Valerie Hart

Kindle To Russia

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:18:53 -0500

I am about to leave for Russia tomorrow afternoon. I am attending our first Stockxpert gathering for photographers and contributors on Saturday in Moscow (at the Marriott Courtyard). I rarely do siteseeing when I travel but I will make an exception on this trip. I did visit the Taj Mahal on a Saturday during my India trip in February and that led to a car accident. Hopefully things will go smoother in Russia?

Last night I had dinner with John Patrick. John is a member of the Board of Directors of Jupitermedia. More importantly he began all things Internet at IBM in the 1990s. John pulled a Kindle out of his briefcase and I was impressed. I ordered my own this morning and expect to have it by airplane boarding tomorrow afternoon.

I just received a notification from Amazon that shows the genius behind Amazon and the Kindle. Amazon wanted me to know that my account for wireless ordering of books, magazines and newspapers for Kindle can be accomplished by using my normal Amazon account information. I am geared up to put the Kindle to through its paces.. And of course I will keep readers informed.

The Politics of MySpace

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:44:44 -0500

There's no mystery about it anymore -- the wisdom of Web 2.0 tells us that the modes of packaging news are changing. People, particularly those who flock around the social networks, increasingly expect to be able to interact with the people who deliver their news -- or any other type of information, for that matter.

So, across the board, traditional news outlets are integrating social features into their Web sites, and most have formulated a strategy to give them a branded presence on the major social networks. For some, that simply means a profile page; for others, it's a real content deal.

NBC News is rolling out its Decision 08 page on MySpace, offering links to the profile pages of luminaries such as Brian Williams, Tim Russert and Chris Matthews. The section will also feature news blogs, RSS feeds delivering updated news items and other interactive features.

The deal is very similar to the one ABC News struck with Facebook last fall, before election fatigue set in for so many and they just stopped paying attention.

Of course, it is curious that News Corp would look outside the family for a news partner for its social media property. Cynically, perhaps, I would have expected a MySpace news partner to carry a Fox brand, but maybe the Fox News voice was determined not to be the best match for such a youthful community -- one smitten by the promise of change, hope and a wholesale overturning of the status quo that will never be.

XSS Watch, PA Primary Special Edition

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:50:50 -0500

“XSS Watch - Inaugural and Probably Last Edition,” more likely, but it’s primary day and I’m all out of red, white and blue bunting clip art.

Anyhow, a hacker found an exploit in the Obama campaign’s Web site and used it to send visitors to Hillary Clinton’s.

Netcraft’s Paul Mutton has some information on what appears to have been a prank.

Someone claiming to be the hacker posted a community blog entry on the Obama site claiming that he or she used a common cross-site scripting exploit to pull off the redirects.

CNET’s Elinor Mills says an e-mail sent to CNET late last night from someone claiming to be the hacker read: “this exploit was not at all politically motivated, and it was simply an immature prank meant purely for fun. Senator Clinton had no hand whatsoever.”

Except we all know that Senator Clinton is totally elite!

Xssed has more details on the exploit itself.

If that’s not enough political stuff for you, go play with Google’s election map, which is explained in a little detail over at the Official Google Blog.

Comcast Rolls Blunt For Subscribers

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:26:34 -0500

I hate to keep criticizing mega-ISP Comcast -- life, after all, is unfair enough for our major corporations. But it's hard to let this one by without comment:

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin on Tuesday told Congress it appears that Comcast used technology that completely blocks certain traffic, like peer-to-peer file sharing.
Martin's testimony contradicted claims by Comcast. The head of the Federal Communications Commission told the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation that cable subscribers do not have the freedom to do what they want on the Internet.

Well, not yet, anyway. Still, there's plenty of time for a White House executive order.

According to this Reuters article published on internetnews.com, the FCC chair testified that "Comcast had used a 'blunt' technique to impose broad restrictions on peer-to-peer file sharing."...

"Contrary to some claims, it does not appear that this technique was used only to occasionally delay traffic at particular nodes suffering from network congestion at that time," Martin said in prepared remarks.

The FCC is looking into complaints from consumer groups that cable operator Comcast has unreasonably blocked or hindered some file-sharing services, such as BitTorrent, that distribute TV shows and movies.

You know those consumer groups, always jumping the gun. All kidding aside, here's a perfectly reasonable explanation for why, in the words of Martin, "some users were not able to upload anything they wanted and were unable to fully use certain file-sharing software.":

Comcast, which has more than 13 million broadband subscribers, has denied impairing some applications and has said it merely managed the system to deal with network congestion for the good of all users.

For the good of all users. Comcast, maybe I had you all wrong.

Photobucket opens well for pix sharers

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:54:19 -0500

Horizons broadened today for some 40 million users of Photobucket, one of the largest photo sharinig sites on the Internet., as the service introduced new technology that allows images and videos stored at its site to be accessed from a wide spectrum of places--places such as Web sites, Web applications, desktop applications, browser plug-ins, mobile phones, home-entertainment systems, digital photo frames and directly from cameras.

The technology called anAPI, Application Programming Interface, empowers developers to create applications that permit Photobucket users to

Securely log into Photobucket accounts
Create, edit and access albums
Upload new content to their albums
Share content from albums via email
Search through publicly available content on Photobucket and
Access and update metadata (titles, descriptions, tags, etc.)

Following the Photobucket announcement, a number of developers launched applications using the new API.

Flektor, a unit of Fox Interactive Media, trumpeted a new slideshow creation tool made exclusively for Photobucket that lets its members create MySpace addons like slideshows, polls, surveys and quizzes with customizable skins, sound and interactivity that are all updated in real time.

Intercasting Corp. introduced a tool for seamlessly moving photos from mobile phones to anywhere within Photobucket.

Another player in the mobile space, Ontela, says it has adapted its PhotoCopter service to automatically upload images from mophos to the 'bucket.

Personal book publisher Blurb revealed that it has incorporated the new API into its BookSmart software so Photobucket users can "slurp"" pix from the service into Blurb's program where they can be used to create photo books.

Another tome maker, Albumoprinter, has embraced the API, which can be used to drag-and-drop images from Photobucket into the company's online personal photo book system.

The API is also being used by Tapatap to allow Photobucket members to meld their images into the social photo game maker's mobile offerings.

And Picnik, an innovator in online photo editing, is using the API to link its editing tools with Photobucket. Picnik users can work on their Photobucket images from within the editing service. and when they're finished working on a photo, it can be sent back to Photobucket without leavinig Picnik.

No doubt these are just a few of the applications we'll see cropping up in the coming months as developers warm up to the new API.

Red Hat Ups Virtualization With AMD and HP

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:57:07 -0500

From the 'I can virtualize faster than you' files:

Red Hat has been partnering with chip vendors AMD and Intel for a long time. Every so often though Red Hat will announce something specific with one vendor (or the other) -- that's the case with the announcement today on a speed/functionality announcement with AMD's processors running on HP hardware with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

Red Hat is announcing that users can, "...achieve significant performance gains by coupling new high-performance device drivers with the features provided by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, available with HP ProLiant DL585 G5 servers."

The improvements are non-trivial. By taking advantage of AMD's silicon based Rapid Virtualization Indexing, the promise is that users will reduce the overall number of cycles required to enable virtualization.

The problem with virtualization has always been that it requires a certain degree of processor utilization which tends to impact performance such that often times virtualized application simply cannot perform at the same level as their non-virtualized counterparts.

The actual metrics reported by Red Hat show that in an OLTP (online transaction processing) environment test, with a 16-CPU system, there are considerable gains to be had. With a fully virtualized system running the Rapid Virtualization Indexing feature Red Hat reported a 21-fold performance gain over regular (non-Rapid) virtualization metrics.

"Red Hat and AMD have worked very closely with the open source community to ensure that full support for Rapid Virtualization Indexing is available with the first Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based systems to be offered by a leading hardware OEM," said Earl Stahl, vice president, Software Development at AMD in a statement. "We've been able to ensure that customers can reap the benefits of this new virtualization technology right away."

The problem though, in my simple layperson's opinion is that even though the AMD/HP/Red Hat metrics are significantly improved, they are still not at the same level as non-virtualized (that is native) environments. Red Hat reports that the AMD/HP/Red Hat solution, "...reached 77 percent of the performance of a non-virtualized environment on one of the industry's most difficult database OLTP workloads."

So in my opinion, while this is certainly a good piece of forward momentum news, for data centers with heavy OLTP workloads, the case for virtualization will still remain a utilization versus performance issue.

I would suspect given this massive leap forward, that others (be it IBM and/or Intel) will soon enough come out with their own tests that will continue to push Linux virtualization closer and closer to fully native performance levels.

Defining The Semantic Web

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:18:59 -0500

We all know the Semantic Web is a vision, an idea, a base-set of technologies. It's not something Dad picks up at the hardware store. It's not even something my brother-the-developer fully understands. Lots of head nods from that one as I talk about it's several aspects. The calendar on the 2008 Semantic Technology Conference site is a great example of Semantic Web technologies at work. While it's a calendar, it's also a search function, and a favorite's function. So on and so forth. A little of this and a little of that. It's functioning Semantic Web technologies. And that's awesome to have a clear-cut example of a real-life application.

Search features are frequently discussed in reference to the Semantic Web. Maybe search is the core of the Semantic Web, except no one wants to call it Search 2.0, or Search 3.0. They want to call it something shiny and new. The Semantic Web. Kind of romantic sounding, isn't it? It may sound like I'm making light of the Semantic Web, but anything that revolutionizes search will redefine the dark alley's of Google and the underpasses of Yahoo. And that my friend, is web-o-lutionary. Perhaps we need to redefine the Semantic Web so that it focuses on search? Remove the enigma. Will that provide the Semantic Web further validity? Will that make it easier for developer's to understand?

The success of the Semantic Web depends entirely on developers picking up the tools and languages and using it in their every day work. And why would a developer want to do that when the How's, Why's, and Where's are not clearly defined? Defining words is the key to language. Without definition there is no understanding. Without understanding there is no applied knowledge. Read the Wikipedia entry for the Semantic Web. It's like the marketing guys slapped a new coat of paint on the term World Wide Web and renamed it Semantic Web. Who does that help? What does that accomplish? Where does a developer even begin?

FCC Chairman To Congress: Stay Away

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:14:10 -0500

Please, don't pass any laws that require me to actually regulate anything, especially the Internet. That's the message FCC Chairman's Kevin Martin appears to be delivering to Congress this week.

Apple Applies for iPhone Instant Messaging Patent

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:03:45 -0500

The U.S. Patent the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) recently published a patent application, filed on the part of Apple last summer, to bring native instant messaging to the iPhone. A feature common to nearly all high-end feature phones and smartphones that's been lacking in the iPhone from the beginning. Whether it is a patentable feature is open to question.

Be that a sit may, the filing - entitled Portable Electronic Device for Instant Messaging, describes a system similar to the iPhone's SMS bubble-chat interface with dedicated text field for entering new messages, as Apple Insider points out, but with some important differences (see picture).

As you can see, the application makes no mention of SMS in the drawings; although it does so in the text of the filing. Rather, IM is written in the images instead. The system described in the patent application may be able to be used for sending and receiving MMS (Multimedia Message Service) messages, which are those that feature pictures or video. That's another feature, like IM, lacking in today's iPhone.

Current SMS app setup on left, Possible future IM app setup on right

Here's the patent filing's abstract:

A portable electronic device for instant messaging is disclosed. One aspect of the invention involves a graphical user interface (GUI) on a portable electronic device with a touch screen display. The GUI has a set of messages exchanged between a user of the device and another person. The set of messages are displayed in a chronological order. In response to detecting a scrolling gesture comprising a substantially vertical movement of a user contact with the touch screen display, the display of messages are scrolled in accordance with a direction of the scrolling gesture. The detecting of the scrolling gesture is substantially independent of a horizontal position of the user contact with the touch screen display.

Since Apple's iPhone SDK for developing third-party software doesn't allow for developers to create applications that run in the background, which is essential for a native Instant Messaging program to do its job, it is important that Apple bring this service to the iPhone itself. If this just posted patent application is accurate, then that may be exactly what Apple has planned.

Report: Italy Getting Unlocked 3G iPhone

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:59:40 -0500

Author: Susan Schrank

Telecom Italia mobile is rumored to be getting the 3G iPhone "in a matter of weeks," according to an Apple Insider post. The really intriguing part of the deal is the talk that Apple might let the Italian cellco sell the iPhone unlocked and without a contract. According to the article, which cites a report in Italian newspaper Repubblica, Telecom Italia will reportedly have a few months as the exclusive retailer of the 3G iPhone and be able to sell the new device without a contract or other restrictions, but at a higher price, of course.

Post Courtesy of MobileContentToday.