their car, and go inside the restaurant to eat it.

My Experience

When I visited for lunch, there were 12 customers on line and about five employees serving food. At a traditional Souplantation, 12 customers can serve themselves faster than five employees can serve 12 customers while restocking the line at the Souplantation Express. It's mildly annoying to get up to the next station on the serving line only to have the employee stop serving in order to restock low items. At a regular Souplantation, the employees can restock the line while customers pile up their plates. Most delays in the tradition Souplantation buffet line are perceived to be caused by slow customers (i.e. a parent serving themselves and their kids), so most frustration from a slow buffet line is directed at other customers, not at employees.

However, no customers outwardly showed any annoyance, that I noticed at the Souplantation Express, which is probably attributed to the outstandingly friendly and cheerful attitude of all of the employees. Their attitude was on par with cruise ship or hotel management customer service.

Food, Drink, & Ambience

The quality and selection of the food was very good, just as I've come to expect from Souplantation. The serving sizes are definitely not small, either. Two people could share a single soup and salad serving. Also, the outside patio was very pleasant. I've been to Souplantations in Carlsbad, Vista, and Encinitas, and this is the first time I recall seeing a patio.

Their coffee system was a little odd, though. I ordered a small drink, thinking that I could make an ice coffee. But, they appeared to be out of both regular and decaf coffee. After eating, I went back to the self-serve beverage counter and both thermoses were still empty. When I asked about the coffee, I was told that they don't brew it into the thermoses until the first customer orders it. Once it was brewed, though, I had to track down the half and half. I don't think it's kept at the beverage counter due to the small space.

Unfortunately, there's no frozen yogurt or muffins and, since it's not a buffet, there's no seconds on food. But, you'll break even on the price if you think of trading those goodies for more salad since the serving sizes are much bigger (that's probably a stretch, though).

One little touch, that I liked, was the high quality plasticware which looks like real silverware until you pick it up.

Verdict

The food is fresh and tasty with great customer service inside and outside a clean restaurant. There was a continuous line of customers waiting to be served mainly because this place is in high demand. After your first visit, you'll know exactly what to expect, so this great experience only gets better. I know that I'll be going back.

QR Code Marketing Fad?

2011-05-25T18:35:00.000-07:00

I think QR codes, in display ads, will end up being a short lived fad like the :CueCat. Advertisers who use this new barcode format are shutting out everyone else who doesn't have a device, in hand, with a camera and QR code reader application.

Short URLs would be a much better alternative. Perhaps, putting the short URL next to the QR code would be a good way to include people who don't have a QR code reading device.

Part of the problem is that, when your average non-techie comes across a QR code, they won't even know where to begin to figure out what it is. How many times have people wondered what that U inside a circle means on food condiments?

I tried out the QR code in this ad (circled in red) for The Dragonfly Effect and the experience wasn't so hot. For starters, this QR code lead me to a landscape video that would only play in portrait mode inside the QR app; and, when the video ended, there was no where to go from there (i.e., no further call to action). I think that this experience will probably get better over time, but so far, it's lacking.

On the other hand, I think QR codes have a perfect place in the off line world since each QR code can contain over 4,000 characters. Imagine being able to scan a shipping container in the middle of the desert, without any network connectivity, and the QR code reporting back the container's inventory since it's all encoded in that bar code. I can see the QR code being popular with the military.

What would it take for these marketing QR codes to catch on with consumers? Integrating QR code in the OS or camera driver is key. Now that would give it a fighting chance.

Playing the Quiet Victim

2011-05-24T12:45:00.000-07:00

Ever been in one of those situations where, if you didn't say anything, you were the victim and if you did say something, you were the bad guy?

This happened to me, last month, when I was flying home from the East Coast.

My United flight was completely full. Although I had a seat in one of the last rows, I ended up in the last boarding group since I had an aisle seat and United boards window seats first and then moves inboard.

When I got to my row, the window seat was still not occupied and there was a guy seated in the middle seat. I took my aisle seat and then, a few minutes later, a couple with two small children showed up. Mom and the kids were in the row in front of me and dad was assigned the window seat in my row.

The father asked me if I'd mind switching my aisle seat for his window seat so he could help out with the kids. What could I say? Of course I obliged. But, in the blink of an eye, the guy in the middle seat said, "Let me just move over a seat," as he took the window seat.

Things had just gone from a so-so window seat to an unpleasant middle seat faster than I could respond and, with each passing second, I realized that I couldn't say anything polite without sounding like a curmudgeon. Now what?

I could tell, when the father and I made eye contact, that he felt bad about what just happened. Although he mentioned that this was, in no way, his intention, I didn't say anything. Mr. former-middle-seat looked like he was in the military and I imagined that, had I said anything, his response could have been something on the order of, "I'm just returning from Afghanistan and I was hoping that I could have the window seat so that I could look at the country that I've sworn to defend."

But, playing the quiet victim did end up having its advantages. About ten minutes after takeoff, the father, in the aisle seat, moved up into the row in front of me and sat there, with his daughter on his lap, for the rest of the flight. So, I ended up next to the only open seat on the plane. Meanwhile, Mr. former-middle-seat took out a military technical manual for an aircraft radar system and quietly read it.

Missing Friends' Facebook Updates

2011-05-22T15:27:00.000-07:00

Over the past several months, I noticed that I was missing friends' updates in my Facebook News Feed. Specifically, I wasn't seeing many of my wife's posts in my Facebook News Feed unless I visited her Facebook page.

My friend, Rich, told me that Facebook had defaulted to showing the updates only from friends that I interacted with most often. I spent a good deal of time trying to track down this setting without any luck.

This afternoon, I asked Rich where to find the Facebook setting that controlled whose updates appear in my Facebook News Feed. It took him a little digging, but he found it and sent the details to me.

Click to embiggen

Nefarious Mac OS X Attack

2011-05-21T21:14:00.000-07:00

This is one of the most clever attacks on Mac OS X that I've seen in the wild.

I was searching Google for photos of Kelly McGillis since I had driven by "her" Top Gun house, earlier this evening. When I clicked on several of the top results from Google, the following webpage came up and a ZIP file, with a trojan, started downloading.

Click to enlarge
At first glance, this download might look legit to the casual user, but it's not. Fortunately, nothing bad can happen just by visiting websites like this one.

This type of attack is not a virus since it doesn't spread on its own. But, like most social engineering attacks, people could be duped into thinking that they might need to install the application that was just downloaded. After unzipping this file, you'd have to double click on the installer and then grant it administrative access to install this malware on your computer. Falling victim to this attack requires that a user take several deliberate steps, but, that could easily happen if you thought this was a software update from Apple.

While attacks like this aren't uncommon, it's interesting that the attacker was able to figure out how to poison Google's search algorithm into returning their nefarious websites at the top of the list.

Was the Killing of bin Laden Legal?

2011-05-09T22:37:00.000-07:00

Under the law of war, a combatant can engage the enemy at any time as long as they're not surrendering. Even if the enemy is running from the fight (retreating) - as was the case at the Highway of Death - they're still a legitimate target. Surrender is an honorable action when you no longer have any means to resist (Article II of the Code of Conduct).

This leads to a couple questions.
1. Was bin Laden a civilian?
2. If so, can civilians be considered combatants?

The short answer to the second question is yes; even if bin Laden was considered a civilian, civilians can be considered combatants when they take up arms (some exceptions are peace officers, such as the police).

When civilians take up arms it is referred to as levée en masse. Al Qada's attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 & 2001, American embassies in East African in 1998, USS Cole in 2000, etc. were attacks (acts of war) against the sovereign nation of the United States of America. Al Qada carried out these attacks as a perverse misinterpretation of Islamic defensive jihad. Therefore, the plan to capture or kill bin Laden (Operation Neptune Spear) was legal.

Thought Exercise
Now here's an interesting thought, try reversing the situation. What is the status of the President of the United States? He's clearly the commander-in-chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, yet he is a definitely a civilian. Imagine if Iraqi commandos flew into Texas, captured former President Bush, and labeled him a war criminal for attacking and occupying Iraq? How would Article 98 of the Rome Statute apply?

The End?
The real challenge is figuring out how the end to the War on Terror will look. What parties will sign the treaty? Will al Qada, one day, gain legitimacy in the eyes of the U.N., like the PLO did in the 1970s and 1980s, in order to take a seat at the table?

Planes and Pilots at Palomar

2011-05-05T12:30:00.000-07:00

I covered the Wings of Freedom tour at Palomar Airport for Carlsbad Patch, this past week. The video is below and you can see the photos here.

Osama Bin Laden Killed

2011-05-01T21:15:00.000-07:00

This is the web page to watch, in the coming days, for details of Osama bin Laden's death.

Photojojo iPhone Telephoto Lens

2011-04-22T18:22:00.000-07:00

I love to take photos with my iPhone – and I've taken thousands. One thing that I really wish the iPhone could do better is zoom. In photography, there are two types of zoom: digital zoom and optical zoom.

Digital zoom simply blows up pixels. If you've ever "overzoomed" into a photo then you've seen how blocky it is when it's pixilated. It looks terrible.

Optical zoom, on the other hand, uses lens optics to "magnify" the subject – it's as if you were physically closer to the subject when you took the photo. A 10x optical zoom will appear as if you were ten times closer.

In photographer lingo, they don't actually refer to telephoto lenses as "10x" – instead, they refer to a lens by its focal length, i.e. 400 mm, since that indicates the distance to the focal point, behind the lens, where the light rays will converge.

Optical zoom is always better than digital zoom. But, it's also more expensive, due to the added lenses, plus it's bulkier.

On Tuesday, Jeff Leon, a high school classmate of mine, showed me an ad for Photojojo's iPhone Telephoto Lens which is an 8x telephoto lens that's made specifically for the iPhone 3 or iPhone 4. Priced at $35.00, it was an offer that I couldn't resist. Plus, the more that I dug into this product's offerings, the more that I was impressed.

Not only does 35 bucks buy you an 8x zoom lens, which attaches to your iPhone with a simple snap on case, but it also comes with a tripod to hold your iPhone. Do you know how long I've been looking for a simple iPhone tripod? Answer: a long time!

Ordering the Telephoto Lens

I placed my order on Tuesday and I received the new zoom lens this afternoon. The entire process of ordering and waiting for my telephoto lens to arrive was more fun than I expected when I received e-mails from Photojojo like:

We just wanted to let you know that we got your order. You've got this online shopping thing down pat!

The next day, when my order shipped, I received an e-mail with a subject line that read:

Yay! Your Photojojo Order Shipped!

And, the best part was the way they signed off this e-mail:

We hope our box of photo goodies brightens your day and brings you super photo happiness!
xoxo,
Photojojo

Photojojo was just as excited about my order as I was!

Unboxing

When I opened the shipping box, I immediately noticed that the telephoto lens box had the same form factor as the iPhone 3 box. And, in the packing materials, I saw that they also included a green toy dinosaur tchotchke.

As I showed the triceratops to my wife, we got a huge laugh when our beagle jumped up and sank his teeth into the plastic dinosaur as he tried, unsuccessfully, to snatch it from my hand and eat it thinking that it was a yummy Greenie.

Included in the box:

Telephoto lens
Universal holder
iPhone case
Mini tripod
Carrying case
Cleaning cloth

Critical Assessment

I can sum up this product in one word: Fantastic!

It's well worth $35 – I would have happily paid more. The plastic case easily snaps onto my iPhone and then the zoom lens screws into the threads on the case. You can manually focus the lens, depending how faraway the subject it. The minimum focal distance is about ten feet.

The tripod mount also rotates a full 90° so that you can take photos in either portrait or landscape (or anywhere in between).

I took my iPhone 4 with the telephoto lens outside to snap a couple photos of the birds of paradise on my lawn using the Photojojo tripod. You can click on these two images to compare the details and see the difference. Both photos were taken from the exact same vantage point. It obvious that I'm a happy camper with this product.

Tweeting and Meeting the McCains

2011-04-16T17:59:00.000-07:00

I saw that Cindy McCain (Senator John McCain's wife) was fairly active on Twitter so I began following her. Around lunchtime, today, she mentioned that Senator McCain was cooking.

Brats for lunch. John is the grill master!less than a minute ago via Twitter for BlackBerry® Favorite Retweet ReplyCindy McCain
CindyhM1

So, I asked her to tweet out a photo:

@CindyhM1 You should tweet out a photo of the Senator grilling. Does he wear a "Kiss the cook" apron? ;^Dless than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhone Favorite Retweet ReplyJoe Moreno ✔
JoeMoreno

Well, a few minutes later, she posted a picture of Senator McCain:

John in his grilling outfit! http://yfrog.com/gzh44jnjless than a minute ago via Twitter for BlackBerry® Favorite Retweet ReplyCindy McCain
CindyhM1

Here's the photo she took:

Of course, I thanked her:

@CindyhM1 That's beautiful. I love it! Thanks!less than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhone Favorite Retweet ReplyJoe Moreno ✔
JoeMoreno

Meeting The McCains

My wife and I got a chance to meet the McCains about a year and a half ago. Senator McCain, who gave the commencement address when I graduated from the Naval Academy in 1993, was back in Annapolis for his 50 year reunion in 2008 - which coincided with my class' 15 year reunion.

After a parade, that reunion weekend in 2008, we met at the Superintendent's house for a garden party reception. Cindy was at the reception with her son, Jack, who was a "firstie" (senior) at the Academy, and her daughter, Meghan.

I spoke with Jack, for a short time, and I mentioned to him that his father gave my class' commencement address. I'm guessing that Jack must have been about seven or eight years old in 1993. I was surprised when Jack told me that he clearly remembered his father's commencement address to our class and he said that it had a big impact on him. Jack then introduced my wife and I to Cindy and we chatted for a little bit – but not too long, Cindy was a busy women with only six or seven weeks to go until the presidential election.

Where to turn to when you're sick?

2011-04-14T11:50:00.000-07:00

I've had a sore throat for the past week. It came on the day after I went to the San Diego Padres home game season opener, last Tuesday. No doubt that I caught something after being exposed to the crowds and eating the stadium food.

I feel fine and it doesn't feel too sore. However, my voice sounds like I've smoked a carton of cigarettes every day for the past 80 years.

Since it hasn't gotten any better (nor has it gotten worse), I left a message with my doctor's office, this morning, to see if they could recommend some over-the-counter medication. An assistant called me back a few hours later and she recommenced Mucinex.

The funny part of the phone call was when the doctor's assistant said, "I was just looking at WebMD and it says..." As she mentioned that, it conjured up the brilliant advice that my sister once gave me, "When you're sick, you go to the doctor, not the Internet."

Stealing Software Is Too Easy At The Apple Store

2011-03-25T13:31:00.001-07:00

When building a secure system, you have to think about all the different ways that it can be attacked or compromised. Unfortunately, that is nearly impossible in today's world.

Defender's Advantage

Historically, defenders have the advantage. While modern military communications and mobility, referred to tactically as "shoot, move, and communicate", have slightly shifted the advantage to an attacker, a good defender will still have the upper hand. Think about how difficult it would be to break into the White House or Fort Knox and you can see how much of an advantage the defenders have.

Cyber Security

When dealing with cyber security, the advantage is almost completely turned around as it lies with the attacker. There are so many different ways to launch an attack that a networked computer (including via "sneaker net") can't be fully defended against. It is so difficult to safeguard against all attacks that even industry experts such as HBGary and Steve Gibson are at the mercy of the attackers.

Apple Retail Store

I recently checked out the iPad 2 at an Apple retail store and noticed that it was a special demo unit since I couldn't move the app icons to different locations. Obviously, you don't want customers messing up the demo models. But, this got me thinking about how hard it would be for Apple to wall off the computers in the store which are running Mac OS X.

How To Pull It Off

The first thought experiment I conducted to steal software on the Mac, such as Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop, was to drop to the command line to tar and gzip the apps, then scp the apps to one of my servers. Obviously, this isn't a simple operation and anyone sophisticated enough to do it would probably realize that they'd leave an audit trail.

MobileMe To The Rescue

As I thought more about it, I realized that each Mac on display in the Apple Store has a subscription to MobileMe. MobileMe comes with iDisk, and iDisk comes with a publicly accessible folder. Unlike a Windows application, which usually requires an installer to update the Windows registry, each Macintosh application's settings are stored under the system and user's preferences folder. If those configuration files don't exist when the application is first launched then they're automatically created. These configuration files usually contain any needed software licenses for basic installations, too.

You can probably see how the rest of this plays out. Simply drag a copy of an application, along with its preferences folders, to the iDisk's public folder and then access it from any other Mac.

What Did I Steal?

What did I actually steal to test out this theory? Well, even in the name of investigative journalism, I saw an ethical issue with actually stealing anything in this case. Both my ethics training at college and my writing on this subject wouldn't allow it. But, as a test, I took a screen shot of a website, for which I own the copyright, and then dropped it on the iDisk's public folder. That's all there is to it.

Next Steps

For starters, don't actually try conducting the thought experiment that I outlined above. What can Apple do to prevent this? Simply setting the public iDisk folder to require a password would prevent this particular attack. Although, pointing out this vulnerability and its solution to a couple Apple Store employees didn't seem to sink in.

Living Without Incandescent Bulbs

2011-03-23T21:14:00.000-07:00

As with all new technologies, there's a bit of a learning curve to understand the gotchas. Over the past few months, I've started replacing incandescent bulbs with low-energy light-bulbs, more formally known as compact fluorescent bulbs.

When I first started making the switch, my biggest concern was the color and brightness of the light emitted from these bulbs. I did not like many of the ones I've seen in hotel rooms which were too dim and yellow. A visit to Home Depot solved that problem since they had some on display that you could juxtapose which worked out very nicely.

Once I understood the color terminology such as bright white, soft white, etc, I thought I had the problem licked.

Unfortunately, there's a problem that I can't figure out how to solve which is that some compact florescent bulbs take longer than others to reach full brightness (on the order of a couple minutes).

Here's an example where I installed four GE bulbs of the same power and color with very different results. Although the following photo does not show the true difference, I can tell you that the bulb on the right is much, much brighter than the others for the first two minutes. The three on the left are so dim, when first turned on, that they're truly annoying. But, once they're are warmed up, you can't tell the difference.

In my limited experience with these bulbs, the only thing I've noticed, in common, about the bulbs with the long warm up time is that they're all made by GE. Of course, the irony is that GE is suppose to "bring good things to light." If I could go back, and do it again, I'd look for white LED bulbs instead of compact florescent lights to replace my incandescent bulbs.

iPad 2 Launch, Part II

2011-03-12T12:12:00.000-08:00

Covering the actual iPad 2 launch wasn't as interesting as covering the first person in line, the day before.

San Diego Tsunami a Non-Event

2011-03-11T14:12:00.000-08:00

By the time the tsunami traveled from Japan to San Diego, it seemed to have lost all of its power. As spectators flocked to the beaches to see this morning's non-event at Carlsbad, a lone surfer threw caution to the wind as he rode the waves near the very spot where Junior Seau drove his SUV off a cliff. So many people parked along the Coast Highway that the Carlsbad police had to shoo away drivers who parked illegally.

iPad 2 Customers Queue Up in Carlsbad

2011-03-11T11:06:00.001-08:00

Last night, I starting gathering some background info for a story that I'm writing on today's iPad 2 launch at the local Carlsbad Apple Store. After interviewing the first person in line, Paul Yorke, he tweeted it out:

I was just interviewed by an AOL news organization called the Carlsbad Patch carlsbadpatch.com #inLine4iPad2less than a minute ago via Twittelator☣☢ Paul B. Yorke ☣☢
bpekroy

My editor saw the tweet so we ended up running the story-before-the-story. It was my first real attempt at a video story incorporated into a written article; so the quality should only get better from here.

I Still Don't Get Twitter

2011-03-07T21:02:00.000-08:00

"Getting" Twitter isn't really that hard. Most people understand that an e-mail is an online version of a written note or letter. But there are a few short falls of e-mail that don't match how we communicate in the real world.

First, it's difficult to have a real time conversation over e-mail. Second, people usually do not talk to each other by speaking several paragraphs before getting a response during a casual conversation. Third is the fact that you can't easily start a conversation with someone you don't know.

Twitter and Facebook simply take the conversations that we have at parties, cafes, bars and mixers into the online world.

Facebook is the private party or water cooler chat we have with the people we know, whereas Twitter is the place to have a random conversation, in public, usually with strangers. The beauty of Twitter is that you can search the conversations and jump in at any time.

Just like many people don't go to bars or cafes for atmosphere, the same is true for logging onto Twitter or Facebook. You don't have to do it if it doesn't float your boat.

Craigslist Taxi Service in 11 Minutes or Less.

2011-02-26T09:10:00.000-08:00

On Thursday, I drove up to French Valley airport, in Temecula, and flew back home to Carlsbad. While the drive takes about 45 minutes without traffic, the flight is about 15 minutes. The only problem with flying back to Carlsbad was that my car was still at the airport in Temecula.

I considered a couple options to get back to my car including paying for a taxi or a one way car rental. The taxi option would have cost about $120 which made it an easy decision to say, "No, thanks."

A one way car rental could have been a good option if the stars lined up correctly. Some car rental companies charge less than $30/day - the problem was finding one in Carlsbad and and another one Temecula. While I did find a car rental for about $40/day, they told me that they'd add at least another $40 for the one way rental.

Enter Craigslist
After almost giving up, I ran a search on Craigslist and discovered that someone had posted an ad asking for a ride from the San Francisco airport to Palo Alto. While I've never bought or sold anything through Craigslist, I was well aware of how closely people watch it so I posted my ad.

Instant Gratification
I posted the ad at 12:51. Within 11 minutes I had one e-mail and one voice mail from two different people. I called back one of the "bidders", Anthony, who said that this job would help him make ends meet until he received some college money that he was expecting next week. I gave him the address and we set the pickup time for 2 p.m.

I was wondering what he meant when he said that he was expecting some money for college. Two things popped to mind. At first, it sounded like he was expecting money back from the G.I. Bill since the VA pays you back once you've completed a class. I quickly dismissed that remote possibility for a more likely scenario which was that he was waiting for a check from mom and dad.

At 1:55 p.m., he called me to let me know that he had arrived. I walked across the street to the school wondering what my ride to Temecula would be like.

It turns out that Anthony is a former Southern California gangbanger who joined the military. After getting out of the military, a few years ago, he became a born again Christian and began using his G.I. Bill to study theology at a local Christian college.

Military Connection
Since we were both in the armed forces, we had a lot to talk about on our drive. I was impressed with Anthony's military background. He served in Coast Guard from 2002-2006 in their security forces unit which is used for both boarding and securing ships at sea as well as counter-terrorism.

He also knew his Coast Guard history. When I mentioned that the last time I was on a Coast Guard ship was the USCGC Munro in West Africa (Djibouti) he told me that that ship is named after the Coast Guard's only person to be awarded the Medal of Honor. While I knew that, since the ship's captain told us the history of the ship during my visit, what I did not know, which Anthony went on to explain, was that Douglas Munro was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for rescuing Marines during the Guadalcanal campaign in WW II.

Finances
While Antony never complained about not having money, I could tell things were tight for him and his wife and kids when we got off the highway and he asked for some of the money, a few miles before the airport, to pay for gas. I felt bad for this guy who had obviously turned his life around. He was now on the straight and narrow to the point that he wouldn't even say "Hell" when he told me, "The Navy guys used to give us heck."

As we pulled up to the airport, he told me that, when he was in high school, he went on a tiger cruise with his father who was in the Navy. A tiger cruise is usually the last week of a six month deployment when the ship picks up civilian dependents so they can get a taste of life aboard a Navy ship. It turns out that his tiger cruise was on the U.S.S. Boxer in 1997 which is the same ship and deployment I was on.

When he dropped me off I couldn't help but give him an extra $20 for the company and conversation.

Amazon S3 Webinar on New S3 Features

2011-02-24T10:01:00.000-08:00

This morning I attended Amazon's Webinar to learn about their new S3 features. Their newest feature, which was launched last week, allows you to set a bucket's default root object (i.e. index.html) and it also allows you set a default HTML error page to return for 4xx HTML status codes. These features make it easier to host a static website on S3.

Actually watching someone walk through the Amazon console was very helpful and I learned a few things to keep in mind.

1. If you set a bucket's default object to index.html, then each bucket's subfolder's default object must have the same name (i.e. index.html). For example, if you want http://www.example.com/subfolder to return a default object then you'll need an object named subfolder/index.html.

2. Don't forget make website objects public so that they can be read by anyone on the Web. You can set a bucket's default upload policy to public and then, later, explicitly set a specific object as private so that it will only be served up to a user after authentication (i.e. a digital signature with expiration, referrer, or specific IP address).

3. The new feature maintains backward compatibility so that the API still returns XML when accessing a bucket directly, yet, it'll return your default object when appropriate. They accomplish this by changing the URL to your bucket's root object using a slightly different end point URL for you default HTML object, such as:

http://pubs.joemoreno.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com

This is a technical issue which will be completely transparent to anyone configuring the new feature using the AWS console and, most importantly, it's elegant in that it fully maintains backward compatibility with their APIs.

Gotcha

Although Amazon S3 still does not allow you to configure an A record so that you can host http://example.com, I got the impression that this feature will be available in the future. Although I'm speculating, today's comment, from Amazon, was, "We're looking at ways that we can do that [host a domain's root without requiring a subdomain]."

Workaround

In the mean time, Donovan Watts showed me his workaround, last night, that he uses with Adjix and CloudFlare. His workaround allows a domain's root domain, which normally must be a DNS A record, to be configured as a CNAME. Although I have't tried his technique, yet, I can see it in action with his short domain name.

Hosting Static Websites on S3: The 99.4% solution

2011-02-18T17:14:00.000-08:00

Today, Amazon announced a new feature which allows you to (almost) host a static website entirely on AWS S3. They do this by allowing you to set a default root object for each S3 bucket. Think of the default root object as the equivalent of an index.html default file. This setting tells a web server which file to return to the user when one isn't specifically asked for. For example, when you enter cnn.com in your web browser, CNN's web server automatically returns www.cnn.com/index.html.

Gotcha

In order for this feature to work, you'd have to configure your domain's DNS CNAME (alias) to point to your bucket. But there's a big gotcha and that's the fact that a CNAME record can only be used with subdomains (i.e. www.example.com, blog.example.com, images.example.com) and not the root domain (i.e. example.com). The DNS RFC directs that the root domain must be an A record which can only point to a numeric IP address.

Amazon Permanent Fix

To fix this problem, Amazon would need to set up servers at a single IP address. Load balancing a single IP address is exactly what keeps the entire DNS root servers alive and running. While there may only be 13 different static IP addresses for the world's DNS root servers, each one is supported by many redundant servers located on different continents. In other words, one static IP address can easily map to an unlimited number of physical servers.

Workaround

Since an Amazon fix to this problem may not be in the near future - or it might never come - there is a workaround, but it's not as elegant as it could be.

I've actually been using the following technique for a few years at Adjix. When visiting adjix.com, note that the URL for most of the static web pages at the bottom of the Adjix home page begin with web.adjix.com. As long as things are working, most people never even notice if a URL begins with www, web, blog, or has no subdomain.

1. Create an S3 bucket called www.example.com. Put an index.html file in there along with all of your website's static content and set the index file as the bucket's root object.

2. Configure your DNS CNAME to point to this bucket (i.e. www should point to www.example.com.s3.amazonaws.com.).

3. This final step is unpleasant and inelegant from a technical point. It involves using a third party service where you can configure our domain's root domain to point to a static IP address. I would be more than happy to host this redirect service for your domain's root A record. If you're interested in using this service then please let me know via e-mail.

Nearly anyone who visits your website, by typing the URL directly into their browser, will either enter www.example.com or example.com. Either method will work since they will be redirected to www.example.com/index.html.

While redirects aren't always elegant, you've probably noticed many redirects when logging into your Google account or when accessing a custom domain blog on Posterous. It isn't as clean and quick as it could be, but it doesn't violate any RFCs and it works.

"Facebooking" immediately after being held up at gunpoint

2011-02-17T14:33:00.001-08:00

A local pizzeria was held up at gunpoint and "Facebooked" the incident practically in realtime.

For the details, watch Deanne Goodman's Carlsbad Patch interview.

The Hug

2011-02-14T00:01:00.000-08:00

What’s in a hug
That makes it feel so snug?
Warmth, love, and compassion.
It’s always in fashion

Between Mom and Dad
When we’re happy and sad
And as we grow old
It never gets cold

Each time we hug, it seems to mean more
We get and give so much with the ones we adore
Between lovers and friends
It’s a message we send

We’re there for each other
Even sister and brother

Oh, how I miss a hug from a lover
This I want now, more than no other
To hold her tight
It feels so right

True and complete
It’s no small feat

There’s a piece of me missing
To what I say here, please listen

On nights when I’m alone
I sit by myself at home
And wish I could have saved
Those hugs which I now crave

All the attention goes to the kiss
But right now that is something I don’t miss

It is the completeness of the embrace
And not the touching of the face
That literally warms you up
Like coffee in a cup

After a marriage, a husband and wife
Sleep in each other’s arms for the rest of their life

Or on a cold and stormy night
When things don’t seem to be quite right
Mom and dad are there for child
And keep things from getting too wild

But if you cannot tell
I wish it were hugs I could sell
For when you’re feeling down
Just have one of these around

And keep one thing in mind
Especially when in a bind
A great big hug today
Can make everything okay

For my wife, Laura, on our eleventh wedding anniversary.
Married: 2/14/2000

The Future of Digital Publications

2011-02-10T15:04:00.000-08:00

I have seen the future of digital publications and it looks like Flipboard and Livestand.

The challenge of distributing digital books has already been solved with the Kindle and iBooks. But, reading a book is a different experience than reading a digital newspaper or magazine. Books are read linearly whereas newspapers and periodicals are flipped through. While we might read a magazine article from beginning to end, how we discovered that article could have been through the random process of flipping.

Bad

I belong to two large associations which have both tried to distribute their magazines in a digital format. The problem is that both associations have chosen to use solutions like NXTbook or Issuu. Once you get to a page that you want to read you have to click to zoom in because the text is too small to read when viewing the entire page. Actually, each page isn't really text - rather it's a screenshot of the magazine's artwork - so you can't search for text, easily, or copy and paste it. If it's a multicolumn article, you then have to pan back up to the top next column to continue reading. These solutions are basically an online version of microfilm.

There are several other problems with this user experience. First, the magazine rendering is CPU intensive, so it's slow to initialize, turn pages, and it doesn't work well on older computers. Also, since it's just screen shots of the magazine pages, there's no multimedia such as video or audio.

This solution is a clear cut example of a case that violated a key rule in UI/UX: Start with the UX and then work back to the technology.

Good

The Daily and Project provide good user experiences since they're designed specifically for the iPad and they have rich multimedia. However, the content can only be displayed on the iPad. If you send an article from The Daily to someone without an iPad, all that the recipient will see is a humongous screen shot of the entire article as rendered on the iPad.

Better

Flipboard currently provides the best experience that I've seen. I love that I can read a blog, using Flipboard, simply by pointing it at the blog's Twitter stream or Google Reader.

There are two distinct ways in which publication media is distributed and consumed. One way is through batch publication, such as a daily or monthly publication. Both The Daily and Project use this technique. The other way is through continuous updates, i.e. a river of news, such as most blogs, CNN.com, etc.

The problem with batch publishing is that you can't easily go back to a previous issue's article. If you missed it, then you missed it. The nice thing about a river of news is that you can back up in your river to pickup where you left off.

Best

The ideal solution is an open format (such as RSS or ePub) so that the content can be best displayed depending on the medium. Consuming a slightly customized RSS feed via an application similar to Flipboard is how I envision the implementation - let's call it a Digital Publication Feed (DPF).

It would work by pointing a Flipboard-like application at a web site for automatic detection of the DPF (similar to how my web browser automatically finds the RSS feed when visiting cnn.com). The DPF would be an RSS feed standardized for the digital publishing industry with a few special tags, such as <hed>, <dek>, <byline>, <lead>, <text>, <video>, <audio>, plus other metadata to give any third party consuming application the ability to render news articles. There could even be tags for handling comments and ad revenue sharing.

The DPF is a fairly simple concept, but the beauty is that it would work well across different devices and, most importantly, it would be a standard.

Worst

While generating ad revenue is vital, it's important that ads don't get out of control. Leading newspapers don't plaster ads on the front page of their printed papers. Yet, if you look at the newspaper industry's attempts to monetize the web you'll find web sites where a single article stretches across multiple pages for the sole purpose of increasing advertising CPM. At least, with an interstitial ads, the reader only needs to click once to get beyond it.

My final pet peeve is with news sites where the actual content of the article is completely below the fold. You can't even begin to scroll down to the actual article until the multiple instances of the Flash players finish loading and begin rendering their flashing ads.

P.S. - I wonder if it's called Flash because so many ads now flash using Flash? (That's a joke.)

What's the difference between iTunes & iPod? It depends.

2011-02-07T15:03:00.000-08:00

As businesses grow, things can get confusing as more products and services are offered for sale. Apple has done a great job of managing this since nearly all consumer facing products and services are reviewed, in detail, by Steve Jobs.

Over the past few years, I've noticed something that will confuse people who are new to Apple's ecosystem.

iTunes, iPod, & Videos
iTunes is a desktop app which includes access to the iTunes Store. This app is where you store, purchase, and download music, videos, and mobile apps. You also consume this content inside the desktop iTunes app with the exception of the mobile apps since they only run on the mobile devices.

However, on iOS devices such as the iPad, iPod touch, and iPhone, the paradigm is different. On these mobile devices, think of the iTunes app as only the iTunes Store for buying and downloading media such as music, videos, and podcasts.

If you want to buy and download Apps on the iPad and iPhone, then you need to use the App Store app, which is similar to the desktop App Store app for buying and downloading desktop apps.

But, on iOS devices, your music isn't accessed through the iTunes app, rather it's accessed through the iPod app (which looks very similar to the version of iTunes running on your desktop). Here's where it gets more confusing; when accessing video on your iPhone or iPod touch, you use the iPod app, but, on the iPad, you use the Videos app to play your videos.

It can be a little difficult to remember all this even if you've been along for the ride since Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007. I find myself opening and closing iTunes and the iPod apps to figure where everything is on the iOS devices. And, if you're new to Apple, it will be very confusing.

Citizen Journalism: First hand experience

2011-02-04T22:19:00.000-08:00

Today, I had a first hand experience with citizen journalism. I think of it as pro-am journalism where both a professional and amateur report the news.

This morning, when driving from Carlsbad to San Clemente, I was stuck in gridlock on I-5 ("the Five"), northbound, which was backed up for more than a dozen miles at the Las Pulgas exit of the Marine Corp base at Camp Pendleton. Since this 17 mile section of the Five passes through a military base, there are no public detours between the two towns that border on Camp Pendleton's north and south sides. But, fortunately for me, I still have a military sticker on my car which let me cut through Camp Pendleton to avoid the traffic.

After cutting through Camp Pendleton I was headed back onto the Five at Las Pulgas, via a service road, when I passed the wreck which caused the accident. I made a U-turn and parked next to the truck to snap these photos in the parking lot where the flatbed truck was parked.

After taking these photos, I stopped at a tea shop in San Clemente, a few minutes later, and posted one photo to Twitter. Immediately, a reporter from the North County Times saw my photo and tweeted me to ask if she could use it to accompany an article about the accident.

@JoeMoreno Do you mind if I use that photo on the NCT website? We have a story up, but no art.less than a minute ago via TweetDeckDorrine Mendoza
AssignmentDesk1

I told her that I has several photos which I sent to her.

@AssignmentDesk1 Sure. Feel free to use that accident photo. I have several other photos that I can email to you if you'd like.less than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhoneJoe Moreno™ 
JoeMoreno

She ended up using two of my photos in the article about the accident.

I was telling the tea shop owner about the accident and gridlock as I was tweeting with the reporter and sending her my photos. The shop owner casually mentioned that, earlier this morning, as he headed from his home in Carlsbad to his shop in San Clemente, he was passed by a white pickup truck driving the wrong way on the Five which kicked up rocks into his windshield. I was stunned! The tea shop owner drove right past the pickup truck just before it caused the four-vehicle pileup.

How to Regulate Software Security

2011-01-25T12:56:00.000-08:00

In the 1960s and early 1970s my father worked for JC Penney's quality assurance (QA) department. In those days, JC Penney used to evaluate and test the products that they sold.

After we moved from New York City out to Suffolk County, Long Island, my father decided to forgo the commute on the Long Island Rail Road and he went to work locally at Underwriters Laboratories (UL) which specializes in independent safety certification.

Growing up, I learned a lot about the importance of QA in manufacturing. After all, you can't know everything about everything, so it's nice to have a professional looking out for your safety.

The Emergence of Consumerism
As new industries emerged during the Twentieth Century, there arose a need for independent organizations to evaluate the suitability of third party products. A similar requirement now exists for the software industry where third parties need to evaluate software for security. However, these organizations cannot also sell the solution to the problems they discover.

These third parities would evaluate software in ways similar to how current private (Consumer Reports, BBB, UL, etc) and public (FDA, EPA, FAA, etc) organizations evaluate cars, planes, businesses, drugs, etc.

Regulating Innovation
But, software is too innovative to regulate.

That's what was said about the automobile industry more than 80 years ago. Today, NHTSA provides a meaningful safety rating system with 90% of cars receiving at least four stars (out of five).

Walled Garden
But, closed systems take power from the user.

This is exactly what was said to ADM Grace Hopper when she developed the first library of mainframe software routines in the early 1950s. However, over the time, more and more users are consumers, not programmers.

It's important to keep in mind that a regulated system does not have to be closed. Car owners are free to modify their cars, but very few actually do that. Nearly all consumers, these days, opt for a car and engine that's made by the same manufacture and rarely look under the hood.

With power, comes responsibility - if software engineers really wanted all the power and responsibility possible then they'd be programming in assembly language and foregoing higher level languages and operating systems.

App Store
The Apple App Stores for Mac OS X and iOS are a small step in the right direction. Over the years, we've come across software from independent developers and asked ourselves, "Do I trust this app enough to download and install it?" Having a creditable App Store is a good first step to building trust in both the product's quality and the financial transaction.

Nowadays, we don't dig too deep into safety when it comes to driving a car, flying on a plane, or driving over a bridge. The system works because we trust it.

Independent Evaluation

The next step would be independent organizations which evaluate software (and perhaps websites) for security.

Steps have already been taken to evaluate how companies store payment data, collected by web sites, using the PCI Compliance standard.

An oversimplified sample of questions that could be answered in the evaluation would be:

How is my private information stored (is it encrypted)?

How does it communicate over the Internet?

What information is transferred?

Does it use third party open or closed software libraries?

For server software, metrics could be used such as determining how many transactions can be processed within a given time. Of course, the transaction details would need to be specified so that others can reproduce them. Publishing how much load a server can handle is no different than publishing how much load a crane can hold.

The criteria for the evaluation is important, but it's up to each independent organization to develop their own standards for competitive reasons.

In the end, the evaluation would sum up the software quality using a rating system. Most people, when reviewing cars, look at the star ratings for specific vehicles that piques their interest and then they dig into the details of the review.

Just because an application receives, for example, one star, doesn't mean that the government needs to intervene. We have plenty of "one star" software on the market, today; it's just a matter of giving consumers enough information so that they can evaluate the big picture.

Please make a voice call to 911.

2011-01-24T20:10:00.000-08:00

"Please make a voice call to 911. There is no text service to 911 available at this time."

If you have your Facebook account tied to your Verizon cell phone then you may have repeatably received this message, tonight.

Neither the news nor bloggers have reported this incident - but, the Twittershpere is buzzing with complaints about it. I'm betting that it's a bug in Verizon's cell phone network as they get read to roll out the iPhone.

In the mean time, your best bet to stop the repeated text messages is to log into your Facebook account and remove your cell phone number.

InTrade Futures Contract to Hedge Against Steve Jobs' Departure from Apple

2011-01-23T19:23:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I contact InTrade and asked them if they'd consider creating a contract to hedge against Steve Jobs' departure as CEO of Apple.

Less than 24 hours later InTrade replied back to me: "Thanks for your suggestion. A market for Steve Jobs to depart as CEO of Apple has now been listed".

These futures contracts are not valid, though, if Steve Jobs dies before he steps down. Why not? InTrade goes on to explain, "We are very reluctant to list a market where people can profit from the death of an individual."
Very classy, InTrade, very classy.

The thinking, here, is that Steve Jobs would step down before he became too sick to lead Apple

Following a Spammer's Trail

2011-01-23T16:03:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, a friend posted an odd message to my Facebook wall. As soon as I read it I realized that her account was highjacked, probably by visiting a nefarious website.

This can happen when you click on a link that takes you to a website while you're still logged into Facebook. At this point, the nefarious website will exploit a vulnerability in your web browser and post something to Facebook on your behalf.

I decided to follow the trail. It started with a post that took me to allfreeipad.com (to be on the safe side, don't visit these websites).

AllFreeiPad.com redirected my web browser to www.ipadfree4me.com which lead me to www.ipadfree4me.com/freeipad.htm.

This is where things got interesting, at least from a technical point. Most people know that you can view a web page's HTML source code to see its details (View -> Page Source). This is the first step to finding out the "where and how" a webpage was created, and the source code is almost always human readable unless you're trying to hide something. Instead of normal HTML, the actual source of this page uses JavaScript encoding (called escaping).

This is what you get if you decode (unescape) the JavaScript:

This escaped JavaScript tells your web browser to create an HTML frame and display the contents of elitesiteemporium.com/ipad-for-testers/?mn=54321.

After all these hops, you're now at elitesiteemporium.com. This domain name is private, so you can't see who actually owns it, but you can find out that its IP address (92.241.169.14) reveals that it's located in Russia. However, this isn't the end of the line, after a few more hops, you'll end up at a web page that wants you to enter your e-mail address so that they can send you a free iPad.

The trail ends at yourrewardinside.com's servers (IP address 204.51.78.152) running on a network leased to MPC Systems LLC which could be based in Delaware or perhaps Texas, depending who you ask.

Keep in mind that there are two parties (confederates) involved in this scheme which could be unrelated, but that's usually not the case. One party created the nefarious web page which posted their message to your Facebook wall, without you knowing, and the second party is located at the destination website (yourrewardinside.com) which claims that it will give you an iPad for the low (free) price of giving them your e-mail address.

I wouldn't recommend giving them your e-mail address.

Privacy Concerns on Twitter?

2011-01-20T14:57:00.000-08:00

Is it really necessary for Twitter to put my cell phone number and e-mail address in the HTML source code, in the clear?

To see your cell phone number and e-mail address, log into your Twitter account and then view an individual tweet. For example, view this tweet's source code and search for "Init CurrentUser Method":

Usually, sensitive information, like this, is encoded in a cookie. The cookie can change the information encoded, from time to time (for example, each time you log in). However, I can't change my cell phone number if it's compromised.

Jerry York's Ethics

2011-01-19T21:05:00.001-08:00

The late, great, Jerry York has received some attention this past week.

When I worked at Apple, I had the opportunity to have one-on-one phone calls and exchange e-mails with Mr. York regarding non-Apple business. During our first phone call, he was adamant that I review Apple's ethics policy's to ensure that our conversations wouldn't jeopardize my job at Apple (it was a non-issue, since there was no conflict of interest, and he agreed).

Service Academy Networking
Jerry York graduated from West Point (USMA '60) and he would always make the time to take a business call from another Service Academy graduate. An Annapolis classmate of mine pointed me towards Mr. York after the two had spoken about a year earlier.

My first phone call with Mr. York was scheduled for half an hour, but it lasted about 45 minutes. I called him at his home in Michigan and, during our conversation, his wife came home. He very politely excused himself for a minute or two to talk to her and I was struck by how pleasant he seemed as I could hear the beginning of his conversation with his wife.

Off the Record
So, why would Mr. York go off the record with Doron Levin? Part of the reason may have simply been privacy. How much privacy does someone deserve? Every life threatening disease is a very personal issue. Some people don't want a soul to know about it while others broadcast it over the Internet. Mr. York may have realized, as soon as he mentioned Steve Jobs' undisclosed trip to Switzerland, that it wasn't for public consumption.

Additionally, I think that Mr. York felt conflicted (to put it lightly) about Steve Jobs' lack of transparency regarding his illness since he had considered resigning from Apple's board over the disclosure of this information. While Apple's shareholders may want to be aware of these facts, regardless of Steve Jobs' privacy concerns, it would certainly give a competitive advantage to Apple's competitors. I'm sure one could argue that the shareholders also want to know what future products Apple has in its pipeline since that, too, will affect Apple's stock price.

AAPL Competitive Advantage
While competitive advantage concerns may seem like a stretch, the ideal outcome, from Apple's point of view, would have been if no information regarding Steve Jobs' health leaked out. This is exactly what happened in 2004, when Steve Jobs was first diagnosed and treated for cancer which wasn't disclosed until immediately after his surgery; and, at the end of 2004, Apple's stock price took off on its current rocket ride through its all time high, previously set in 2000.

As an Apple shareholder, I, too, want to know just how sick Steve Jobs currently is. However, I have to pause, for a moment, and wonder: Had the news of Steve Jobs' cancer been revealed in early 2004, as soon as it was discovered, would the stock price had begun its climb to where it is now?

But, perhaps this type of thinking is too Machiavellian.

Simplifying AWS S3 Bucket Sharing

2011-01-18T12:33:00.001-08:00

The problem with sharing buckets on Amazon's S3 is that it's too complicated for the casual user.

I have yet to see a simpler way to share a bucket on S3 other than the technique outlined in the link, above, but I envision a "Share my bucket" link on a web page which, when clicked, pops-up the following widget:

When the user clicks the Share Bucket button, the user's web browser would communicate directly with AWS to share the bucket. The fact that the Secret Access Key is not stored by the third party's (developer's) server is important for this to work and be trusted.

AJAX Limitations
Of course, this technique may require a little AJAX finessing since browsers only allow an XMLHttpRequest back to the server host name, port, and protocol from where the web page originated. So, the web app developer may need their own web server (e.g. Apache with its rewrite engine) to proxy the XMLHttpRequest.

Added Security
Also, for added security, the developer should be able to create a new pair of AWS Access Credentials, since up to two can be created at one time. Then, once the bucket is shared, the developer can delete the Access Credentials used for sharing the bucket.

Apple's Human Interface Guidelines

2011-01-17T15:28:00.000-08:00

I was at Apple's World Wide Developer's Conference (WWDC), in 2004, when Apple announced a subtle change to their UIs. Specifically, Apple announced that they were going to begin branding search fields with rounded corners, instead of square corners found on regular text fields.

This change is not a big deal and it works well since people are already familiar with text fields. Also, most people won't even notice the difference between square and rounded corners. More importantly is the fact that Apple announces and documents their UI design changes.

Human Interface Guidelines
It's been ten years since Apple launched Mac OS X. A key philosophy that's kept the Macintosh user experience consistent, regardless if was developed by Apple or a third party, is their Human Interface Guidelines (HIG).

A quick glance of the HIG shows how Apple explains each detail of UI design. Of course, developers are free to deviate from the HIG. But, since most developers tend to create things that are "engineer ugly", they're usually more than happy to follow these guidelines.

Kudos From Dave Winer

2011-01-14T20:42:00.000-08:00

I know that I'm bragging (yet again), but I'm honored that Dave Winer has been talking up some Internet tricks that I've used over the years related to DNS and Amazon Web Services.

Dave is the co-creator of RSS, he's a pioneer in blogging and podcasting, and, among other things, he's currently a visiting scholar at NYU.

Dave and I first connected about two years ago.

This past week, I received three great mentions from Dave:

1. Connecting reallysimple.org to Twitter

2. How to share a bucket on S3

3. Why bucket-sharing is important

Thanks for the credit, Dave!

American Health Care. Is it Un-American?

2011-01-11T00:47:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I spent about ten hours as a visitor (not a patient) at a hospital emergency room (ER). During that time, I heard a good number of stories. Several members of the staff told me that, for some reason, they'd been swamped since the New Year with three to six hour ER wait times for their patients. But, during my visit, I heard, first hand, the story of one patient which stood out as a symbol of our out-of-control health care costs.

Can't Breath in Japan
A young man was admitted with a breathing problem who was very pleasant until the nurse started explaining how much his ER visit would cost.

He was genuinely shocked when he was informed that his visit would cost $750, based on the hospital's flat rate level for a person in his unemployed and uninsured financial situation. He was told that this amount was a big savings when compared to an insured patient's billing. As the nurse started to explain how the costs would be billed he kept nervously interrupting her to say, "$750 is too much to charge a person to be treated".

His breathing problems began as a result of sleeping in a dusty and moldy apartment when he was in Japan, several weeks ago. He told the nurse that his hospital visit in Japan cost only $15, which also included a medical inhaler that was provided to him and instructions to stop working out for a few weeks. That treatment was working well, until the last day or so.

The young man told the nurse that he had no income, since he was unemployed, and that his hospital bill would probably end up being referred to collections. The nurse told him that, in order to qualify for any of the hospital's flat rate, reduced cost, plans, he'd have to leave a token deposit. His question, "How much do you need?" was literally answered with, "How much do you have?"

He dug around and gave her all the cash he had in his pocket: $7. Obviously, this American, who was a very fit and healthy young man, received a rude awaking to our country's health care costs.

O Canada, I'm Having a Heart Attack
Last Memorial Day, while visiting Canada, Guy Kawasaki had symptoms that mimicked a heart attack. A trip to a Canadian emergency room cost him a grand total of $853.04 with a final diagnosis of pneumonia. Guy said that his bill was about $9,000 less than he expected for his visit which included three ECGs, one blood test, one chest x-ray, two aspirins, and a few hits of nitro.

Congress, Security, and Health Care
I have no doubt that Representative Giffords is alive, after this past weekend's shooting, due to America's outstanding and world leading health care. But, does our health care have to cost as much as it does? More than $750 just to walk into an American emergency room verses $15 in Japan, or $853 in Canada for a complete ER heart attack symptom workup.

While these two examples of ER visits are cherry picked, they still represent the actual costs paid by any foreign national in the respective countries. Costs paid by local nationals would actually be less.

I'm sure that personal security is foremost on Congress's mind in the wake of this past weekend's shooting. We all hope that this shooting is a one time incident and the odds are very good that it is. Only one member of Congress has ever been assassinated in the line of duty: Congressman Leo Ryan was assassinated at Jonestown, Guyana on that faithful day in 1978 when more than 900 people drank the Kool-Aid.

But, once decisions are made regarding the security of Congress, I hope they can bring some sanity to health care costs. I'm not asking for socialized medicine (or, maybe I am, depending on your definition), but $25 for an aspirin is obscenely excessive. Do we begin with the health care providers, the health care insurance companies, the malpractice insurance companies, or our legal system? Or, do we just surrender, chalk it up as "too hard", and accept the status quo?

Net Neutrality For Poets

2010-12-21T00:18:00.000-08:00

socalTECH.com picked up this article for publication.

Net neutrality is a complicated and controversial subject. The principle states that if a given user pays for a certain level of Internet access, and another user pays for the same level of access, then the two users should be able to connect to each other at the subscribed level of access.

Basically, net neutrality calls for an open and non-tiered network. The world's systems of roads is a great metaphor for the Internet. Just like there's no simple way to shut down all the roads in the world, there's no simple way to turn off the Internet.

By imagining the Internet as roads, we can envision each packet of data as a car or truck traveling the highways and byways. Just as a car or a truck carries a "payload", a network packet carries a payload of data.

Using this metaphor, net neutrality means that cars get to drive on the roads with the same priority (speed) that the surrounding traffic will allow. No one's allowed to travel faster than the speed limit simply by paying more.

Openness is also a huge part of net neutrality. The biggest difference between a public toll booth on a road and an outlaw warlord collecting a bribe at a roadblock is openness. We all know that the police and the fire department get to break the speed limit in the line of duty because it makes sense and it's done openly; but it's not OK for a police officer to speed, when off duty, in order to make it to a personal appointment.

Being open also means that a network's owner cannot secretly block, filter, or divert packets because it suits them.

Image what the U.S. road system would be like if large corporations could pay for faster, shorter, and better "Lexus Lanes", while private citizens were forced to use lower quality roads.

Bank of America User Experience

2010-12-04T09:32:00.000-08:00

Each time I visit Bank of America I get to interact with their ATMs. Earlier this year, I noticed a great UI improvement to save a couple steps when withdrawing money. Unfortunately, B of A needs to improves some of their other UIs.

1. The drive through ATM is unusable without having to at least open your car door and, sometimes, get completely out of the car.

I've seen adjustable ATMs at other banks which let the driver set the height of the ATM so that it works for both SUVs and sedans.

2. Another pet peeve of mine is when I use the ATM in the lobby after the bank is closed. For some reason, I can't read the directions on this sign in my haste to unlock the lobby door with my ATM card. I think simply three words, "Magnetic Strip Down", along with this diagram, would go a long way to improving my understanding.

King Schools Office & Studio Tour

2010-12-01T20:25:00.000-08:00

I recently completed my private pilot training using the course materials from King Schools which is based in San Diego. Earlier this year, King Schools released their private pilot training curriculum as a web based course. Through out the training, I provided feedback regarding errors or enhancements that they responded to which lead them to inviting me down to take a tour of their offices and studios, today.

The head of their product development, a retired Navy pilot, call sign Mac, who has been with the company for nearly to two decades, spent close to an hour giving me the VIP tour and introducing me to every employee we came across from the shipping department all the way up to the CEO. The corporate culture at this company was definitely a caring, enthusiastic, attitude by everyone I met.

The roots of King Schools goes back to the mid 1970s when the husband and wife team, John and Martha King, began teaching flight training. What started out as test prep guides became VHS based courses, that evolved to CD-ROM training, leading to the present day web based format.

The high point of today's tour was the studio and control room which they use to create their videos. Their video editors and film directors absolutely love their work which was very apparent as they showed me around the studios.

Now that I've completed my private pilot certification, I'm looking forward to moving on to get my instrument rating. Although the King School instrument course is still CD based, they assured me that it would be available next year in a web based format. But, I doubt that I'll wait that long before beginning my instrument training.

Hundreds Night

2010-11-11T19:46:00.001-08:00

I came across this old photo which was taken during "Hundreds Night" when I was a Firstie (senior) at Annapolis. One hundred days before graduation, the firsties swap rank with the plebes (freshmen) for a little reverse hazing fun.

Twitter's Blackbird Pie

2010-11-05T14:38:00.000-07:00

Trying out a test of Twitter's Blackbird Pie which lets users embed tweets into blogs.

Apple to discontinue manufacturing Xserve and recommends transition to Mac Pro or Mac mini: http://adjix.com/73meless than a minute ago via AdjixJoe Moreno™ 
JoeMoreno

Amazing Internet Stats

2010-10-29T08:53:00.000-07:00

The amazing size of the Internet.

Smoking Bans

2010-10-19T21:58:00.000-07:00

I didn't know that is was legal for parents, in Massachusetts, to give a cigarette to a minor.

Via: MedicalInsurance.org

Flash

2010-09-21T12:52:00.000-07:00

Flash is great in that it is ubiquitous. There is not a single, decent, desktop web browser that doesn't have Flash installed.

But, the problem is that Flash is a CPU/memory hog.

The Java VM, which runs applets inside web browsers is also a hog, but few websites that run Java applets will run more than a single instance. Flash, on the other hand, is everywhere.

Nearly every single ad on a professional website is Flash so there are multiple instances of the Flash plug-in running on a single page and they're all sucking up CPU cycles to process video which can result in your web browser crashing. This can render a web page painful to load and watch on a web browser that's more than a few years old.

Flash was originally designed to provide an interactive user experience, similar to Java, and it later became the de facto standard for displaying video. Unfortunately, it can only display video, effectively, on the newest of desktop web browsers.

Twitter Search Engines

2010-09-21T07:30:00.000-07:00

It seems that there is no shortage of search engines combing tweets for links. Whenever a tweet is sent, that contains a link, within a few seconds search engines start to spider the tweet. In the first two minutes each link in a tweet has been hit by a bot 12-20 times.

Here are the first ten hits on a link within three seconds:

Click to enlarge

Catfish Movie

2010-09-16T09:36:00.000-07:00

I saw a screening of Catfish, last night, courtesy of a San Diego TweetUp organized by @JBruin and @ThePegIsIn.

Catfish is a raw documentary that was all the talk at this year's Sundance Film Festival. The movie follows a 24 year old New York photographer as he establishes a relationship, on Facebook, with a family whose eight year old daughter is a prodigy artist. The family lives in rural Michigan and the film takes an interesting twist when the photographer makes a surprise visit to see the family since he's established a romantic, online, relationship with the older sister.

It's a good movie and I particularly enjoyed the cinematography as they filmed a laptop display for the movie credits and used Google Earth to show different locations.

I don't want to give away anything, but think: Walter Mitty meets Facebook.

A Marine Layer To Remember!

2010-09-06T23:26:00.000-07:00

This summer has been one big marine layer. I can't get over how few days they have been without fog on the coast. At least it has given me some time to work on AirportRamp.com.

Using S3 to Serve Up an Entire Web Site: The 100% Solution

2010-09-01T22:59:00.000-07:00

Ever since Amazon launched AWS four years ago I've been yearning for a way to use it to serve up an entire static website, including the index.html. Last month, Amazon made that possible by allowing a default root object to be assigned to a CloudFront distribution, which, in turn, can point to an index.html file in one of your S3 buckets.

Here's an example of it in action:
http://bio.joemoreno.com

Phase I
1. Create a bucket named web.yourdomain.com and load your static web pages into it. (Note that's web not www.)

2. Configure your domain's DNS so that the CNAME for web.yourdomain.com points to web.yourdomain.com.s3.amazonaws.com.

If you've configured the bucket correctly and the DNS has propagated then you should see your static website when visiting:
http://web.yourdomain.com/index.html

Phase II
1. Create a bucket named www.yourdomain.com.

2. Put a single object into the www.yourdomain.com bucket named index.html. This index.html object will be a static HTML web page that's a meta-refesh. It'll look something like this:


<html>
        <head>
                <meta HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0;URL=http://web.yourdomain.com/index.html">
                <title></title>
        </head>
        <body bgcolor=#FFFFFF>
        </body>
</html>

3. Configure a CloudFront distribution pointing to www.yourdomain.com.
Although you can use the web browser based AWS Management Console to set up the CloudFront distribution, you'll probably need a third party tool, such as Bucket Explorer, to configure the root object in step 5.

4. Configure your domain's DNS so that the CNAME for www.yourdomain.com points to your CloudFront distribution host name. (A CloudFront host name looks something like this: d1jlm9avypcmdg.cloudfront.net.)

5. Set the CloudFront distribution's root object to index.html which will be served up from the www.yourdomain.com bucket. (I used Bucket Explorer for this step.)

That's it!

It can take up to 15 minutes to create the CloudFront distribution and set its default root object. Your website should work fine once CloudFront reports that the distribution is Deployed and the DNS has propagated. How long it takes your domain's DNS to propagate depends on its TTL and negative caching time out. I recommend setting these as short as possible until everything is working correctly (I set mine to 60 seconds and then upped it to 24 hours once everything was up and running.)

Remember that you must set all of your objects in your S3 buckets to Public Read so that anyone can view your website.

Apple Co-Founder Crashes Airplane

2010-08-27T12:36:00.000-07:00

A long time ago, Apple co-founder, Steve "Woz" Wozniak, almost killed himself while piloting a plane. This incident literally changed his life.

Click to enlarge

NTSB Identification: LAX81FA044
14 CFR Part 91 General Aviation
Event occurred Saturday, February 07, 1981 in SANTA CRUZ, CA
Aircraft: BEECH A36TC, registration: N2WZ

NAME OF AIRPORT - SKYPARK
DEPARTURE POINT INTENDED DESTINATION
SANTA CRUZ,CA SAN DIEGO,CA
TYPE OF ACCIDENT PHASE OF OPERATION
STALL: MUSH TAKEOFF: INITIAL CLIMB
PROBABLE CAUSE(S)
PILOT IN COMMAND - PREMATURE LIFT-OFF
FACTOR(S)
PILOT IN COMMAND - LACK OF FAMILIARITY WITH AIRCRAFT
MISCELLANEOUS - UNQUALIFIED PERSON OPERATED AIRCRAFT
REMARKS- AFT TKOF,ANGLED FM RWY HDG,MUSHED,HIT 12FT EMBANKMENT.NOT CERTD HI PERF ACFT IAW 14CFR61.31(E).