These look interesting:
he WIP300 and WIP330 are the first in a line of Wireless IP telephony products from Linksys that will enable users to make low-cost Voice over IP (VoIP) calls through 802.11g wireless networks.
Archive for May, 2006
I still haven’t gotten over a country hip enough to even have a Minister of Culture, much less one as totally cool as Gilberto Gil:
Minister Gilberto Gil, a renowned musician who accepted President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s invitation three years ago to join his cabinet, commented at the opening of the Global Internet Congress here. Participants in the four-day conclave are discussing current tendencies in cyberspace and challenges facing the World Wide Web.
“I, Gilberto Gil, as minister of culture of Brazil and as a musician, work every day with the impulse of the ethics of hackers,” he said.
Though hacking – or unauthorized access to Web sites or other Internet-borne information – is a criminal activity in most nations, he said hackers should be distinguished from those he called “crackers,” or pirates intent on stealing or otherwise doing harm while overcoming Web security barriers.
Gil, 63, called hackers “counter-cultural militants who see in the computer a fantastic tool for communication.”
He said the Internet allows good hackers “to create permanent spaces of equality” that give them, as they pursue universal free software, strength against “the reactionary orthodoxy” controlling much of the sector.
“Hackers create, innovate, solve problems and voluntarily exercise a mutual help organization,” which he said meshes with the founding principles of the Internet.
from www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/05/29/1661679.htm.
Thanks, Bruce!
I’ve been really busy with real life, so have fallen way behind on my usual blog reading. That’s too bad, because it wasn’t until 2 pm that I read Tim Bray’s post about WKCR (Columbia University’s radio station) playing an entire day of Sun Ra. But I’m listening to it now, and if you can, I urge you to do the same.
I was fortunate enough to catch several live performances from Sun Ra and the Arkestra before he departed for other regions of the galaxy, and it was always an experience worth catching!
UW students object to staff looking them at their Facebook pages
Published May 22, 2006 Technology ClosedThere’s an interesting article by Kate Rothgeb in last Wednesdays issue of the Daily, the University of Washington’s student newspaper.
Students have accused members of Housing and Food Services (HFS) of going on Facebook and discovering pictures of resident advisers with cups in their hands. HFS staff assumed they were drinking alcohol and used that as evidence against them, said Hansee Hall resident John Stevens.
As a result, the Student Senate is calling for the university to let them know how students’ online presences will be used.
The resolution requests staff and administrators to tell students how online social networks will be used “so students know what to expect,” McCuin said. It also aims to protect admissions and awarding of scholarships.
If an administrator or admissions counselor is going to use online social networks to see what a student is involved in, students have a right to know what is being used against them, said senator Sam Al-Khoury.
There’s a really interesting dynamic at work here. Students are living large parts of their lives in public on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, but largely assuming that it’s only their peers who will be looking at those sites.
But what do you expect if you belong to a group with a name like I’m Not Going To Lie, I’m Completely Wasted In My Face Book Pic…?
The students here are trying to paint this as a free speech issue, but that doesn’t quite seem like the heart of the issue to me. I think it’s actually more of an authorization and access control issue on the social networks. People using the networks assume that the use of the network is limited to their peers, without stopping to worry how that is defined or enforced.
Facebook, for example, limits accounts to people who have email addresses in the .edu space. While that includes most students, it also includes all faculty and staff of educational institutions, as well as alumni, donors, friends of the institution, etc.
This is all part of us learning how to live in the new social reality created by technology. It’s a fascinating ride.
Technorati Tags: privacy, social software, social-software
The multitrack master tracks from Eno and Byrne’s 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts are now available for downloading. The site also lets people upload their remixes of the tracks for sharing. Very cool – I’m downloading the tracks now.
Eno, by the way, has also collaborated with Paul Simon on his aptly titled fine new album, Surprise. The credit reads: Produced by Paul Simon, Sonic Landscape by Brian Eno. Worth a listen.
Technorati Tags: music, open-source
Upcoming talk on designing text-free user interfaces for illiterate people
Published May 16, 2006 Uncategorized ClosedThis upcoming Computer Science Colloquium here on the Seattle UW campus looks really interesting:
Indrani Medhi (Microsoft Research India)
Host: Anderson
Designing a Text-Free User Interface for Illiterate Users
Colloquium
Friday, June 2, 2006
1:30 pm, CSE 403
Abstract
*NOTE: THIS LECTURE WILL NOT BE VIDEOTAPED NOR WEBCAST*
Did you know, 26% of the world’s adult population is illiterate and 98% of all illiterates live in the developing countries! The world is experiencing a substantial ‘Digital Divide’ in terms of the gap in access to information and communication– illiteracy playing a significant role in widening this gap. Hence the need arises for a platform which enables free flow of information by surpassing the barriers of literacy and computer skills.
Text-free user interfaces for illiterate and semi-illiterate users is an application designed at Microsoft Research India such that even novice illiterate users require absolutely no intervention from anyone at all to use. It is based on many hours of ethnographic design conducted in collaboration with a community of illiterate domestic laborers in 3 slums in Bangalore, India to understand what kind of application subjects would be interested in, how they respond to computing technology and how they react to UI elements. The UI eliminates the need for text, uses unabstracted cartoons versus simplified graphics, provides voice feedback for all functional units and provides consistent help features and a movie dramatizing the purpose of the application. Results show that the text-free designs are strongly preferred over standard text –based interfaces by the communities which we address.
Prior to the usability tests, most subjects had never seen a computer and none of them had ever touched one. Because of the unique nature of the subject group, for me the user studies were very different from traditional user studies I had done earlier. My talk will describe the design process, the design principles which evolved out of the process, the final application design, and results from initial user testing.
Bio: Indrani Medhi is an Assistant Researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India. She has a Master’s degree in Design from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA. She received her Bachelor’s in Architecture from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, India. Her research interests include using extensive ethnography methods in designing applications for emerging markets and the BOP; identifying social and cultural factors in UI design. She has done ethnography at a variety of places such as post offices, railway stations, nationalized banks, coffee cafés and urban slums.
People are always accusing government and academia of being inefficient, and saying they should be run more like businesses. Now Gizmodo is reporting this:
Not sure why we didn’t see this earlier, but everyone’s favorite wireless brand, Cingular, is going to go bye-bye. AT&T is currently purchasing Cingular’s parent company, BellSouth, and will remove the Cingular name, replacing it with the euphonious AT&T Wireless. Gone, too, will be the dancing orange fellow we all know and love.
Branding and building the Cingular line cost BellSouth $4 billion. Oh well.
Does this mean when I need service I’ll have to report now that I have a service that is AT&T that used to be Cingular that used to be AT&T?
People are always accusing government and academia of being inefficient, and saying they should be run more like businesses. Now Gizmodo is reporting this:
Not sure why we didn’t see this earlier, but everyone’s favorite wireless brand, Cingular, is going to go bye-bye. AT&T is currently purchasing Cingular’s parent company, BellSouth, and will remove the Cingular name, replacing it with the euphonious AT&T Wireless. Gone, too, will be the dancing orange fellow we all know and love.
Branding and building the Cingular line cost BellSouth $4 billion. Oh well.
Does this mean when I need service I’ll have to report now that I have a service that is AT&T that used to be Cingular that used to be AT&T?
Sheila is giving us the update on Chandler.
With the 0.6 release folks in OSAF are “dogfooding” the app themselves.
Mitch Kapor and his assistant Esther are using it and push the capabilities.
0.7 will enhance the calendar and bring more people in to use it. It will also bring in some of Mimi Yin’s design vision for a collaborative PIM.
The Scooby web client has to catch up with Chandler. They’re looking at 2 month release cycles for Scooby.
They launched a hosting service in December using the Cosmo server. Foxmarks is using Cosmo as a repository. Foxmarks is on the Mozilla download page, so it’s gotten quite popular and the usage has forced them to get Cosmo performing to meet the use. The next version of Cosmo will implement CalDAV free/busy reports, to support CalDAV scheduling in Chandler.
Looking for Chandler beta 1.0 in about a year. Sheila is working on a concrete plan for the 1.0 roadmap.
Sheila asks whether people have satisfied the needs they had that led them to originally invest in Chandler. Jack Duwe remarks that three years ago when this started, Oracle had just purchased Steltor, and at this point Oracle hasn’t pulled the rug out from under them, which was a concern at the time.
Greg notes that what’s emerging is a client that looks to be nice and integrated (like Outlook), and that most of us have become rather settled in our environments. One possibility is that we say this has been an interesting collaboration and learning experience, and we go on our separate ways. Or we could find new ways, now that our three years of funding is running out, to continue the collaboration.
Technorati Tags: Calendaring, CSG-Spring-2006, chandler
Paul Hill from MIT starts off by stating that, since universities are in the business of nurturing lifetime and multi-generational relationships, then we need to be in the social software space.
He then asks why we would encourage (or allow) faculty to do course interactions in commercial services, and what the relationship to FERPA and other regulations are. This will drive us to create many parallel services of our own.
we encourage students to collaborate and work in teams. There are pedagogical styles that support engagement and reinforce learning objectives. We want to increase interaction between students and faculty. IM helps facilitate that at MIT. Zephyr, MIT’s messaging system, has seen a decrease in use, and there’s anecdotal evidence that faculty are asking students for their IM handles on commercial systems.
Policy issues – are you going to provide logging of IM? Will these systems have implications for ID management? How will you respond to requests for logs, etc.?
Will you create a closed community or an open community?
What are the long term implications for your namespace?
Convergence – shared whiteboard and IM
Paul shows scripts.mit.edu – allows anyone on campus to run pretty much any script through a web server.
Standards in this space – SIP
Jabber/XMPP is gaining critical mass. There’s now 26 people in the back channel chat room – last CSG the max was 8.
SVG will be of interest – not coming as fast as hoped, but there are plugins for most browsers.
Blog standards? There are lots of posting APIs, but no formal standards.
Also in wikis there are de-facto standards, but not formal ones. RL Bob notes that divergence of markup makes it hard to make content portable.
Ken asks what the implications of Infocards will be in this space for access control. Paul says that the focus of Infocard is the phishing problem, not total identity control. RL Bob – “Just a new way to log in.”
Bob notes that there are a number of people working on Shibboleth-enabling Confluence – Internet2 among them. At MIT IS&T is introducing support for campus for both Media Wiki and Confluence.
Paul shows an ink enabled wiki. Unfortunately, the ink standard is a Microsoft “open standard”. But at least the information is published.
Yale supports Jive for chat, integrated with their auth systems.
Technorati Tags: CSG-Spring-2006, social software, social-software
