Founded
22 November 2002
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
News and Views from The Institute for End User Computing!
We have just upgraded our blogging software to WordPress 2.9 without incident.
Since we are working on a major look-and-feel upgrade for our site, we have installed this temporary WordPress Theme along with the update to save the time it would have taken to retrofit our old custom theme.
All of us at the IEUC wish you a safe and Happy New Year’s Eve.
We have just upgraded our blogging engine to version 2.8.5 using WordPress’ convenient automatic update facility.
In other news, we are also working on a major revision of our static pages to simplify their organization and better support a certain legacy web browser that is still used by a significant percentage of our site’s visitors who no doubt can’t upgrade due to institutional decisions outside their control.
We have just augmented our WordPress installation with the WPtouch iPhone Theme plugin to provide improved blog access on the iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini mobile, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm platforms.
Installation on our end was completely painless.
Do let us know how you like it or if you run into any problems viewing this content on your device!
Apple has just released a significant upgrade to OS X which actually frees up some disk space and generally optimizes the entire OS. Cosmetic changes are minor but welcomed.
We recommend running the disk repair utility off of the install disk before upgrading. Also, when the system comes up to reboot to complete the installation, there is a chance that your machine may stall giving you a mobile cursor against a blue background that has nothing to click on. If this happens, “Don’t Panic”. Just wait for all disk activity to stop and hold down the power button until your machine powers off, then reboot normally. At that point, you should see a multicolor spinning cursor for a bit after which the Finder will load.
If you had previously installed the PlugSuit Preference Pane, it will generate annoying permission requests until you disable it. You may have to enable, disable, and re-enable it, before disabling it will “take”.
If you use any third party plug-ins like the popular GPGMail to add capabilities to Apple’s Mail application, they will be automatic disabled, so you need to wait for newer versions of them to be released. Sadly, GPGMail’s developer does not have the time to work on an update, so he recommends using Thunderbird and its Enigmail plugin instead.
If you use QuickSilver, download the new b56a7 release and delete the QuickSilver folder from you Application Support folder.
There is also a new release of DragThing with a new “Marble” dock theme that visually dovetails in with Snow Leopard’s Dock.
NVIDIA’s cudadriver_2.3.1 installs smoothly, but no amount of tinkering will get SETI@Home to take advantage of it at this time since cuda is only supported on the Windows client.
Finally, there are updates on the way for all the major third party disk repair utilities, so we wouldn’t recommend using anything other than Apple’s Disk Utility until you upgrade them.
This advice is based on a single installation test case, so your experience may be different. As always, it is best to make a bootable backup copy of your hard drive before making any radical changes to your operating system.
All Summer we have been busy re-designing our javascript support code to bring it up to the ‘State of the Art’ and to best leverage the latest releases of the Prototype and Scripty2 support libraries.
Planned features include, back-end PHP versioning integrated with third party browser detection, nested grid layout using Faux Absolute Positioning, automatic detection of font size changes, auto-balancing columns, and custom rounded corners based on the Canvas element and images embedded in our source code via DataURI’s.
When done, we will concatenating and minimizing everything so our pages should load significantly faster at low connection speeds.
Of significantly more interest to other web masters, we will also be releasing the source code, so you will be able to use our framework on your site.
We also strongly recommend that if you are one of the dwindling number of Internet Explorer 6 users, you should upgrade to a modern browser like Chrome, Safari, Opera, or Firefox at your earliest convenience. Any of these browsers are far more capable and standards compliant that IE 6.
Accordingly, we will no longer be supporting IE 6 when we next revise our pages.
IE 6 users should still be able to read our substantive content in a bare bones format. But we will no longer invest the countless hours needed to hack our code in a futile attempt to fully replicated a modern browser experience for IE 6 users.
Consumer Nightmare: Quite inexplicably, a legally purchased copy of Windows Vista which used to activate and run flawlessly under both Bootcamp and VMware Fusion on a MacBook Pro decides that some combination of software bug patches and device driver upgrades has transformed its host hardware into a different computer on which its Vista license code may no longer be used since it was already in use on a different machine — never mind that it is still running off the same disk partition on the same physical computer.
We should all be quite sympathetic to Microsoft’s concerns about software theft, but it is unconscionable to employ an authentication system that causes legitimate End Users so much anguish.
Particularly irksome is the Vista Help System’s Activation FAQ which omits the all too common question of:
“What do I do if a previously activated copy of Vista has deactivated itself and online activation fails with an erroneous report that one’s license code is already in use on a different machine and can’t be reused?”
Over the Summer Microsoft Research in Cambridge presented some extremely impressive demos of the Windows 7 user interface, but if their new OS employs a similar activation scheme to that used in Vista, one would have to very seriously think twice before investing in the upgrade.
That means that it is in both Microsoft’s and its End Users’ best interest to find a more workable alternative. One that protects Microsoft’s IP Rights but recognizes the reality that today’s End Users frequently upgrade their hardware and move legacy operating systems into Virtualized environments possibly under other host operating systems.
This strongly suggests that Microsoft shouldn’t try to tie Windows licenses to particular hardware configurations.
The next Windows should instead be licensed for the use of a single copy at a time by a single individual on any current or future hardware or emulation software he or she may currently or subsequently own. If one needs to run multiple copies on different machines at the same time, that would call for multiple licenses.
This model corresponds to the real world notion of using a physical Key and its computing equivalent, the Dongle!
A dongle is a small plug that goes into a communications port on a computer like a USB jump drive that contains custom hardware to authenticate a user.
Granted that some early dongles were usability nightmares (e.g. they lacked the now common pass-through port allowing other devices to be connected through them). But much has been improved over the years and this technology has much to recommend it.
Indeed, today, a dongle could be designed as a cryptographic co-processor to improve user security, handle licensing management for 3rd party software, and automatically store and retrieve passwords to access secure web sites.
Such functionality would be seen as a major feature that would drive up system sales, particularly if any given copy of the OS would accept any licensed dongle.
Then if one had 3 family members, each could purchase a license dongle, which would unlock his or her personal file space and identity, or perhaps even temporarily and securely access a cloud-based home folder from a total stranger’s PC.
One could even imagine the development of families of dongles, where one could purchase one or two master dongles and several subordinate ones allowing parents to access their children’s accounts.
If the dongles also incorporated a fair amount of nonvolatile memory, additional OS version and 3rd party licenses could be burnt into them to avoid having a proliferation of dongles chained together. In effect, each user would have one master keychain to pop into a USB port in lieu of a traditional easily guessed password login.
Of course, a conventionally encrypted copy of such licensing and configuration data, protected with a really long and truly random password, could be stored by the system provider on a remote server which would also facilitate sharing protected files with friends, transferring licenses between individuals, and invalidating any stolen dongles’ encryption codes.
This would entail sharing keys or deleting license keys and passwords from one dongle while adding them to another as part of a single secure transaction as well as changing the password used to encrypt any online authentication credentials. This would also permit the True Owner of local content to use the online backup of a lost dongle’s codes to access his or her encrypted files long enough to re-encrypt them with a replacement dongle.
In effect, such an approach would limit any data loss/exposure or unauthorized software access to local content/credentials stored on devices that fell into the wrong hands along with one of the matching dongles with which such data was encrypted.
To eliminate this final risk, some dongles or devices could readily be augmented with fingerprint readers or some other form of biometric authentication control to offer industrial grade security at a premium price point.
Such scenarios would offer countless benefits for platform vendors and their loyal customers including new revenue streams from dongle sales & cloud based security services for the vendors and improved security & ease of use for their customers.
Of course in a world of new hardware devices of every imaginable form factor, with OS X and Linux steadily on the move, Windows 7 in final development, and Google’s own OS just around the corner it is just a matter of time before such innovations reach End Users!
On the 4th of July, we celebrate The Founding of the United States of America.
For all peoples of the world, this holiday represents the potential for individual freedom to triumph in the eternal struggle between Liberty and Tyranny.
The Founders were very much the Hackers (in the constructive sense) of their day, using the best technology of their age to spread the radical idea that ordered liberty and the civil society could empower every individual to reach their full human potential. They knew that as human beings, those serving in office aren’t perfect, and that on the broader scale, to achieve the consensus necessary to launch the new republic short term political compromises would have to be made.
But they never lost sight of the ideals espoused in The Declaration of Independence. This is why they crafted our system of checks and balances between the branches of government. It is why they established Constitutional mechanisms by which the deeper defects of our founding documents could be cured and why countless American’s laid down their lives to end Slavery and establish racial equality.
Such epic statecraft is very much like programming and those entrusted with governmental authority could learn much from the lessons of good software engineering principles — since code, be it legal or computer, shares many of the same qualities and ought to be approached with a similar mindset.
Sadly, it is hard to convey the sense of exhilaration and personal mastery that one can derive from the act of programming. There is no greater sense of freedom than realizing that aside from a very few fundamental limits on what is “computable” by any machine, you have the power to make a computer do nearly anything you can dream of and thanks to cheap hardware, Open Courseware, Free Software, and the global community of professionals and hobbyists eager to help you, anyone anywhere on the planet can teach themselves how and by so doing amass the skills and knowledge needed to elevate their lot in the *real* world.
Tyrants everywhere quake at this potential of Personal Computing and Ubiquitous Communications to educate and rouse their citizenry to enlightenment. This is why it is so threatening to authoritarian power which would filter The Net and censor The Press.
Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution along with our technological innovations in Personal Computing that have made so many other advances possible are our gifts to the world which we most joyously share with you on this 4th of July.
Over the weekend I read yet another dower article on the percentage of students who self-report using Google and/or their cell phones to cheat on assignments or shortcut homework assignments by downloading prior semesters’ solutions.
Such concerns are not new, dating back at least as far as 1958 with Williams & Abrashkin’s publication of “Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine.” — which optimistically posited that programming a computer to do one’s homework would have at least as much pedagogical value as doing such work by hand.
Sadly, most students have their schedules so heavily overloaded in an attempt to woo collegiate and grad school admissions committees that they lack the time to pursue their own research interests. And even more sadly, many feel that not taking advantage of a search engine to avoid re-inventing the wheel and stashing a few key notes in their PDA to compensate for the vagaries of memory will grievously disadvantage them vis-a-vis their peers.
In short, lazy assignment and test designs that lend themselves to regurgitating stock answers invites an arms race in ways to avoid doing such ultimately pointless work. Students are not entirely wrong to view the memorization of facts or hand calculation of readily computable values to be utterly worthless skills in the modern age.
Herein lies the challenge for faculty. It is no longer acceptable to recycle past assignments of a “write a program to implement a binary search tree” or “write an essay about the Turning Test” variety. Instead we need to figure out ways to invoke today’s skill set of integrating the results of multiple discreet searches, reading and analyzing other people’s code, identifying bias and gauging the quality of others’ research.
Demands on today’s students are considerably higher than they were in previous generations as the sheer volume of human knowledge has exploded. Thus, the tools and skills that matter today have changed, as to must our approach to teaching.
On this Father’s Day we note that the Manchester Mark I – the first functioning stored-program computer – executed its first program sixty one years ago on June 21, 1948.
While sources aren’t in full agreement as to this exact date*, it is appropriate to recognize this milestone on Father’s Day since the microprocessors that dominate our lives today are all descendants of the Mark I inheriting some of its most fundamental conceptual design elements.
* June 21st is indirectly cited according to lab notes by Peter Van Roy and Seif Haridi in their magna opus “Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming” (MIT Press, 2004 – page 36) whereas Wikipedia cites dates in April and June of 1949. But like much of the early History of Computing, we may never be able to reach “ground truth”.
We have just upgraded our blog engine to WordPress 2.8 using the automatic upgrade functionality of the prior release. We are happy to report no glitches with the upgrade process.
If you would like to review our 2007 – 2009 Cumulative Annual report, please grab a copy of it at: http://www.ieuc.org/pdf-files/ieuc-2007-2009-cumulative-annual-report.pdf
If you would like to review our 2008 financials as submitted to the IRS with our latest Corporate Bylaw revisions, please grab a copy of it at: http://www.ieuc.org/pdf-files/ieuc-2008-990-ez.pdf
Our site has been rather stagnant over these last few months while we have been caught in the thick of Conference Season and Tax Season.
Things are finally settling down and we have completed all of our annual paperwork.
Indeed, our 2008 990-EZ has already been received by the IRS and we have a new Cumulative Annual Report ready for distribution.
We will be posting these key documents this week and updating our main pages to reflect these new offerings as soon as possible.
It will take a few days to catch up after last week’s CHI 2009 Conference & Walking Tour of Area Labs. Stay tuned for comments and observations as time permits.
Over the last few weeks reports based on Open Source Intelligence have been trickling in from a number of Institute Operatives in various organizations that point to the eminent reintroduction by RadioShack® of the Micro Executive Work Station.
The new design closely follows the body plan and design philosophy of the TRS Model 100™, the new machine code-named “Excelsior” is thinner than a MacBook Air™.
In another bold move, RadioShack is using the latest nano-tech fabrication techniques. Excelsior’s rechargeable paper battery is worn inside out under the protection of a thin sapphire coating making the unit’s housing a functional component rather than mere dead weight.
Pushing the power frontier even further, thanks to piezoelectric power cells integrated into the illuminated full travel keyboard which generate power as you type, Excelsior’s battery life is effectively unlimited!
With its integrated support for high bandwidth long range ad hoc Mesh Networking inspired by OLPC™ technology, Excelsior will be able to remain connected to the Net at all times in urban areas with no air charges, while remaining practical in less developed areas of the world where it can fall back to networking through your cell or satellite phone.
Its high contrast color light emitting e-ink display further conserves power and offers unparalleled legibility under a wide range of lighting conditions.
An integrated webcam, microphone/speakers, and bio-metric fingerprint reader round out the base hardware. Naturally a full compliment of ports is provided on the back-pane behind ingeniously designed trap doors that keep dust and gunk away from the connections.
Of course when you are on the road you can’t always find a place to sit down and type, so the Excelsior features a toggle switch that lets you configure it for wireless Audio I/O using your favorite bluetooth headset while it is stored in your luggage or backpack.
In this mode, you can use a stylized Natural Language Interface to access your schedule, address book, dictate memos, and request GPS directions by making requests through the headset’s microphone. Responses from Excelsior are returned in the calming voice of Canadian actor Douglas Rain.
Indeed, the simplicity and elegance of Excelsior’s software rivals its next generation engineering. Hardware buttons integrate the device with the most important Social Networking Applications, which can also be accessed via speech, putting LinkedIn, Twitter and more just a touch away.
With its brilliant industrial design and ingenious use of AI, this ultimate expression of mobile perfection will be a must have for tech savvy executives on the go.
We have been racing around to a number of venues of late in between grinding away at regulatory compliance paper work. In fact, quite a lot has been going on offline, but as a result we have fallen behind on our blogging and website updates.
Once we have our 2008 990-EZ out the door and CHI 2009 behind us, we will shift back into gear online. Until then, hang in there and get your seedlings started for the Spring.
As the new Obama Administration takes the helm in Washington today, we wish them all the best, particularly in their desire to revitalize primary and secondary education.
We hope and trust that they will recognize the critical importance of information technology literacy at a much deeper level than mere button pushing to make things work.
Students need to understand what computing can and can’t do; they need to be able to recognize, anticipate, and minimize risks; to be able to make informed business and public policy decision about the implications of emerging technologies; and they need to be able to roll up their sleeves and delve into End User Programming lest they loose those opportunities to offshore outsourcing.
The IEUC stands ready to work hand in hand with all sectors to help bring about these vital changes.
2009 is shaping up to being a very exciting year for the IEUC.
As we noted last month, Rob Akscyn has now rotated out to our Advisory Board and Kirk St. Amant and Jeff Smith have joined our Board of Directors, restoring our Board to full strength for the challenging year ahead.
2008 was a bad year for the US economy and the nonprofit sector was particularly hard hit. With donors at both the institutional and individual level re-directing their giving to Social Safety Net causes, our donations were sharply off. Since, it is now clear that online fundraising for an organization with our profile generates far more regulatory compliance overhead than actual revenue, we stand ready to totally re-think our fundraising strategy going forward.
We will have more financial details on the year past as final bills and donations roll in over the weeks ahead.
While the financial outlook for 2009 is murky, our prospects have never been brighter on the Operations Side. Our new Directors are already exploring the feasibility of several potential Special Projects and last year’s complete online infrastructure overhaul has us well positioned to dramatically expand the range of content offered on our website. We are also preparing to share most of our back end code, which will let other sites leverage the thousands of hours of R&D that went into our website relaunch.
These are exciting times and scary times. The nonprofit sector remains in crisis and their is a very real risk that a number of charities will fail this year. However, the IEUC will not be one of them. With no paid staff, truly minimal overhead, and a mission that involves channeling IDEAS rather than DOLLARS we are here to stay.
So if your New Year’s Resolution is to volunteer some of your time or to share some of your financial good fortune with a worthy cause, we invite you to join us in Forging The Future.
The future is what we make it, so by supporting our work, you can choose economic recovery, increased freedom & security, and a new era of personal empowerment ushered in through the wonders of information technology!
On Friday, December 12th, we successfully concluded our 2008 Annual Meeting. The key business consisted of revising our Corporate Bylaws and naming Jeff Smith and Kirk St. Amant as Directors Elect. They will take office on January 1st as Rob Akscyn rotates off of our Board of Directors to take a seat on our Advisory Board with our other former Directors.
OpenID is the name for a single login scheme that is supposed to free us of the need to juggle multiple user names and passwords. Instead, with OpenID, the theory goes, that we use a single login and sites we want to visit will redirect us to the OpenID provider of our choice for us to verify our identity with that service which will then return us to the site we were originally trying to log into with a security token that will complete the login process.
Since the system consolidates all of your accounts into one, it is critical that you trust your OpenID provider even more than you would a single site, since someone with database access to the OpenID server could usurp your identity everywhere by resetting your password to a new one and then logging into any of your accounts elsewhere.
The logical way to minimize that risk is to host your own identity provider server, which is supposed to be quite painless and easy to do.
Be warned, it is not.
For the last few weeks we have been trying various OpenID servers and have yet to find one that can pass all of the OpenID Enabled: OpenID Tests.
If you do want to experiment with this technology, we recommend indirectly specifying your OpenID End Point. This means that you should point any services requiring you to use OpenID to a web page that uses link tags in its headers to redirect them to your current OpenID provider of choice. Then you can, in theory, change OpenID providers without changing your OpenID Identity with respect to third party sites. However, different implementations may place restrictions on your account name choice which could foil your attempt to seamlessly swap servers.
If you can find a solution that reliably performs well in the real world, do let us know so we can share your good news. Until then, beware the hype and avoid diving in prematurely since this sort of experimentation can be a real time sink.
So in the meantime, if you must use OpenID, go with a large trusted “name” provider and if there isn’t one that you truly trust, consider establishing multiple OpenID’s for different accounts, even though doing this would of course defeat the point of the entire exercise.
When we were enabling the new Turbo feature in WordPress 2.7-beta2 GoogleGear returned the following error:
Error: Download of 'http://weblog.ieuc.org/wp-admin/css/press-this-ie-rtl.css?ver=20080915' failed, status code 404
Further investigation revealed that the press-this-ie-rtl.css file in question was delivered with 0 bytes of content causing Gears to hang.
To fix the problem, just insert the following CSS Comment at the top of that file and upload the edited version to your server:
/* nothing here */
It should weigh in at 43 bytes. At that point, disable Gears for your site, reload the Turbo admin page and re-enable the feature. This time all of the files in the Gears manifest should download smoothly.
Today, those of us in the US get to choose a new direction for our nation. It is one of those big choices that one hopes no one will take lightly.
But every day, we, as End Users, make countless little choices that in aggregate resonate far into the future. What operating system will we choose? What programs? Which websites and traditional publishers will we trust to inform us? Which vendors do we want to see grow and prosper? What user groups will we join and support?
It is so easy to dismiss the impact of these little choices but they give us far more leverage to steer the coarse of history.
At the IEUC we do a lot with very little, indeed for the cost of a single major network TV ad we could run our annual operations or pay down a big chunk of our startup debt.
So after you cast your vote in the political area, consider lending us a hand in the financial arena.
We will put your hard earned dollars to productive use.
We have just completed a first pass at integrating our various online subsystems (Calender, Citations, Surveys, and Weblog) with our main site-wide navigational infrastructure and visual theme.
We have our Archives back online and we will be restoring more of our legacy content in the next week or so.
There may still be some glitches and some of our non-critical user interface functionality (i.e. the animated in-page visual transitions) won’t be available in Internet Explorer for technical reasons outside our control.
We are inviting in Volunteer Website Testers to help us ferret out any problems that still need work.
In the meantime, bear with us, and drop us a note if you run into any serious problems.
We just wanted to take this opportunity to give you a progress report on our website relaunch efforts.
We have finalized our latest artwork and verified our new page template in A-Grade browsers.
Our only major dependency is active javascript support so we can accommodate Internet Explorer 6 and inject non-semantic markup to serve as scaffolding for style-sheet based visual effects like our translucent rounded corners.
In-page navigation will be handled by leveraging the Prototype and Scriptaculous javascript libraries to support our own animated user interface code. Retrofitting this new code to provide Explorer users with a comparable experience is proving to be a bit more daunting than we anticipated, so we can’t venture to say when everything will be good to go live, beyond our good faith estimate that we should be back up and running early in the Fall 2008 Academic Semester.
At that point we will be able to revise most of our old materials and consolidate them into a smaller number of content rich composite pages to dramatically reduce the navigational overhead of exploring our offerings. Until then, most of our legacy content is offline, but you can still find much of it through The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine if you are so motivated.
The 2007 Cyberbullying Public Service Announcement
Presented by Sony Creative Software, the National Crime Prevention Council, and the Ad Council.
Sony Creative Software, the Ad Council, and the National Crime Prevention Council (NCPC), are pleased to announce the winners of last fall’s public service announcement (PSA) development contest organized to raise awareness of the problem of cyberbullying.
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