elliot winard

Inspired by Scott’s list of 10 good things from 2010 and refreshed from a week & a half off from work, here’s my list of 13 good things from 2010 - 3 rock ‘n roll, 2 non-profit, 6 technology, 2 general ones.

1. Recess – My new band!  Mary, Kate and Elliot play rock ‘n roll.  4 shows in 2010. Lots more coming in 2011.
2. The Whores, The Pioneers of Seduction, Clinical Trials, Crazy Pills – One of the great things about playing gigs again is the fact that I get to see so much AWESOME local music!  Based on the music from these local 3-piece outfits, rock ‘n roll is alive and well in Brooklyn!
3. Mojo’s night at The Trash Bar – Free PBR from 8-9, great local bands, awesome bartenders, close to the train.
4. Lexington Readers Club.  The LRC doesn’t have a web site yet.  Patrice Covino put together a monthly program where professionals and artists spend an hour a month reading with third-graders,
5. DonorsChoose.  DonorsChoose.org is an online charity that connects public school teachers with people who want to help.  They call it citizen philanthropy.  Yeah, this isn’t totally new for 2010 but they were one of Oprah’s favorite things of 2010.
6. The Monkeysphere Project – Why do you trust the web sites and servers you connect to, the people that you communicate with?   The Monkeysphere and the OpenGPG web-of-trust add add a layer of authenticity to online connections.
7. DebConf 2010. This year DebConf was up at Columbia University in NYC. DebConf is an international gathering of free software advocacy, free software in design & government and the Debian operating system.
8. DropBox. This online backup service allows you to “sync your files online and across your computers automatically”.
9. Ruby on Rails.  I’ve never been a fan of “web development” but the test-driven-development approach and conventions/best-practices that are part of a standard Ruby on Rails projects almost force good coding practices.  Sure beats the head-ache of dealing with other people’s sloppy undocumented code.  Yeah, I still like Django/Python and Perl but the Ruby ecosystem is really sweet.
10. Arduino and open-source hardware.  At the TechCrunch hack-a-thon we stayed up all night and built a “welcome mat” that greets you when you get home, asks about places that you’ve been and people that you may have talked to.
11. Git source-control management.  Also not new for 2010 but git is a pleasure to work with.  Thank goodness I can use git as a front-end to the Subversion repo that we use at work.
12. Samuel the amazing cat.  Yeah, he’s a little crazy but he means well.
13. Babies.  What can I say?  I like hanging out with my sister’s and friends’ kids.  They call me Uncle Elliot.

This morning WNYC had a spot on FTC’s proposed ‘Do Not Track’ tool.

Assuming that web tracking is a real problem, legislation is *not* the right solution.  We should better educate Internet users about online privacy, about tools available to them.

There are several ways that individuals can already avoid tracking without government intervention.  The only guaranteed way to fully “opt out” of Internet tracking by not using hosted services.  For most people, this is not a viable option.

Assuming you are fear tracking at several levels, there is a range of free tools available now to avoid tracking.

1. BROWSER TRACKING: Use Chrome and the Incognito feature.  A new Incognito window explains “Pages you view in this window won’t appear in your browser history or search history, and they won’t leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window.”  I’m not sure how/if plug-ins like Adobe’s Flash Player are sandboxed so this may not be 100% tracker-free. More on this after I take a deeper look.
2. ISP TRACKING: Use Tor, a free tool for anonymous browsing.
3. EMAIL PRIVACY: Use a mail client that supports the OpenPGP standard.  Encrypt all messages.
4. ONLINE SERVICES: Don’t post private stuff online.  Duh.

Educate, don’t legislate.

Don’t get me wrong – I love the Web2.0 RIA always-connected lifeblogging world and digital audio recording and tweaking my linux window manager to maximum productivity.

But sometimes it’s nice to put down the iPod, sit down, put on a vinyl record, write an old-fashioned letter to a friend for their birthday, ride your bike in the freezing weather to the post office and send it off.  She’ll get it in a few days.  Why the hurry?

I finally updated my (mt) MediaTemple.net account from a [ss] shared-service to a [gs] grid-service lite account. What does this mean? It means that the server behind ihardlyknower.org is running on top of 2007 technology rather than 2003 technology. And I’ll be more likely to update ‘er more often.

After the upgrade I went through over 5000 comments that were posted on this blog, all of them spam. It’s definitely time to look into CAPTCHA or some other way to block the comment spam. Interesting thing I discovered while paging through the pages and pages of spam – supporters of Ron Paul for President in 2008 was responsible for a few hundred of them. The radio talks about McCain, Huckabee, Giuliani, Romney, Clinton, Obama, Biden and Kucinich. Looks like Ron Paul has the support of the comment spammers.

I’ve been busy with life – learning to play jazz, getting hitched, looking for Brooklyn apartments, helping Chi-ah fight lymphoma, writing code for Laszlo Webtop.

It’s funny – I’ve been working on making interfaces and UI-heavy applications over 10 years – first ASCII-based games and then PEEKing and POKEing my way into non-text games. Then it was X11 development in the mid-90′s – building widget-based application UIs and a frame-based animation engine and at the same time making HyperCard stacks. When time came to get a job I started working at Macromedia on Director, Flash and Flex. I dabbled in CSS and browser JavaScript but found it frustrating to keep up with the latest browser idiosyncrasies.

Now browsers are catching up with Plugin-based rich-content like Flash & Director. At AJAXWorld 2007, I worked the Laszlo booth for part of the 3-day conference & walked around to sample the tech of other companies. After doing the rounds I really feel like the stuff we’re doing at Laszlo – releasing and supporting the open-source OpenLaszlo compiler & server, working on Laszlo Webtop – is top-notch technology. I’m truly psyched to be working at Laszlo.

Why do my engineers need to learn another language? asked a few folks. When I demonstrated the simplicity of writing LZX and the complexity of apps like LzMail, LzPix and Webtop they were impressed. When I showed how you could tweak a query arg and generate AJAX they were floored.

I can’t wait until we get Webtop running in OpenLaszlo 4.0 and offer the ability for companies to iteratively port their existing web layer over to Webtop.

Last night Laszlo sponsored a cruise down to the Statue of Liberty and then back up the Hudson. The multicontinental crowd loved it. You’ve never really lived until you’ve seen a dancefloor full of European and American tech folks doing the electric slide wearing funny hats on a boat off the coast of Manhattan.

Laszlo seriously rocked that conference.

When you register at digg, it ask “Are you human? (Sorry, we have to ask)” at the bottom of the registration page. Looks like it assumes the answer is yes if you can parse alphanumeric pages in the image.

I gues the new Turing Test is the ability to parse an image and extract symbols. Got that vision scientists?

We had some server problems at MyLaszlo.com so I moved the Clockblox to a more reliable server. You should update your clockblox links to point at http://www.openlaszlo.org/apps/clockblox.xml. The lead engineer on Google Modules will update the link posted on the Google Modules Homepage the next time they update the site. I’m not sure when he expects that will be.

the short story

Phew. After a month or so of hard work, we’re demoing an early alpha of Laszlo’s new DHTML backend at the etech conference in San Diego.

Check out our first example piece – a flickr-browsing photo application. I wrote the data-handling chunk of the app. Search for lzpix and look at the whole gang who put the little app together. Don’t have the Flash-player because you’re an open-source linux zealot? That’s okay. A relatively-new build of Firefox should be good enough.

• LzPix demo, DHTML version
• LzPix demo, Flash version
• LzPix demo, source code

Then come work at Laszlo. We can always use a few more great engineers and designers.

the long story

One of my first comments when I started working on v1.0 of Macromedia’s still-unnamed server (now called Flex) was “Hey, this is a cool idea – writing code in MXML, which is abstracted away from Flash’s ActionScript API, means that I can write code that can potentially be compiled into multiple different runtimes!” At the time I thought that Java was the only strong contender for an alternate runtime for my markup. Alternate runtimes for MXML still hasn’t happened.

One of my first questions after I left Macromedia to go work at Laszlo Systems was “Hey, what is this ‘alternate runtime’ that you mysteriously alluded to during my interviews? Java? DHTML?” It turns out we hadn’t yet developed the compiler to run applications developed in LZX (Laszlo’s XML+ECMAScript language) in multiple runtimes. I was bummed.

But now we’ve done it. You can write your code once, compile to SWF and run the results in the ubiquitous Flash player. Flip a switch (actually, append lzt=dhtml query parameter to your url or use a command-line argument to lzc), compile to DHTML and run the results in a browser natively. That’s right. LZX to AJAX, pure and simple.

Of course, we’ve still got a bit of work to do – optimization, rounding out the feature-set supported by the compiler, a bunch of stuff. But the results are pretty darn impressive. Not bad for a month’s work, eh?

Folks at the US Department of Justice are interested in seeing what us li’l citizens are interested in searching for. They asked Google to provide ‘em with a month of query data and Google refused. Note that this isn’t about National Security or protecting America from terrorism. It’s “assist[ing] the Government in its efforts to understand the behavior of current web users, to estimate how often web users encounter harmful-to-minors material in the course of their searches, and to measure the effectiveness of filtering in screening that material.” So they’re just interested in finding out how often folks encounter porn (and possibly other things in the future?) on the web.

It’s not that hard to search for adult content on the web. Lawyers are often smart people and I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard for them to figure out how to use a search engine and see for themselves how often adult material shows up. But the government should have no special powers to get private information gathered by search engines if the search companies don’t want to make this information public.

As a public service I started making a little web application where people can post common search-engine queries and providing the DOJ with a URL that they can use to ‘harvest’ this information. I’ll post it soon. Then you can provide search strings that characterize searches that you make on Google. And Google can keep protecting the privacy rights of her users.

You know, I’m just doing my part to keep the web safe for everybody.

23jan2005 – JUST POSTED! – little Laszlo app that you can add to the list that I’m making available for interested parties at this XML feed.

I spent a little time with the new Google Homepage API yesterday and looked into inserting apps written with Laszlo into Google’s Portal. I played with one of the simplest BlogBox the community has developed, ClockBlox.

I followed the API specs and quickly had a ClockBlox in my Google Homepage after creating little XML file to describe the module. Because the ClockBlox is so simple there’s no need for user options.

I welcome people to use my XML file as a template to create their own Google Homepage blogboxes. Coming soon… submission of SoundBlox, PhotoBlox and LinkBlox to Google. Then you’ll be able to listen to music, look at pictures of your kids and keep tabs on the latest RSS madness all from the comfort of a single homepage!