Planet Voidspace

Google Earth is turning out to be a great resource for scientists to visualize and communicate the phenomena they study. You can see the migration patterns of endangered and other threatened animals, based on data collected by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation. (The image above shows the range of both the Northern spotted owl and the Mexican spotted owl).

Anybody can take geographical data and turn it into a layer on Google Earth. Scientists are doing this in droves. You can also track storms, the paths of solar eclipses, volcano activity, arctic ice melting, bird flu mutations and biomaps of emotional stress levels in different cities (see this Popular Science article for more info).

Since these are all KML files, they could be made into layers on the regular Google Maps as well. Although they wouldn’t look as cool, more people would see them.

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Tags: Google, Earth

Firefighters hate the Fourth of July, the holiday dedicated to blowing up stuff, because when amateurs try to blow up stuff, they often blow up stuff they didn't intend to blow up. One of my friends has a particular unfortunate knack of drawing disasters to his neighborhood. One July 4th, a house in his neighborhood burnt down due to a stray firecracker landing on a wooden roof. A few years later, he moved to another neighborhood, and the next July 4th, a house in his neighborhood burnt down due to a stray firecracker landing on a wooden roof.

The Seattle Fire Department lets you view all the incidents to which they responded, and the year I checked (the year of the second house-burning-down), the Seattle Fire Department responded to twice as many reports on the fourth as they did on the third.

In late 2004, I was working in my office, minding my own business. I normally keep my door open, as do most other people.

«Knock-knock»

I turn around. There's somebody at the door.

"Oh, nothing," the person said. "I just wanted to look at you."

I closed the door and drew my blinds.

What would you have done?

(In retrospect, I obviously should have installed a webcam and charged a membership fee.)

Originally posted to the Sidebar by "Welbog"...

I'm working on bug patrol for a generic data-entry app. It has a grid view that lets users input data, as well as a set of other views in addition to the grid, such as a regular winform-like deal. One of the things the app has is a trigger-like system, in which classes of a certain interface are called at certain points in the life of a record. So if a record is deleted from any view, data about this deletion is passed to an object invoked via reflection. The idea being the 'trigger' doesn't have to care about what view the user is using, just the data.

Anyway, onto the anonymized code. This is the "BeforeDelete" function, which lets the action decide whether or not the delete action should be permitted. If it returns true, the delete can continue. If it returns false, it must stop.

Public Function BeforeDelete(ByVal controller As Object, _
        ByVal GUIDs() As String) As Boolean Implements BeforeDelete

    Dim RecordFound As Boolean
    If TypeOf controller Is SpecificController Then
        Dim SpecController As SpecificController = CType(controller, SpecificController)
        Dim RowIndex As Integer = SpecController.View.Grid.ActiveRowIndex
        SpecController.View.Grid.ActiveRowIndex = RowIndex
        Dim ItemGuid As String = CStr(SpecController.View.Grid.Cell(RowIndex, 3).Value)

        RecordFound = DataFacade.GetRecordCount(ItemGuid)

        If RecordFound = False Then
            Throw Exception(...)
        Else
            Return True
        End If
    End If

End Function

WTFs:

1. Throwing an exception instead of returning false, which is what it should be doing.
2. DataFacade.GetRecordCount returns a boolean. I have no idea why this is. I don't think I want to know.
3. Getting the active row and then immediately setting the active row to that row. WTF?
4. The biggest WTF of all, is that this function goes to look up the value of a GUID in the grid, and specifically the grid, so that this event can be bypassed in the other view types. Guess what ItemGuid contains once it gets to the GetRecordCount call? Yeah. It contains GUIDs(0). Even better: you can delete multiple records from the grid, and this function ignores that and only tries to delete the active one.

---

Brought to you by the Non-WTF Job Board:

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Due to a fat-finger error on my part, the comments for several posts back were deleted a few minutes ago. Apologies to all commenters; those threads were of rather high quality and I’m sorry to lose them.

The July 2, 2008 edition of the Haskell Weekly News is now available. It summarises recent developments and discussion within the Haskell community.

From: July 2 Haskell Weekly News Available

The July 2, 2008 edition of the Tcl-URL! is now available. It summarises recent developments within the Tcl community.

From: July 2 Tcl-URL! Now Available

Frink 2008-07-03 has been released. Frink is a language which allows for units of measurement to be tracked throughout calculations to help ensure correct answers.

This release includes bug fixes.

From: Frink 2008-07-03 Released

Kite 1.0b3 has been released. Kite is a small, object-oriented language.

This release includes: support for regular expressions, support for anonymous recursive functions, improved debugging support, more reliable exception handling, and other changes.

From: Kite 1.0b3 Released

Sleep 2.1 Update 1 has been released. Sleep is an embeddable scripting language implemented in Java, and inspired by Perl and Objective-C.

This release includes: performance improvements, bug fixes, improved compile-time error checking, and other changes.

From: Sleep 2.1 Update 1 Released

eTcl 1.0-rc29 has been released. eTcl is a standalone, single-executable distribution of Tcl, supporting a number of platforms and including several popular extensions.

This release includes: the use of Tcl/Tk 8.5.3, new commands in the wce package, support for anti-aliased lines in Pixane, applets to wrap sources into a standalone executable, and other changes.

From: eTcl 1.0-rc29 Released

Che’ Shirts, Fake Rebels, Acting Class Helped Free Betancourt

All I can say is “Heh”.

Oh dang Canada! I think my photos for the next few weeks are going to be a bit of an ode to Victoria and environs. This is Fisgard Lighthouse on Tuesday, patriotically bedecked.

Adobe Reader 9 is out. It’s now almost half as fast as Foxit Reader. Also, it lets you embed Flash in PDF and embed PDF in Flash. Adobe supports both platforms, country and western. They’ve also “conveniently” bundled Adobe AIR for no apparent reason and added synergistic integration with their cloud, which claims it doesn’t support my browser and then requires both Javascript and Flash in order to sign up for an Adobe ID, the use of which is governed by the Acrobat.com service agreement, which is a PDF.

You can’t make this stuff up.

It occurs to me that, at some point in the not-too-distant future, we’re going to achieve a harmonic convergence with these mega-platforms. “Adobe Acrobat Reader version 9 with Adobe Shockwave Flash version 10 with Adobe Photoshop CS3 with Adobe AIR beta 3″ will get truncated to “Adobe 9.” Coming soon on Overheard in New York: “Hey, are you on Adobe 9?” “No, I’m on Microsoft 14.” “Pity. I was hoping we could have sex.” Or something like that. Who knows, with these wacky kids today and their vendor-specific runtimes?

• When Hippies Turn to Cyber Terror | Threat Level from Wired.com

Tomorrow we celebrate July 4th, and a week later our long National Nightmare is over. On the 11th we deposit our 2G iPhones in the FriendFeed donation bins and officially hook ourselves up to the Enterprise iPhone. The ePhone will change how we work and play, and in the process free us from the tyranny of our jobs as consumers.

When the iPhone shipped last year, IT responded with a wave of dismissal to the shiny new platform. No keyboard, no push email, no secure deployability, and certainly no way to decommission the phone on exit from a company

Continue reading on TechcrunchIT >>

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Regator, a new blog aggregator that hopes to reduce the blogosphere down to consumable chunks for the average user, has launched today in private beta. The site acts like a combination between Digg and a standard RSS reader, allowing users to vote on the most popular stories drawn from 3,000 blogs that have been hand-picked by Regator editors. TechCrunch readers looking to try the site can get one of 100 invites here by entering the code “techcrunch”.

The Ajax-heavy site seems best suited for users who aren’t interested in heavy-duty blog reading. There’s no way to add an RSS feed that isn’t already on the site, and the sharing options seem to be limited compared to more mature offerings like Google Reader. Each story has voting arrows which allow users to determine the most popular articles - a nice touch, but one that may turn Regator into a Digg-clone instead of a more general news reader.

Beyond standard text search, Regator offers an audio and video search across its indexed blogs, but the results aren’t always appropriate - a video search for “Yahoo” yielded a YouTube trailer for the movie Wanted as the second highest hit.

Regator will see competition from a number of blog aggregators, which include Blogged, which launched a similar feature yesterday, and TechMeme, which uses an algorithm rather than user input to rate top stories.

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A reader suggested that I should take a look at an article I wrote back in 1997, Five Myths of New Media, and consider how those predictions panned out. Good idea, here goes…

1. Business use is driving the growth of the Internet

That myth is long since busted — I called it right. The action, and most of the traffic volume, are in social networking and P2P and other on-line communities not tied to someone’s line of business. Personal use dominates even in measures as simple as tallies of broadband connections; “home” accounts vastly outnumber “business” accounts.

Note: I’m not claiming business use is unimportant, but then I wasn’t claiming that in my original article either. It’s just not the main driver of volume growth today, and probably never has been.

In truth, I think I was actually more prescient than almost anyone else about this, at least anyone else who was willing to speak up in public.

The Internet is the future of mass entertainment and news.

In my prediction I was being derisive of video-on-demand services and the notion that old-media moguls could shoehorn the Internet into a dumb, centralized broadcast medium, issuing entertainment and news over an essentially one-way pipe. Busted: that hasn’t happened either, my negative prediction was correct.

Eleven years later the Internet looks like the future of news, but in a different way than I anticipated in 1997. What it’s done instead is turned everyone who wants to be into a publisher. I didn’t make that positive prediction, but then nobody else did either.

So I’d say I got this half right; I was correct in terms of the questions we knew how to ask in 1997, but I didn’t quite foresee a more radical development that would change the questions.

The techno-literacy problem can be solved in isolation.

Despite the more general title, I was mostly talking about the broadband-deployment problem in my original prediction. But I don’t think anyone would even argue the more general claim in 2008.

Notice that you don’t hear much squawking from the “digital divide” crowd any more? As I correctly predicted, attempts at grandiose government interventions came to nothing and markets mostly solved the Internet deployment problem. Free wireless Internet provided by private citizens and businesses has spread like crazy.

The big remaining deployment issue isn’t rich vs. poor, which is what the do-gooders were obsessing about in 1997; it’s urban vs. rural. Below a certain population density it’s difficult for anyone thinking about dropping in cable or fibre to recover their infrastructure costs. I expect mesh networking and WiMAX to solve this problem during the next five years.

I think I got this one entirely right.

On-line magazines can make money.

…by subscription. If anyone has actually managed this yet, I have yet to hear about it. All the “successful” operations I know of are cross-subsidized by a print business or float on advertising revenue. So I was right as far as that went.

I’m going to concede half of this one, however, because I was wrong in the more general sense. Slate, my example of 1997, started making money in 2007 after the Washington Post bought it from Microsoft. The advertising revenue did it.

And it’s still the case that even specialized devices like ebook readers “cannot replace the experience of leafing through a magazine with your feet up.”

Paper will be history soon.

Busted. Obviously it isn’t, and won’t be in the foreseeable future. Displays aren’t good enough or cheap enough, or light enough, not by an order of magnitude. The technology to make them better than paper is now realistically imaginable — that’s a change from 1997, when high-resolution color CRTs were still pretty novel — but only barely so. It will be a long way off yet.

I wrote: “Internet (like other media) has a natural ecological/economic niche which it fills better than its competitors,
but that said niche is different from any of its competitors. We won’t serve anyone by trying to fit the Internet on a Procrustean bed of old-media forms, nor by assuming any of them is inevitably going to be completely subsumed by the Internet.

One thing we can see a little more clearly ten years later is which old-media forms do look most likely to be replaced. My post on Converging curves cites long-term trends suggesting that general-circulation newspapers look like being one of them.

The learning process continues. I was solid on predictions 3 and 5. I got 2 and 4 at least half-right. And I was ahead of almost everyone on prediction 1. That’s at least an an 80% hit rate, which is pretty good in the prognostication business.

[warning: I am no Unicode expert; just someone who has listened to it discussed a ton of times on python-dev and read up on it somewhat]

There is a thread on python-dev about UCS-2/UCS-4 builds of Python and what the default should be (answer: UCS-2, which is really UTF-16 for Python, as it always has been). But what the thread has done for me is made it clear how bloody complicated Unicode is, partially thanks to the amount of new terms the standard brings into the word.

The first thing to realize is that Unicode is a bunch of code points. A code point is a single entry in Unicode. If something in Unicode is represented as a single character (whether it is a symbol representing a sound, like a letter, or a letter, like an ideograph).

Things get complicated, though, when you try to come up with a scheme to represent all 1,114,112 code points while caring about space. Obviously all code points do not fit in 1 byte, let alone 2 bytes. You could use 4 bytes, but that is way past how much space is needed for representing a single code point.

And this is why you have UTF-8, UCS-2/UTF-16, and UCS-4/UTF-32 to choose from for Unicode encoding. Each of those encodings have a different code unit: the minimum amount of space used to represent at least one code point. Problem is that it can take multiple code units to be able to represent any code point. Think of UTF-8 which is 1 byte: while it takes a single code unit of 1 byte to represent anything in ASCII, you can't represent any of the 1,114,112 code points in Unicode in a single byte. So UTF-8 supports variable-length code points by using multiple code units.

Why do you care if a code point takes up multiple code units, you ask? Well, think about trying to calculate the number of characters/code points in a string. If you have variable length code points you can't just return the number of code units used to make the string; you have to go through and figure out how many of those code units are really just a part of a making a code point. An even more problematic thing is slicing; you can't slice in constant-time based off of memory offsets and the code unit size if a code unit might only make up part of a code point. That means slicing goes from being O(1) to being O(n). That sucks.

So that is why UTF-32/UCS-4 exists. All of Unicode characters can be represented in 4 bytes. Everything is constant. That's nice. But now you are using 4 bytes for EVERYTHING, even stuff that could fit in ASCII. And the majority of Unicode that people typically care about can fit in two bytes. This core part of Unicode is called the Basic Multilingual Plane, or BMP. There are other planes that represent other characters and symbols, but they are not commonly used.

So there is UTF-16 (which made UCS-2 obsolete). Fitting anything from the BMP in a code unit from UTF-16 means that for most things the number of code units needed to make a code point is a constant of 1. Of course there are rare occasions where you need more than a single code unit to make a code point in UTF-16, which is when you have what is called a surrogate pair, creating the code point from two code points. This makes UTF-16 a balance between memory usage and the amount of work needed to calculate things.

In terms of Python, you can build it for either UTF-16 or UTF-32 (although the configure options are named UCS-2 and UCS-4; I believe the underlying support is technically the UTF versions). Windows and OS X use UCS-2 builds, while most Linux distros use UCS-4 builds. The key thing to realize, though, is that no matter what build you are on, indexing, slicing, etc. work on code units, not code points! This is a conscience decision to let these operations have O(1) complexity. Assuming you are using Python 3.0 since it is all Unicode, you should use results from str.index(), etc. to index and slicing into strings so that you don't have to worry about what kind of build you are working on.

Google has just released a lengthy blog post to announce that it has finally put its privacy policy on its homepage. The search giant has been repeatedly questioned over the last few months over its lack of a readily available privacy policy, which until now has been buried in the “About Google” section of the site. The explanation has always been vague (and ridiculous), with Google repeatedly appealing to its desire to keep the home page as pristine as possible.

Google hasn’t said why it finally gave in, but it’s likely that it has been facing pressure from the government to make the privacy policy more available - a post by Saul Hansell points out that the lack of a visible policy may have actually been illegal under California law.

The announcement was accompanied by a lighthearted description of Google’s “homepage weight” - the number of words visible on the page at one time. Apparently the magic number is 28 words, and the company was forced to drop a word from its copyright disclaimer in order to make room for the new link.

It’s an interesting little story, but the tone of it is sort of strange. Privacy is a big deal at Google, so why the levity? We’ve had some recent concerns over where Google is getting its website usage data from, nevermind the fact that it may soon hand over all YouTube user data by court order. It would be nice if they were a little more forthcoming, even if it’s at the cost of a whimsical story.

Despite these concerns, we should give Google some credit for a hosting a pretty comprehensive privacy portal (even if it was difficult to find before). Here’s their captivating introduction to cookies:

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Here are some of the jobs listed on CrunchBoard over the last week:

• Fulltime Senior AJAX/PHP Web Developer
  DriverSide - San Francisco, CA
• QA Engineer
  Gx5 - Anywhere
• Software Support Specialist
  K&L Wine Merchants - Redwood City, CA
• GoodBarry .NET Web Development Ninja
  GoodBarry - San Francisco, CA
• Head of Web Design & Front-End Development
  Global Campus - London, UK
• Quality Assurance Cowboy
  Janus Health - San Diego, CA
• Web Developer
  Wall Street On Demand - Boulder, CO
• Operations Support Engineer
  LiveOffice - Torrance, CA
• Technical Architect
  Frog Design - Milan, IT
• Ruby Developer
  TechCrunch - Atherton, CA

International readers can check out our British and French job boards as well.

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The Seaside core team is happy to announce the first official Seaside Sprint held in Amsterdam. The Sprint starts right after the last ESUG presentation and is basically open ended:

August 29, 2008 (14:00) - August 30, 2008

The Seaside Sprint is intentionally planned outside Camp Smalltalk, because we want to be able to define the exact goals at the beginning of the Sprint where everybody is present. We would be happy if people from the commercial vendors could join the effort, so that we can push the release of Seaside 2.9 together. People proposing their own Seaside related projects or being interested joining the development team are very welcome as well.

The place where the Sprint is held has not been determined yet, but we are trying to get something organized where we can comfortably work. It is supposed to be fun, but be prepared to work hard ;-)

See you in Amsterdam!

The recent court order directing Google to hand over data to Viacom about every YouTube video ever watched strikes many people as an absurd overreach of the law into the privacy of anyone who has ever used YouTube (i.e., almost everyone on the Internet). Google should definitely keep fighting the ruling if it can.

But if it can’t, perhaps it should comply with it in a creative way. The data in question are data logs containing the records of every video watched on YouTube, by whom, and at what times. The court is also ordering that Google hand over all videos that have ever been taken down for any reason. The logs alone take up 12 terabytes. Google should print them out and deliver them on paper.

It would literally fill up the Library of Congress. That is roughly the equivalent of all the printed books in the Library of Congress (by one estimate, others put it at 20 terabytes—either way, it’s a lot of paper). The court order never states what form, the data must be delivered in.

(Photo via, appropriately enough, the Library of Congress And hat tip to reader Paul Christiansen for the original suggestion).

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Posted by Peter Foo, Associate Webmaster and Mark Lucovsky, Technical Director

Political participation isn't just about casting your vote; everyone should be able to become an informed participant instantly. When Americans want to learn about candidates and issues using Google, we find that they want more than one source, and immediate results. Instead of sitting through entire television broadcasts, voters are going online to get their daily dose of politics - as they did during the primaries, when searches for political queries spiked.

We created a page on 2008 US election trends that highlights search queries on candidates by location to show how, during this election season, voters across the nation are getting politically engaged online. Use the Candidate Search Queries map to see which cities are searching more for Obama or McCain, and the News by Candidate tool on the trends page to see the latest headlines on each of the presidential contenders.

Our political outreach efforts are aimed at providing citizens with useful knowledge on where candidates, office holders and advocacy groups stand. As more Americans go online and take simple steps to participate in politics, we aspire to promote democracy and informed participation in the process by equipping voters with useful information through search.

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

Late one night in the summer of 2000, I found myself answering user support emails in response to two new features we had just released, Advanced Search and Preferences (at the time catchily called "Language, Display, and Filtering Options" :)). Busy crafting answers about how to set Safesearch or change the number of results offered by default, I worked my way through the email queue. And then I saw it: The next email had just a number ("37") in the subject - and no message text. What a weird form of spam, I thought. Why would anyone be motivated to just send a number? I searched for the user's email address to see what else had been sent. Interesting. Lots of numbers: 33, 53, and then a clue: "61, getting a bit heavy, aren't we?" Furthermore, the date on each of the messages seemed very familiar. Then I realized that's because the dates were all days that I had launched various changes on the homepage. "Getting a bit heavy?" - that one did correspond to one of the wordiest homepage releases we had ever done. Could the sender be counting words? Sure enough, I looked back, counted the words myself, and he was - a manual, human version of a scale for the Google homepage. He was weighing our homepage and letting us know when it was getting too heavy. One of his earliest mails had a note in the body: "What happened to the days of 13?" - referring to the word count on the initial 1999 homepage.

This mystery and its revelation was really interesting because I thought about the homepage, and how to keep it simple, all the time. Yet I hadn't thought to look at it through this very simple lens: just count the words. The fewer, the better. Ever since that night, this has been our discipline, and everyone who works on the homepage and its design knows the current number: 28. (That's the word count for the basic page if you are signed out, there's no promotional line running beneath the search box, you've set Google as your homepage and thus don't get the "Make Google Your Homepage!" link, and you count "©2008 Google" as two words.)

So, today we're making a homepage change by adding a link to our privacy overview and policies. Google values our users' privacy first and foremost. Trust is the basis of everything we do, so we want you to be familiar and comfortable with the integrity and care we give your personal data. We added this link both to our homepage and to our results page to make it easier for you to find information about our privacy principles. The new "Privacy" link goes to our Privacy Center, which was revamped earlier this year to be more straightforward and approachable, with videos and a non-legalese overview to make sure you understand in basic terms what Google does, does not, will, and won't, do in regard to your personal information.

How does privacy relate to homepage word count? Larry and Sergey told me we could only add this to the homepage if we took a word away - keeping the "weight" of the homepage unchanged at 28. Given that the new Privacy link fit best with legal disclaimers on the page, I looked to the copyright line. There, we dropped the word "Google" (realizing it was implied, obviously) and added the new privacy link alongside it.



We think the easy access to our privacy information without any added homepage heft is a clear win for our users and an enhancement to your experience. You can check out the new Privacy Center here.

We’ve seen a number of music sites like Seeqpod and Grooveshark that leverage user-uploaded music scattered across the web to offer free, on-demand jukeboxes. These services manage to skirt legal repercussions by only serving content that is hosted on other sites, which makes them harder to sue (though some have tried).

Streamzy, a media search startup that launched earlier this year, has taken this approach one step further. Instead of trying to index user-generated content, Streamzy uses Seeqpod’s database as a content source, which it further refines by weeding out broken links. The site, which used to only support audio, has just introduced video playback as well.

Streamzy offers a streamlined (and much improved) interface for Seeqpod’s content, sporting a minimalist player that neatly labels each song by title and artist name. Beyond basic media playback, Streamzy also offers an intuitive drag-and-drop playlist maker that users can save for future reference. In the future the company plans to allow for users to embed playlists on their blogs and social network profiles.

Streamzy isn’t much more than a resigned interface for Seeqpod, but it’s a redesign that was badly needed. And while it will have a hard time differentiating itself from the likes of Jogli, Songza, Soundflavor and a number of others, it’s a good place to start for music on demand.

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While at Dyson HQ, I had the pleasure, once again, of interviewing the man himself. I had to ask what his thoughts were on the iPhone, and James’ answers were both entertaining and interesting.

I have an iPhone and a BlackBerry. And I have to confess that I use the BlackBerry more. But I really wanted to like the iPhone because it’s thin—one of the clever things about it—thinner than any other phone, and fits easily in your pocket. I find that a nuisance if you’re going to a function or whatever it is. I really like that about it.

I hate the touchscreen. That’s my biggest complaint. I love the weather, really good. Maps are brilliant. The way you are supposed to use it, I really like. I’m not sure about having to slide that thing across every time you answer a phone call. As a way of locking the screen, I accept that because it’s important.

Read the rest of the interview at CrunchGear

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Even back in January when Microsoft agreed to pay $1.2 billion for enterprise search company Fast Search & Transfer, it was mired in an accounting scandal and trading in its stock had been suspended. Its aggressive accounting for phantom deals that never materialized earned it the moniker the “Enron of Norway.” But more sordid details keep coming out from some tenacious reporting by the Norwegian press.

The latest account comes in the June 28 issue of the Norwegian magazine Dagens Næringsliv. In an article (in Norwegian) by Trond Sundnes, Dagens Næringsliv, Gøran Skaalmo, the magazine details how the Norwegian company booked free software trials as revenues, and how its executives set up shell corporations for allegedly self-dealing purposes. A translated version of the article (embedded below) is making the rounds among Fast’s competitors and inside Microsoft itself.

The problems at Fast were financial in nature and tied to an overly aggressive sales culture, which arguably Microsoft can fix. But it does point to a certain blindness on the part of Microsoft, or at least a willingness to look the other way, in its obsessive quest to become a player in search (see Yahoo and Powerset). It also raises questions about Fast’s underlying search technology. If Fast was having trouble closing deals for its products, how good can its technology really be?

According to the article, Fast had booked $50 million in fake revenue, $20 million in fictional contracts, and former top executives closely linked to CEO Markus Lervik siphoned off $6 million to shell companies they controlled. Lervik continues to lead the business and is currently the vice president for enterprise search at Microsoft.

Some of the details from the article include:

—The company had an aggressive practice of giving enterprise customers free trial periods and marking them down as tentative deals.

—One of these was a large $18 million deal with Australian Telecom company Telstra that the company recognized as revenues in late 2006. But the deal then failed to materialize.

—A second deal for which Fast never got paid was with Accoona, another shady search company.

—An audit uncovered unauthorized payments to a shell company in Fort Myers, Florida called Archtech that is owned by a former Fast VP, Peter Bauert and Fasts’s former CFO Ali Riaz (through yet another company he controls called Bluebird Collabo). That’s Riaz in the Audi pictured above.

Lervik never responded to repeated requests for comment, but Microsoft did. It sent adjusted annual reports for 2006 and 2007 which noted that over 30 million Norwegian Kroner ($6 million) was “irregularly” paid and “wrongly approved” to:

. . . companies owned or controlled by persons who at the time of the transactions were closely related parties.

That is an apparent reference to Archtech and other shell companies that were supposedly reselling Fast software. The problem, according to the the documents Microsoft provided, was that these related companies “purchased” $3.5 million worth of software licenses for which Fast was never actually paid.

I always wondered what the “transfer” part of Fast Search & Transfer referred to.

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The newspaper industry’s death spiral is accelerating. The “increasingly rapid and broad decline in the newspaper business in recent months has surprised even the most pessimistic financial analysts.” In related news, the avverage age of TV viewers has reached 50 and is still rising. The networks are losing their audience.

The long-term trends hurting the newspaper and TV industry are fairly well understood at this point. At the bottom of most of them is displacement of newspaper-reading and TV-viewing time by Internet browsing. But this, and its consequences (a big one is the collapse of classified-ad revenues; Craigslist and eBay have hit the newspapers
where they hurt) has long since been factored into analyst projections. The puzzle is that recently, within the last six to nine months, old-media channels are hemhoraging subscribers even faster than the long-term trend models can explain.

This worse-than-expected performance is happening as the mainstream media is becoming increasingly unable to obscure a fact that Americans following on-the-spot bloggers in Iraq already know; the surge worked, and we’re winning the second phase of the war in Iraq. Political and military conditions are steadily improving, Al Qaeda in Iraq is on the ropes, control of Basra has been wrested from Iranian-backed militias, and security in the former terrorist haven of Anbar province has been handed off to Iraqi forces who are handling it competently.

The recent acceleration in the decline of old media mirrors the recently accelerating success of the Iraqi counterinsurgency. I do not think this is coincidence; in fact, I believe these trends are feeding each other.

Success in Iraq, relayed home through blogs and new media, damages the reputation of an industry that has routinely made itself a willing conduit for anti-Iraq-war and anti-U.S. propaganda (long-term trend discussed here ; egregious recent example here). But as the obvious disconnect between reality and the media’s preferred narrative of incompetence, defeat, and disaster has become wider, circulation has dropped proportionately.

The newspaper circulation crash, in turn, damages the ability of the Islamists and their apologists in the U.S. to influence the political framing of both the Iraq war and the larger effort to smash the Islamist terror network and its allies. The best evidence of their decline in influence is how rapidly “bringing the troops home” has receded from its early importance as an issue in the 2008 presidential campaign, replaced by gas prices and the subprime-mortgage mess.

We can be certain that an easing of domestic pressure to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq is not the outcome the Islamists or their domestic allies desired. That easing stiffens the resolve of our allies on the ground in Iraq — the national government, the Kurds, the “awakened” Sunni sheiks, and plain ordinary Iraqis who can see the improvement around them.

The hypothesis that these trends are driving each other leads to a prediction about observables. Newspapers that take a pro-Iraq-war position, and Fox News among the networks, should be faring better than competitors in similar markets, and the divergence should have increased markedly in the last six to nine months.

I don’t know whether this is actually true. If it’s not, and that can be documented, I’m certain an angry left-winger will trumpet the facts in the comment thread on this post. Let’s see, shall we?

Posted by Liz Eraker, Policy Analyst

In the spirit of National Internet Safety Month, we welcomed Ernie Allen, co-founder and president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to the Googleplex last week to discuss child protection issues.

For those not familiar with it, NCMEC works closely with federal law enforcement across the U.S. to help prevent child abduction and sexual exploitation and to help find missing children. From serving as the clearinghouse for reports of online child pornography to issuing Amber Alerts when children go missing to reuniting families in the wake of Katrina, NCMEC is at the forefront of efforts to protect society's most vulnerable members.

In a policy talk called "Beyond Milk Cartons: Keeping kids safe in a digital world", Ernie provided an overview of NCMEC's work and chatted with Googlers about the ever-changing landscape of child protection challenges shared by parents, educators, advocacy organizations, and technology companies like Google as we work to help families make smart choices online. Watch Ernie's talk on YouTube.

Technology is an invaluable tool for addressing some of these challenges. In a recent example, a team of Google engineers dedicated their 20 percent time over the last year and a half to build cutting-edge software for NCMEC that uses image and video recognition technology to help NCMEC analysts more effectively sort and review incoming reports of child exploitation. NCMEC analysts sort through tens of millions of images in child sexual abuse investigations, and we've tried to leverage our expertise in organizing huge amounts of data to help make their important work more automated and efficient.

When it comes to keeping kids safe on the Internet, we believe that education for families, support for law enforcement, and empowering technology tools, like our SafeSearch filter and the NCMEC software, are all critical pieces of the puzzle.

Tackling online child safety issues is no small task, but we'll continue our collaboration with organizations like NCMEC, along with other partners in schools, government and industry, to take collective strides in the right direction.

In this post, guest author Ryan Carson goes through some of the lessons learned from building a Web app in four days. Carson is the co-founder of Carsonified, a web shop in Bath, UK. They’ve built four web apps, created ThinkVitamin.com and run events like Future of Web Apps. If you’re bored you can follow Ryan on Twitter.

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The time it takes to design, build and deploy web applications has been steadily shrinking, especially with frameworks like Django, Rails and Symfony. With that in mind, we decided to push ourselves and attempt to launch a web app in 32 hours. Four crazy days later, Matt was born.

The app we built is a simple tool that allows you to post to multiple Twitter accounts. We learned a ton during the experience so I’d like to share some of those lessons with you.

How we did it

We have a team of nine people which were divided as follows:

• Two developers
• One designer / front-end developer
• Two bloggers
• One copywriter
• Three PR folks

I would say you only need three people if you want to strip it back to the bare minimum, which would look like this:

• One developer
• One designer / front-end developer
• One blogger / PR person

Our app was built in Python using Django and is hosted at WebFaction. It uses the Twitter API, Git and Codebase for version control.

How much did it cost?

On a basic level it cost us a week of salaries (around $10,000). There are some other small costs which I’m not including like rent, electricity, coffee and taxes. We got hosting for free because of a connection we have with the company but if you paid for that you might expect to pay not more than $400 for the first month (for a simple app).

Team building

Building a web app quickly is not only a great idea if you need to get your idea to market fast but it’s also a great way to build team morale.

You don’t need to build a brand new app in order to benefit from this idea. You can actually take time off to work on a new feature or direction for your current app.

There are some serious benefits to stepping away from your normal work and producing something totally new and creative:

1. The best boost you can give you or your team is to provide the time to be creative. Turning off your phones and email and just focusing on something new and exciting will do wonders for your energy level.
2. It could generate some amazing buzz around you and your company or products.
3. You’ll come back to your current projects with a new perspective and renewed energy.
4. It will push your team to learn new skills. For example, Will, our head of sponsor relationships, spent the whole week doing PR - something new for him.

Tips on working wisely

Here are a few tips that you should keep in mind if you’re focusing on building apps quickly:

1. Limit meetings to one 10 minute chat in the morning and one 10 minute wrap-up at the end of each day. Meetings are the best way to kill productivity and crush creativity so keep ‘em short.
2. Get people away from their machines at lunch. Go for lunch together and maybe throw the frisbee or play Wii. The excitement and creativity will quickly deteriorate if you don’t have a break during the day.
3. Simplify the site and app as much as possible. Try launching with just ‘Home’, ‘Help’ and ‘About’.
4. Make sure to build on a great framework like Rails, Symfony, Django or Objective-J. Part of our experiment was playing with Django and comparing it to Rails and Symfony (a PHP framework). We’ve found that Django lacks the rigor of Rails or Symfony, thus might not be an ideal choice for future projects.
5. Go with the first logo idea and color scheme from your designer. You shouldn’t over-analyze the look and feel of everything as this process can go on indefinitely. Design the logo and move on. This is why you need to hire good designers and trust them to be good at what they do.
6. Be technologically agnostic. If your developers are saying it should be built in a certain language and framework and they have solid reasons, trust them and move on. Again, this is about hiring smart people and getting out of their way.
7. Coordinate how your designers and developers are going to work together. Our designer creates static HTML and then passes it to the developers who use the HTML as a basis for creating templates. These templates are then committed to a Git repository and from then on, the whole team works from that one repository.
8. It’s not enough to just have a designer and a developer. You need a dedicated person who’s focus is solely spreading the word about your application and working to get media coverage. There’s no way we could get the kind of coverage for Matt that we hope to achieve without several of us working full time on it. However, do not hire a PR agency for this - there needs to be an authentic passion for the app that can only come from your team. (For instance, I asked TechCrunch to cover it, and Erick came back with the suggestion to write this post).
9. Get your ‘Creation Environment’ setup correctly.

Building your Creation Environment

If you want to build quickly and creatively, you need to set up an environment that encourages and facilitates that process. If you don’t have the following basics down, your team will be constantly battling annoying issues instead of getting on with building. You’ll need:

1. Good version control. I suggest Git.
2. An easy-to-use source and changeset browser. We use Codebase.
3. Solid server infrastructure. Why not build on Flexiscale, Grid-Service, Mosso or EC2 and let the big boys worry about uptime and server load?
4. A ‘one-click’ deployment system. This means that deploying the code from your repository should take just one click. If it’s any more complex than that, there is potential for complications and downtime. Capistrano is brilliant if you’re using Rails.
5. Printers, chalk boards and meeting space. People need the physical space to throw around ideas. We’ve painted an entire wall with blackboard paint so the team has room to sketch ideas.
6. Coffee, water, music and healthy snacks.

If you really get these right, it makes building and creating so much more enjoyable and fast.

So that’s it …

Thanks for listening to the Matt story. Please share your advice and experience by commenting below. If you want to see a whole day of development squeezed down into four minutes, watch the video below. Enjoy.

Matt Week - Day Two Time Lapse - Music by MGMT

Related reading, ideas and tools

• Contest to build an app in 48 hours: Rails Rumble
• Post about the danger of too much functionality: Features are a one-way street
• Powerful web frameworks: Django, Rails, Symfony, Objective-J
• Version Control: Git and Subversion
• Source and changeset browsers: Codebase and Beanstalk
• Cloud hosting: EC2, Flexiscale, Google App Engine
• Easy deployment: Capistrano

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

The video and slides from last December in Belgium.

At large, multinational companies, change is slow because of The Process. Not that Matt had any major problems with The Process — he knew what he was getting into when he started his job. A change begets meetings, which beget approvals, which beget forms that have to be signed in triple-triplicate, which beget more meetings, and maybe after a month or two you will have successfully added a column to a report.

All of Initrode Global's IT staff were salaried employees, except for network management, which was outsourced to a team of Highly Paid Consultants — and both groups took their allegiance to The Process very seriously.

One morning after an update, a key server performed a scheduled reboot. Since the KVM switch had been set to another server, some familiar and ironic words appeared on the screen.

Keyboard error or no keyboard present

Press F1 to continue, DEL to enter SETUP

What would you do in this situation? Probably either "find a keyboard, plug it in, hit F1" or "turn the KVM switch, hit F1." And that's exactly what one of the techs, "Clyde," was about to do before a senior tech saw him.

"Whoah whoah whoah! Wait! Whatareyoudoing?"

Clyde looked up from the screen. "There was a BIOS error, I'm just going to clear it to bring this server back online." He was second guessing himself at this point because of the senior tech's reaction. "I mean, right?" he added.

"Just give me a minute. Don't touch anything."

Clyde stood motionless while the senior tech retrieved a clipboard. As he returned, he flipped through a few pages and sighed. "This change request doesn't specify any keyboard activity, let alone any authorization for us to use the keyboard. And further..." he paused for a minute. "Wait here a sec. Don't touch anything."

Moments later, the senior tech returned with a printout. In big bold letters, the heading read "INTWEBSRV017." His eyes scanned the page briefly. When he found what he was looking for, he pointed it out to Clyde. "See, here it says this is a hands-off server. Any actions not specifically authorized in a change request requires a separate change request with approval from a Senior Manager."

The young tech was aware of all of the red tape and approvals that were required for most changes, but this was different. It was a BIOS error that required a single keystroke to clear, and he couldn't imagine anyone having a problem with it. He tried to cautiously argue his point without denigrating The Process. "Well, the change request does say that we're responsible for rebooting the computer. Surely pressing F1 falls under that... and regardless-"

"NO," the senior tech emphatically interrupted. "I just said that we're not authorized for this! You think that it's safe to just make The Process up as you go? Without The Process, we have nothing. The Process Be Praised!"

Defensively, the junior tech replied "No, you've got me wrong! I'm not saying that we do anything without the appropriate change request form signed in triple-triplicate, I'm just saying that it should be assumed that rebooting the computer means that we can clear this BIOS error."

"Look, I understand it sounds a little backwards, but we can not deviate from The Process."

Eventually the discussion grew to encompass everyone in the server room, and soon all of the techs were on an email chain to find out whose responsibility it was to clear the error.

Meanwhile, a whole department was sitting around twiddling their thumbs. Word had trickled down that there was some sort of server error and that the HPCs were on it. At this point, no one outside of the admins or the senior management knew exactly what the problem was, but assumed it must be big if the server was completely offline.

Hours passed and word eventually trickled down that it was a simple BIOS error, but not to worry, the network team wouldn't rest until it was fixed. Occasionally one of the admins could be spotted walking around collecting signatures.

The problem was collecting the right signatures — first, the dev manager refused to sign since their updates couldn't have caused the BIOS error, and that was outside of her jurisdiction. "Try the infrastructure team," she suggested.

"Yeah, that's uh, not really my, uh, domain," the infrastructure lead insisted. "Maybe Gary can help?"

Gary, the network lead, was more accommodating. "Yeah, I can sign off on this once I have a signed Network Request form."

An Emergency Change Request ticket was opened, and over the next few hours updates were provided and forms were signed. In the intervening time, most staff in the out-of-work department had gone home for the day, wondering whether they'd get to do any work the following day. The completed Network Request form was brought to Gary for his signature. And still, no one was sure whose responsibility it was.

"OK," Gary said with a smile. He signed his Herbie Hancock on the form and said "Great, we're all set now."

"That is, after we give the corporate VP a call."

After a long discussion with the corporate VP, an email indicating his approval, ticket resolutions, form filings, and last-minute meetings, the request to press F1 was finally approved.

The senior tech returned to talk to Clyde, who he now thought of as his mentee. "Good news. We got approval to clear the error. The Process works!" He looked at the screen again.

Keyboard error or no keyboard present

Press F1 to continue, DEL to enter SETUP

"I'll let you do the honors," he said to Clyde.

Clyde found himself at the same place he was nine hours earlier, and thought about how the day could've been different had the senior tech not seen him about to clear the error. He could've prevented the waste of hundreds of man-hours of putting a whole department out of work while the teams squabbled over whose responsibility it was, what signatures were required, and how many channels the change requests had passed through.

In an anticlimactic quarter of a second, Clyde pressed F1. He stayed to watch the system boot and to ensure that there were no other errors.

The good news is that The Process will be updated with more specific instructions should this scenario ever arise again. That is, after some Process Change meetings are held, approvals are received, forms are signed in triple-triplicate...

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Brought to you by the Non-WTF Job Board:

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Last time, we learned about the dangers of uninitialized floating point variables but left with a puzzle: Why wasn't this caught during internal testing?

I dropped a hint when I described how SNaNs work: You have to ask the processor to raise an exception when it encounters a signaling NaN, and the program disabled that exception. Why was an exception being raised when it had been disabled?

The clue to the cause was that the customer that was encountering the crash reported that it tended to happen after they printed a report. It turns out that the customer's printer driver was re-enabling the invalid operand exception in its DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH handler. Since the exception was enabled, the SNaN exception, which was previously masked, was now live, and it crashed the program.

I've also seen DLLs change the floating point rounding state in their DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH handler. This behavior can be traced back to old versions of the C runtime library which reset the floating point state as part of their DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH; this behavior was corrected as long ago as 2002 (possibly even earlier; I don't know for sure). Obviously that printer driver was even older. Good luck convincing the vendor to fix a bug in a driver for a printer they most likely don't even manufacture any more. If anything, they'll probably just treat it as incentive for you to buy a new printer.

When you load external code into your process, you implicitly trust that the code won't screw you up. This is just another example of how a DLL can inadvertently screw you up.

Sidebar

One might argue that the LoadLibrary function should save the floating point state before loading a library and restore it afterwards. This is an easy suggestion to make in retrospect. Writing software would be so much easier if people would just extend the courtesy of coming up with a comprehensive list of "bugs applications will have that you should protect against" before you design the platform. That way, when a new class of application bugs is found, and they say "You should've protected against this!", you can point to the list and say, "Nuh, uh, you didn't put it on the list. You had your chance."

As a mental exercise for yourself: Come up with a list of "all the bugs that the LoadLibrary function should protect against" and how the LoadLibrary function would go about doing it.

Google has announced an iPhone version of Google Talk which is simply an iPhone-ized browser-formatted version of the Google’s text chat application. This means you can’t talk over the Interwebs but you can tap out halting messages to your friends on the iPhone’s screen and, thanks to Safari’s tendency to clear pages randomly, you probably won’t enjoy a sustained conversation.

When the App store finally launches expect about 500 VoIP solutions for the iPhone on the first day. Until then, sit back, think of England, and enjoy your browser-based Google Talk while it’s fresh.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Just as The Governator tries to pursue green policies, like keeping Tesla’s electric production car local, you’ll now also be able to hand out full-sized “green” business cards with Flickr images, courtesy of the same guys who brought us those cool little mini-cards, Moo.com. They are launching full-sized business cards with a new partner, LinkedIn, which makes sense in the business space, so maybe that be-suited VC won’t snigger at your tiny Moo cards any more. Moo already has partnerships with Facebook, Flickr, Bebo and LiveJournal so that people can turn their image galleries into cards. Their technology means they can put a unique individual image on every card you order - impossible with other printers. So far they’ve sold over 10m cards to more than 180 countries - even to some people in Afghanistan. They recently released an API, and have a cards designer reward scheme in the works. The new classic business cards are sourced from sustainable forests and the ‘Green’ business cards are 100% recycled, 100% recyclable and 100% biodegradable. Here’s an interview I shot to with CEO Richard Moross.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

What you see above is not a video or a slide show, it is a Flowgram. If you click on it, you will be taken to a full-screen player with what appears to be a screencast with a voiceover. Except that you can control the pages by scrolling up and down, watching any videos that might be on the page, or clicking on the live links (which takes you out of the Flowgram to that Website, but if you hit the back button it picks up where it left off). You can also add comments and share the Flowgram via a widget like the one above, which is muted and requires you to click through for the full experience.

If you want to make your own, we have invites for the first 1,000 readers who register here with the code “TECHCRUNCH”.

It’s an interactive screencast, a way to synthesize the Web by pulling different pieces together The voiceover acts as the glue. It can be used for slide shows, travel guides, tutorials, sales pitches, or just to explain something to a friend.

The best way to understand a Flowgram is simply to watch a few. Here is founder Abhay Parekh explaining what a Flowgram is (above) and another one he made specifically for TechCrunch (below). Flowgram’s are also great for narrated photos slide shows. Investor Joi Ito did one about Google Zeitgesit Europe and another one about an amazing restaurant in Tokyo (also below).

Parekh was previously the co-founder and CEO of FastForward Networks, which sold to Inktomi for a cool $1.3 billion in 2000. (Those were different days). He then did a stint as a VC at Accel. He founded Flowgram in June, 2007 with $10,000 and raised $1.3 million in September from a high-profile group of angel investors, including Reid Hoffman, Josh Kopelman, Caterina Fake, Stewart Butterfield, Bud Colligan, Kevin Lynch, Joi Ito and Rajeev Motwani.

To make it easier to create a Flowgram, Parekh’s team is building a set of importing tools for Flickr, Facebook, RSS feeds, and Powerpoint slides. And as more people create Flowgrams, the service will be able to recommend similar ones. Parekh plans to make money with either ads or a premium subscription version for sales people and marketers.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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Brought to you by the Non-WTF Job Board:

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The ongoing Google/YouTube-Viacom litigation has now officially spilled over to users with a court order requiring Google to turn over massive amounts of user data to Viacom. If the data is actually released, the consequences could be far more serious than the 2006 AOL Search debacle.

Louis L. Stanton, the senior judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, issued the opinion and order, which is here (PDF).

That data includes every YouTube username, the associated IP address and the videos that user has watched on YouTube. Google will also be required to hand over copies of every video removed from Youtube for any reason (DMCA notices or user-initiated deletions). Stanton dismissed Google’s argument that the order will violate user privacy, saying such privacy concerns are merely “speculative.”

Meanwhile, the judge denied Viacom’s request that Google turn over YouTube’s source code as it could “cause catastrophic competitive harm to Google by sharing them with others who might create their own programs without making the same investment.”

I can understand why Judge Stanton, who graduated from law school in 1955, may be completely and utterly clueless when it comes to online video services. But perhaps one of his bright young clerks or interns could have told him that (1) handing over user names and a list of videos they’ve watched to a highly litigious copyright holder is extremely likely to result in lawsuits against those users that have watched copyrighted content on YouTube, and (2) YouTube’s source code is about as valuable as the hard drive it would be delivered on, since the core Flash technology is owned by Adobe and there are countless YouTube clones out there, most of which offer higher quality video.

YouTube’s core value is in it’s network effect - the library of content along with its massive user base.

The privacy fallout of this ruling is spectacular. The EFF has already chimed in, noting that the order is highly likely to be in violation of federal law.

Judge Stanton doesn’t seem to care much about that law, for now. And he clearly doesn’t understand that far more data is being transferred than is necessary to comply with Viacom’s core stated concern, which is to understand the popularity of copyright infringing v. non-infringing material. Viacom has asked for far more data than that, and there’s only one use for that data: to sue individual users (or shake them down via the threat of lawsuit, which has been perfected by the RIAA) who have watched a few music videos or television shows on YouTube.

I say this with the utmost respect, but Judge Stanton is a moron. And Google simply cannot hand this data over without facing a class action lawsuit of staggering proportions.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Europe is a hotbed of mobile startups right now, so appropriately enough the Mobile 2.0 event which started in San Francisco is putting on a one-day international event tomorrow in Barcelona which focuses on mobile startups, dubbed Mobile 2.0 Europe. I’ll be moderating a panel there, hosting a TechCrunch networking party and we now have the exclusive on the early stage start-ups selected for the competition: