Our WeblogAs the Fall Semester kicks off, we invite all of our volunteers to touch base and let us know about your plans for the academic year ahead.
Founded
22 November 2002
The Institute Online
The IEUC was established to engage in ongoing research and educational initiatives pursuing secure, simple, supple, and sophisticated systems to unlock our full human potential. It was established under New York State's not-for-profit corporation law and has been recognized by the IRS as a tax exempt public charity.
email: info@ieuc.org
Forging The Future 2/5/12 — 7:11 UTC
News and Views from The Institute for End User Computing!
Welcome Back!
September 1st, 2010Apple’s Spyware Patent and The Eternal Battle for Control
August 27th, 2010The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just posted a piece entitled “Steve Jobs Is Watching You: Apple Seeking to Patent Spyware” on its Deeplinks Blog.
We urge you to read this stunning analysis of Apple’s patent application for a technique to personally identify its users through covert activation of a device’s audio and video capture hardware to identify the location of your Apple device, photograph its surroundings, possibly monitor your heart beat, record your communications and online activity, and disable your system (by wiping your device after sequestering your data on its remote servers) if you engage in “unauthorized” uses of your device even if they are perfectly legal.
This takes Steve Jobs’ transformation into a Big Brother figure to a whole new level.
Of course, in all fairness to Apple, this capability is ostensibly contemplated to recover stolen iPhones. Moreover, since Patents are a Monopoly Right to Prevent Others from Using a Technology, Apple could put a positive spin on this PR disaster by promising to not exercise this patent themselves and to use it to prevent other manufacturers from spying on their End Users, further insuring that Users are not punished for legally customizing systems that they have purchased.
But if the patent is really driven by such beneficence, Apple needs to make its intentions clear, ideally by opening its devices to arbitrary user-installed software to obviate the need for jail-breaking in the first place.
Given the level of deep reaching control that Mr. Jobs exerts over the company it is hard to believe that a patent of this scope covering such sensitive subject matter would be filed without his personal knowledge and approval.
The application also raises some interesting questions for owners of current Apple devices. Does current Apple hardware support the Spyware functionality contemplated by the patent applications, and if so, is such functionality present in any shipping Apple System Software?
Sadly, we may not longer control that which we own, making the only trustworthy devices non-networked ones.
So until definitive answers are had, End Users must assume that their Apple devices are subject to remote monitoring by corporate spymasters in Cupertino, that their microphones are always recording, and that the indicator lights on their built-in webcams cannot be trusted.
And make no mistake, if such hooks are in place for Apple’s use, it is only a matter of time before black hat hackers discover how to exploit them to look in on your bedroom or office.
We urge the Board of Directors of Apple to do some serious soul searching about what kind of a future they want to live in. No matter how desirable absolute control may seem in the short run, such power is fleeting.
In a matter of months, Android and Windows 7 Tablets will arrive to challenge the iPad. The iPhone is no longer the only game in town, and the Windows 7 and Linux operating systems offer a viable alternative to OS X.
It is not too late for Apple to step back from the precipice, but if it continues to display ever increasing levels of arrogance towards its End Users and Developers alike, a tipping point will be reached that will send the value of Apple stock plunging as its customer base evaporates.
The Case Against Robotics in the K-12 Curriculum
August 5th, 2010Robots are fun. Robots are cool. Kids love robots. So lets use robots to teach computer programming…..
So goes the common wisdom of many an educator. After all, it is so much more fun to make robotic dogs frolic than to do something as mundane as to write a traditional program.
But there is a real danger here, particularly in lower grades that a robotics course will either devolve into pure play or dead end in frustration turning students off to computing.
The biggest problems in teaching with real world robots are three fold.
First, it conflates programming engineering issues making it impossible to truly know if students are making a reasoning error in their code or are just encountering the unforgiving nature of physical reality. This is particularly apt to humiliate a student at a competition or demo in an environment with different ambient levels of heat, lighting, floor slipperiness, acoustic noise, physical geometry, ventilation system air flows (which can overpower the motors of a robotic blimp), the coincidental presence of target stimuli in the environment (e.g. someone wearing an electric orange T-Shirt that matches the hue of an artificial target) and radio frequency interference from other nearby projects. Any of these factors can prevent a system that worked one day from working on the next and the expertise needed to troubleshoot the resulting systems failure is apt to be beyond the keen of most instructors. Indeed, teams of graduate students have found themselves unable to ferret out the often multiple sources of such failures. So there is little doubt that most students would rapidly grow frustrated if they tried to use real robots as more than RC Cars to play with.
Second, working with tangible artifacts reduces the likelihood that students will develop the right intuitions for thinking about abstractions. Only the most disciplined instructor will be able to keep attention focused on deeper concepts like recursion and the environment model of evaluation with students chomping at the bit to make their bot do something. Instead, the path of least resistance will most likely take the form of simple imperative drag and drop tile based visual languages that will act as inverse parsers to insure that syntactically invalid programs can’t be composed in the first place. Abstraction support in such systems is usually rather limited and, aside from the now defunct Prograph data-flow oriented visual programming language, support for reflection and higher order programming constructs is all but unheard of.
The counter argument to this point is that the use of robotics grounds the curriculum in the real world and offers opportunities for students to look at the interrelationship of topics like Machine Vision, Probabilistic Reasoning, Physics Computations, Planning, and Multi-Agent System Design. (See Preparing Computer Science Students for the Robotics Revolution by David S. Touretzky – Communications of the ACM 8/2010 Vol. 53 No. 8 pp. 7-29 — N.B. an ACM Digital Library Account is required to access the ditial version of this article). The assumption here is that such topics can indeed be made accessible to students outside of graduate research labs. While this may eventually come to pass, Touretzky acknowledges that high school level robotics competitions like US FIRST “emphasize the mechanical engineering aspects of the field at the expense of computer science” and that the robots used in such programs “must be primarily teleoperated because students aren’t being taught the kind of software that would allow their robots to act autonomously.” [p. 28]
Third, there is the economic reality that robots are very expensive short lived devices whose widespread use in schools would drive up property taxes on the middle class and exacerbate the digital divide between rich and poor school districts. With prices ranging from six to sixteen hundred dollars per device, the inevitable desire to have enough robots for students to use them individually or in groups of no more than two or three, and the need to upgrade hardware every year or two to keep students competitive with their peers in other districts, the price of a robotics program could quickly skyrocket. Despite the overall downward trend in technology costs it is far more likely that successive models will offer more tech in the same price range than it is for them to offer the same tech at lower prices.
The digital divide aspect is particularly troubling since poor students will have to settle for relatively blind and deaf mobile boxes while rich students could experiment with sensor laden humanoid robots costing ten times as much.
Touretzky has demonstrated that advanced computing concepts can be integrated into a robotics programming toolkit and deployed by a world class professor at the undergraduate level, but for ordinary K – 12 End User teachers, the robotics path is fraught with danger.
Bearing these risks in mind, systems like Racket – a free scheme dialect with extensive pedagogical support and educator outreach programs – remain the best hope for promoting computing in our schools. If students still want to experiment with robots, there are a number of free hardware-optional simulations available like the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio.
Ramping Up for the Fall Semester
August 2nd, 2010Last week marked the un-official start of the Fall Semester with IBM’s Programming Languages Day.
As the summer draws to a close we will be getting back in touch with our volunteers. Then once the initial semester kick-off dust settles, we will be blogging and updating our website with more regularity.
Enjoy the lazy, hazy, crazy days of August.
4th of July Reflections On Freedom & Personal Computing
July 4th, 2010
Today we celebrate the 4th of July, enjoy fireworks, reflect on the legacy of freedom enshrined in the Declaration of Independence by our nation’s founders, and marvel at the system of ordered liberty they embodied in the Constitution of our Republic.
The Founders were very much the makers and white hat hackers of their age, with many active in both politics and technology. Thus, in a very real sense our founding documents were nothing less than a political operating system devised to maximize and preserve the creative potential of the individual. Perhaps this is why America holds a unique position in ushering forth the age of Personal Computing.
As we have noted before, Personal Computing and Freedom share a deep and fundamental bond. The general purpose computing device, whether it sits on a desktop or is shrunken to clip onto an article of clothing, is ripe with promise. It only awaits the ingenuity of an End User like you to help you realize your latent potential. Countless careers were born of a young person’s curiosity about how computers work and the sense of empowerment that comes from the realization that anyone’s study could be rewarded with the ability to bend these machine’s to one’s will, solve real world problems, and maybe even earn a livelihood by using this knowledge to start a small business or find a position in industry.
But not everyone wants to see End Users develop such skills or the increasing level of sophistication in thinking about information & technology policy that comes with them.
Thus we see the eternal battle between the forces of freedom and control that gave birth to our nation, mirrored on the technological front with ever more restrictively controlled “walled gardens” offering the often illusory promise of security, fashion, and ease of use for the price of one’s willingness to sacrifice the ability to customize one’s computing environment and forgo the opportunity to freely purchase or install software from “unapproved” sources.
If this pessimistic vision of docile End Users comes to dominate, computers will loose their transformative power, innovation and freedom will suffer, and we will all be so much the poorer should technology tip in an Orwellian direction.
Fortunately, that day is not yet here. Rejoice in the potential of open systems, support vendors and communities that encourage you to tinker and share your discoveries, and never willingly surrender your freedom and independence!
Summer Tech
June 28th, 2010If you reside in Ossining, New York, or a nearby community, we would like to know if you would be interested in participating in a Summer Tech educational program. We are considering offering an Introduction to Computer Science & Programming for middle school and high school students and a survey of Comparative Programming Languages with a seminar format for students at the university level. We might also run an Interactive Fiction Workshop using the Inform 7 authoring environment to teach you how to create your own text adventure games and simulations.
These programs may be offered online in our Educational Outreach Center or we might be able to find a space to meet in person.
We are also setting up a discussion forum for River Town Webmasters, Designers, and Developers.
In any case, if you are interested in any of these offerings, please drop a note to us at: info@ieuc.org
IBM Programming Languages Day 2010
June 2nd, 2010CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
IBM Programming Languages Day
July 29, 2010, Hawthorne NY
The eleventh annual Programming Languages Day will be held at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center on Thursday, July 29, 2010. The day will be held in cooperation with the New Jersey and New England Programming Languages and Systems Seminars. The main goal of the event is to increase awareness of each other’s work, and to encourage interaction and collaboration.
The Programming Languages Day features a keynote presentation and approximately 8 regular presentations. Prof. Doug Lea, State University of New York at Oswego, will deliver the keynote presentation this year.
If you would like to present your work, please send a title and abstract to etorlak@us.ibm.com by June 23, 2010. Tutorials or joint presentations are welcomed. We also solicit input on topics or particular presentations that would be of interest to attendees.
Abstracts will be selected by a committee consisting of Adriana Compagnoni, Stevens Institute of Technology; Joshua Guttman, Worcester Polytechnic Institute; and Emina Torlak, IBM Research. Notification of accepted abstracts will be sent by approximately June 30, 2010.
You are welcome from 9AM onwards, and the keynote presentation will start at 10AM sharp. We expect the program to run until 4PM. The Programming Languages day will be held in room GN-F15 in the Hawthorne-1 building in Hawthorne, New York.
If you plan to attend the Programming Languages Day, please register by sending an e-mail with your name, affiliation, contact information, and dietary restrictions to etorlak@us.ibm.com so that we can plan for lunch and refreshments.
Important Dates:
Talk title and abstract deadline: June 23rd
Acceptance notification: June 30th
PL Day 2010: July 29th
Program committee:
Adriana Compagnoni, Stevens Institute of Technology
Joshua Guttman, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Emina Torlak, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Our Website Redesign Enters Live Public Beta!
June 1st, 2010It gives us great pleasure to report that with the start of Summer we are going live with a Public Beta of our latest website redesign. We have done some serious retooling of our infrastructure to simplify things and provide better hooks for future enhancements, like the versioning system that permits major revisions of our site to be accessed simultaneously as well the hooks we have in place to track version changes at the page level.
Our old site featured a lot of animated eye candy that was more a demonstration of our scripting prowess than a truly useful navigational affordance. The redesign, Code Name: Placid, features a more traditional three column layout that should be easier to integrate with dynamic PHP-based subsystems like this blog, which will eventually merge much more tightly with our website proper. Our markup is also much lighter this time around as we were able to replace a lot of structural hooks and CSS2 code with more direct CSS3 declarations. The actual layout itself is based on the Faux Absolute Positioning technique. We also make minimal use of javascript to play a brief audio greeting the first time someone arrives on our site regardless of which page they land on. Finally, we are using Google’s Web Fonts to enhance the overall legibility of our copy.
Compositional Freedom — The True Path to Simplicity
March 15th, 2010Advocates of the iPad and its locked down single vendor store based kin contend that End Users will gladly trade a nearly complete loss of freedom for stripped down user interfaces with fewer bugs that save them from having to make choices. Gone are the days of General Purpose Computing, computers are destined to devolve into consumption oriented appliances where End Users will forever be paying for each and every scrap of restored functionality.
But there is another path. The path taken by programming languages like Lisp and Scheme and by internally extensible software applications like Spreadsheets (host to the most common form of End User Programming) and recent Hypertext environments. Such systems, offer a range of powerful primitives that can be combined in an infinite number of ways to meet any given End User’s personal needs. They empower End Users to craft their own solutions or to mix and match components from other sources. They don’t discriminate between commercial and non-commercial solutions, since no one economic model is best at meeting real world needs, nor can any one vendor know which tools are best.
An optimal workflow will often draw on both free and proprietary software and when found, it should be possible to encapsulate such a solution so it can be shared. Indeed, it is this sort of compositional freedom that holds the greatest potential to empower End Users and simplify life.
The Dark Side of the Apple
March 3rd, 2010On March 2nd, Apple turned further to the Dark Side and initiated patent litigation against HTC based on an array of sweeping patents (like recognizing phone numbers and unlocking things by visually sliding a graphic of a latch) that could potentially impact web site interfaces and operating systems, casting a dark pall over non-Apple phones, web tablets, and any number of innovative technologies. Given Apple’s own origins lifting the research of Xerox PARC, this is particularly troubling.
Apple already enjoys a tremendous marketing lead with its iPhone and has a strong reputation for creating new functionality. But it also has developed an unquenchable thirst for control that leads it to consistently refuse to meet standing consumer needs in an attempt to insure that its customers are never quite satisfied by always leaving something important out. To sell more phones, it leaves out a built-in microphone and camera from its Touch devices that would let their WiFi capabilities moot the need for a cell contract. To boost App store sales, it denies users the ability to directly install third party software. To insure that developers commit to its native API’s so they can’t port their Apps to other platforms, it prohibits the installation of interpreters for programming languages on its phones.
All of these things you can’t do as a matter of business policy on the Apple platform led to Droid’s successful Droid Does marketing campaign. This is one thing the new Apple can’t bear, real consumer choice.
So rather than relax its strangle hold on its customers so they will freely choose its products and services, Apple has turned to the very dark side tactics of sowing Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt to attack the Android platform. It isn’t the copying of some specific technology that truly scares Apple, it is the fact that Google’s Android Platform is more Open than its own and has enough technical appeal and interface sophistication to hold its own in the market.
In the glory days of Apple Computer, the company embraced competition through technological superiority as it strove to empower its End Users. When the company dropped “Computer” from its corporate name it renounced the promise of End User Computing and sough to transform its once independent customers into mindless drones dependent on Apple for their next entertainment fix.
This new Apple fears competition and evidences utter contempt for consumers as it now turns to the courts in an effort to stave off the loss of customer defections of its own making.
If you hold Apple Stock, now would be a good time to make it known to management that trying to stifle innovation and consumer choice with IP litigation hurts the entire industry, could lead to a flurry of patent litigation by making it socially acceptable for other companies to go after Apple, and threatens to destroy the long term value of your investment. If you were thinking of buying Apple products, hold off and let Apple know that you don’t appreciate its strong handed attempt to gain a monopoly over mobiles devices.
[Obligatory FTC Disclaimer: The Institute and some of its officers, directors, staff & volunteers have made use of free Google Services which might in theory bias us in favor of positions that would advance Google's interests, which in this case run in concert with those of HTC which is being sued by Apple. Some of us also use Apple products and services. We have not canvased everyone to determine whether any of us directly or indirectly own stock in any of these companies, but that possibility no doubt exists. So the reader should assume that potential relationships exist and consider this to be a notice thereof.
That said, our writing is solely motivated by our desire to advocate for the interests of End Users like you and we only include this notice because it is required by the FTC to avoid the risk of running afoul of their regulations and becoming subject to substantial fines. If you are a blogger and have ever received anything of value or have any kind of theoretical relationship with an entity you are blogging about, you should consult with a lawyer to determine your disclaimer obligations under these new rules.]
End Users Will Prevent the Abuse of Facebook’s News Feed Patent
March 1st, 2010This morning the web is awash with worry over the US Patent and Trademark Office’s decision to grant a patent on presenting news feeds about activities in social networks based on an application first filed by Facebook in 2006.
This is another case of taking a very generic idea with utterly no novel engineering behind it and turning it into a patentable innovation by attaching it to a subject domain. This is almost the same recipe that cooks up most business method patents.
Take a generic idea like reporting something of interest, qualify it slightly, throw in some generic computing steps like turning references to resources into hypertext links to them, sorting items, or displaying some content, and be the first to the patent office with a permutation that hasn’t been patented yet.
In this case, “generate a news feed”, “attach informational links”, “attach links that let you perform some actions with the current item”, “limit who sees what (i.e. don’t display info about people the user doesn’t know)”, “sort the news items”, and finally “display them”. This sort of “innovation” is totally generic and obvious in that each step could apply to any kind of information stored on a computer and nowhere in such a patent does anyone learn anything they wouldn’t have thought of doing themselves if tasked with solving the same problem. In short, all that is being rewarded is paying the patent application fees to enrich the government.
Indeed, the innovation here is so trivial that no real programmer with an ounce of integrity would consider it worthy of patent protection or worth the time and expense of pursuing the same. Solo programmers and early stage startups simply don’t have the money to play the patent game. Moreover, a patent concept as broad as this would seem so unlikely to be granted before the fact that a developer would be highly unlikely to be able to raise the funds from outside investors to seek it.
Granting Software Patents on sweeping concepts only empowers big companies with deep pockets who can fire this sort of low quality buckshot at the PTO in high volume knowing that a few of their applications will slip through giving them the power to extract royalties from big competitors and to stifle the formation of smaller ones. Every time a patent like this is granted it becomes much harder for true innovators to get backing and bring real innovation to the market. The cost and threat of litigation forces them to sell out to a big player, to shutter their doors if challenged, or more likely to not even bother trying in the first place.
Unfortunately, we will never know how many jobs have been lost or never created because our legal culture falsely assumes that software innovation would not take place but for the existence of patent monopolies. Sadly, since small scale innovators can’t afford to lobby congress as effectively as the mega-corporations that benefit from the current system, patent reform is unlikely in the short run.
That leaves the onus on End Users like you to use your market power en-mass to punish companies that use sweeping software patents unethically. While you can’t do anything to influence Patent Trolls, you can bring pressure to bear on real companies that depend on your patronage as part of their business models.
Facebook is such a company and we trust that it will most likely do the right thing and commit this patent to the Public Domain or promise to only use it defensively if confronted by similar claims. Indeed, it was most likely fear of just his sort of patent being granted to someone else that drove Facebook’s business decision to pursue it in the first place.
However, if Facebook were to try to employ it offensively against innovative competitors, it would then fall on its customers to take action by abandoning its platform in large enough numbers to force it to rethink its course of action. Since the management team at Facebook is not stupid, it is highly probable that they will do the right thing!
Remember, the best defense against the abuse of Software and Business Method Patents is a vigilant global community of End Users willing to put up with a little inconvenience should the need arise to insure that sleazy business behavior is punished in the marketplace since that is the only way to make ethical business behavior the only profitable way to do business.
WordPress 2.9.2 Upgrade Glitches
March 1st, 2010Unlike most recent WordPress Upgrades, version 2.9.2 didn’t take at first.
Invoking the automatic upgrade link took us to the usual upgrade page, but nothing happened after the initial upgrade message was drawn on the page.
Disabling all of our active plugins did seem to free up the Automatic Upgrade process, although one data error was reported.
It also looks like some of our old plugins stopped working after the upgrade. We will wait to see if they get upgraded in a next few weeks before permanently deleting them.
The iPad — A Garden of Pure Ideology
February 1st, 2010Rarely does a company have the opportunity to remake an industry and create the Next Big Thing.
Sometimes, as in the case of the Apple Newton, the technology isn’t quite mature enough to deliver on its potential until the marketing damage caused by a poor first impression is irreparable to the brand.
Other times arrogance, avarice, and a failure of vision conspire to cripple a new device, before it even reaches the hands of its potential End Users. Such is the case of Apple’s much vaunted iPad which is only a worthy successor for the Screen of the Newton.
With a decade to improve on that truly innovative creation, we expected no less than a new OS with multi-touch support, as well as a stylus to drive state-of-the-art handwriting recognition, a forward facing cam for video-conferencing, preemptive multitasking, a zoomable interface, a full compliment of standard USB, ethernet, firewire, and solid state memory card ports, a core of deeply integrated notetaking, sketching, and communications modules with an open architecture allowing them to be extended in unforeseen directions, a fresh platform-wide programming language to simplify such development, User Swappable power packs, and an option for wireless video out to an optional transceiver that could be plugged into industry standard projectors.
We expected the freedom to purchase or develop additional software, without paying to join an Apple Developer Program or having to purchase only Apple Sanctioned content through an Apple Store that will probably add to our costs. We would have gladly paid a premium above even laptop prices for the kind of game changer Apple could have offered.
What we were offered was little more than an oversized iPod Touch optimized to act as a mobile cash register to fill Apple’s till.
The old Apple Computer understood that its End Users wanted power and freedom and were willing to pay a premium to have it. Perhaps even more importantly, it believed that we were intelligent individuals and not stupid drones needing to be coddled and told what to think.
Yet again, Apple has betrayed its core values.
At the IEUC, we still believe in End Users and Open Innovation and look forward to seeing what the rest of the industry will develop to leapfrog this latest affront to common sense.
Our Brief Blogging Hiatus
January 21st, 2010As you may have noticed, we are entering a brief hiatus in blogging while we deal with a couple of time-sensitive maters that require our full attention, foremost of which is a book chapter that our Executive Director is writing.
Once deadlines are past, we will resume daily postings!
Free Anti-Virus Roundup, Part 3 — ClamAV
January 14th, 2010For users of Unix and Linux, the most comprehensive free anti-virus solution is the venerable ClamAV.
This open source project licensed under the GPL will thoroughly scrub your system of known threats to any platform. Its database of malware signatures is frequently updated and the system has a number of graphical front ends.
A new native port for Windows is still in the works, but there is already an older unsupported ClamAV for Windows and a ClamWin as well as a ClamXav 2.0 Public Beta that runs under the latest release of OS X for Mac Users.
While the various ClamAV GUI’s tend to produce too much low level feedback on what the tool is doing, the system gets the job done which is what really matters most in this space.
Free Anti-Virus Roundup, Part 2 — iAntiVirus
January 13th, 2010If you are a home user and your platform of choice is the Mac, you can find a rather elegant and free OS X anti-virus solution in PC Tools iAntiVirus.
Note however that iAntiVirus won’t catch any non-mac threats, so if someone sends you a file with a windows virus you are still at risk of passing it on to friends. Nevertheless, it will catch known Mac viruses and trojans and since there are fewer of these on the Mac side, the scan will generally run at a good clip.
The company also has a subscription version of the tool with technical support for business users.
Alternatively, all Mac users can look at ClamXav (see tomorrow’s post).
Free Anti-Virus Roundup, Part 1 — Microsoft Security Essentials
January 12th, 2010This series of posts will point you to the best free anti-virus software on the web.
Anti-Virus software is a must have of modern computing. Regrettably, the commercial subscription service fees to provide this protection can really mount up in the long term.
Fortunately, if Windows is your platform of choice and your Windows variant has already been “activated” or supports installing the Genuine Microsoft Software validation tools (i.e. Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7), you will be able to download and install Microsoft Security Essentials for free.
Security Essentials will then provide you with up to date anti-virus and malware protection tightly integrated into the Windows update mechanism under an elegant user interface that rivals those of third party vendors.
Site of the Day — Ajaxian
January 11th, 2010If you develop websites or would like to see what technologies go into them, Ajaxian is the site for you.
Here you can find up to the minute reports of all the major javascript based libraries and related tools that you can use to take a site to the next level. You’ll also find discussions of hot web accessibility topics like yesterday’s revelation that many screenreader users have javascript enabled — a situation not contemplated by most site designers.
You can also sign up for newsletters, grab podcasts, and find out about the latest conferences and job offers.
The site also features rich indexing by topic in the left sidebar, making it is easy to go back in time and bring yourself up to speed in any area of interest.
Book of the Day — Zen Computer
January 8th, 2010If you are really new to computing and enjoy Eastern Philosophy, then “Zen Computer” by Philip Toshio Sudo is a must read for you.
This lightweight paper back is a great Ski Lodge or Beach book that will gently introduce you to many computing concepts related to computer hardware, software, programming, and networking while relating them ideas drawn from Zen.
Each entry begins with a pithy quote and leads you on from there with a mix of exposition and the occasional koan to relieve the stress of your day.
Find it at your favorite bookseller from Simon & Schuster (ISBN: 0-684-85410-4).
Site of the Day — A List Apart
January 7th, 2010If you are a professional web designer, you are no doubt are already familiar with A List Apart — the site “For People Who Make Websites”.
While its homepage is rather sedate and has shown less activity of late than in years past, the site’s many high quality articles have remarkable breadth and depth.
Here you will find detailed expositions of most of the web design techniques that undergird today’s state-of-the-art. Alongside such technical content, you will also find discussions of accessibility, information architecture, and the business side of web design and engaging designers.
In short, there is something here for everyone.
Tool of the Day — Zotero
January 6th, 2010If you ever have to do any academic writing you know how much work can be involved in building and formatting a bibliography.
There are some great commercial products that dispatch this task with aplomb, but they tend to be too expensive for casual End Users who aren’t in academia.
Enter Zotero a free FireFox plugin that does the job.
Zotero makes it easy to extract references from web pages and build bibliographies from citations you insert in your favorite word processor. Zotero can even capture web pages and sync across multiple computers & operating systems.
Many of us at the IEUC still use commercial products that support higher end functionality in our workflow, but Zotero is a great compliment to these tools as well.
WordPress Version 2.9.1 Up and Running
January 6th, 2010We have just run the automatic update to WordPress 2.9.1 without incident.
Book of the Day — Coders At Work
January 5th, 2010Did you ever wonder how software gets created? Who are the people behind the programs you love to use? How do they think and what do they think about?
If you do, “Coders At Work: Reflections On The Craft Of Programming” is the book for you!
Written by Peter Seibel, the book contains revealing interviews with such famous programmers as Douglas Crockford, Simon Peyton Jones, Guy Steele, and Donald Knuth among others.
Find it at your favorite bookseller from Apress (ISBN: 978-1-4302-1948-4).
Technological Outlook for 2010 / Part I — Tablets & Readers
January 4th, 20102009 saw the announcement of a number of new devices and 2010 should be a banner year for Nook and potentially an Apple Tablet if the legion of rumors dating back to the untimely demise of the Newton Message Pad 2100 are finally to be believed. Much is owed to Microsoft’s Tablet PC support, the Kindle & Sony Readers, and the multi-touch innovations of the iPhone & iPod Touch in making this space viable.
The big question for End Users is what kind of a reader / tablet to embrace. Platforms like the Sony Reader actively encourage users to bring their own content whereas Apple’s offerings are clearly aimed at dissuading the user from doing so by trying to tie all sales to their online market, effectively placing an Apple Transaction Tax on every purchase.
Whether we will see such practices successfully challenged in the courts on antitrust grounds remains to be seen as does the outcome of potential litigation to prevent the practice of jailbreaking Apple devices to permit End Users to load their own 3rd party apps.
Jailbreaking will become an even bigger issue in 2010 if large numbers of Nook users take advantage of its Android foundation to subvert the Nook’s free wireless internet connectivity which is intended to provide a dedicated conduit to the Barnes & Nobel e-book market for general web browsing.
While a dedicated reader is very appealing, particularly for those of us normally accustomed to printing out countless academic papers and such equally critical is note-taking and reference management functionality which is unlikely to be well supported in a purely recreational device.
The Newton Messagepad still sets a very high bar for user interface functionality that has yet to be surpassed.
In any case, End Users should demand the freedom to install or buy digital content and apps from multiple sources. Given the ability to safely “sandbox” applications and restrict their resource usage if needed (as clearly demonstrated by Google’s brilliant Chrome browser), the claims of vendors like Apple that they need to control what you can run on your device to insure that it behaves sanely in a networked environment are of exceedingly dubious merit.
If End Users refuse to tolerate such practices and vote with their wallets for open ended platforms, 2010 could mark a real turning point for the better.
The Year Ahead
January 1st, 2010A lot has been going on behind the scenes here at the IEUC and we look forward to many exciting developments in 2010.
The next couple of weeks will be taken up with a writing project while we wait for any trailing 2009 donations to reach us so we can fully assess our financial position from the year past. Then as soon as the IRS release the 2009 990-EZ Form & Instructions we will be processing that paperwork and transferring the information in it to our next Annual Report. We are also actively looking to expand our Board of Directors, so if you’d like to be considered, do get in touch.
As time permits between all of these administrative tasks we will roll out our next major website update as soon as possible so we can begin to expand the site again. We need volunteer to help in this work too!
Research-wise, we are primarily focused on parsing quasi natural language for End User Programming and we are also looking at some Public Policy Issues related to Virtual Worlds.
We have a few other plans in the works, but don’t want to prematurely make any announcements at this time.
Overall, 2010 is shaping up to be a great year!