Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Did the folk at the IWF want to get caught, or was it penny-pinching that caused the UK Internet to rise up in collective outrage?

After all, it's not difficult to run a transparent proxy. Many ISPs do it to keep bandwidth costs to a minimum - and have been doing it for years. The early Freeserve network ran on top of a huge transparent caching proxy built on top of a set of NetApp Filers.

In a well-designed transparent proxy everything is handled at a low level in the network stack, so that IP packets traverse the proxy without the source address being changed. Request something that's cached at the proxy or being blocked by it, and the appropriate response and content are delivered to the originating network. Request something that's not in the cache, and packets traverse the proxy as if it wasn't there, just adding a couple of microseconds of latency. The source IP address is maintained, and data routes back to it as per normal.

If the IWF proxies had been running transparently then Wikipedia editors would have been able to carry on working with the site without even noticing the blocked image (probably getting a 403 or similar error and putting it down to problems somewhere at Wikipedia). No one would have noticed, and if anything, there would have been a storm in a teacup rather a full-blown censorship witch-hunt.

I'm a firm believer in cock-up over conspiracies, and suspect it actually comes down to the folk at IWF being cash strapped and having to cobble together their filter out of the Internet engineering equivalent of stick-backed paper, cardboard, and string. Transparent proxying is more processor intensive than rewriting the packets, and it costs a fair bit more to implement. If the IWF just put together a cheap solution, then the events of the last few days were inevitable. Somewhere down the line their proxies would have triggered some site's defences.

In this case it was Wikipedia's anti-vandalism tools that caught the proxying - and the folk at the IWF must be feeling very relieved. What if it had been Amazon's anti-fraud software that had triggered, locking most of the UK Internet out of one of the largest ecommerce sites just before Christmas? I have a feeling that that scenario could have ended up very very expensive indeed.

[edit]

I misread the architecture diagram at the Guardian. The IWF just creates the list of "bad" sites and feeds it to ISPs who then implement the filters.

Even so, my point remains the same. Someone screwed up with their proxy implementation, most likely as a result of having to do things on the cheap. It will be interesting to watch just what happens to the proxies currently in place. I suspect they will very quickly become transparent...

We wanted to show friends a favourite Paso Robles winery; we pulled up Google Maps on the Media Center PC in the lounge and dragged the little man onto a dusty back road to cruise around. But how about doing that when we’re actually there?

I like that iPhone 2.2 has some aspects of augmented reality in the Google street view elements of the mapping tool. Drop a pin onto the map, and you'll find the same street view on your phone as in the browser. Of course, with GPS and an accelerometer there's the scope to actually overlay the street view images on the real world - now all we need is to get that implemented, and tied into a tagging application to actually overlay the world with Yelp or Zagat or, well, whatever...

Of course one could just augment reality with a nice zin...

Neither marypcb or I have been posting much recently, due to being incredibly busy. We're technically having a couple of days off between conferences at the moment, but we're actually holed up in a motel room writing articles on Windows 7.

Last week we were at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. It promised to be an important event, and we certainly got a lot of information in a very short time. Even though we had early access to Windows 7 (and a couple of laptops to run it on), we had a pile of commissions waiting for us to have the code. The result was that we had about 36 hours to write around 8000 words of copy. Various other pieces and techblog entries during the week took that to a round 10K words or so, not counting this weekend's work, which should round things off at a hefty 16 or 17,000 words in less than a week.


Steve Sinofsky unveiling Windows 7

PDC2008 was a fascinating event, and we had great fun talking to new people and learning about new technologies. A Surface-based scavenger hunt gave us something to do in the occasional breaks, and we also managed to spend time with old friends we rarely see.

Here's a round up of what we've written so far:

• At Tom's Guide, we produced a 20 screenshot walkthrough the new Windows.


• At ZDNet UK, the result was a 10 screen walkthrough and a hefty first look article.


• At TechRadar there are keynote reports from the first two days of PDC2008, for the Windows Azure launch and for Windows 7, along with a look at Windows 7 and a piece on Microsoft Research.


• At IT Pro, there's a piece on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, as well as a set of blog posts on Microsoft's identity strategy and an interesting feature in Windows 7.


• And just to round things up here's marypcb's review of Windows 7 for the Financial Times.

Right, it's back to work. Our editors want their copy...

My desk is somewhat different today.

The old pair of 17" LCD panels that has kept me company for the last few years is no more. I've sacrificed some resolution for clarity, and have jumped a whole generation of graphics technology in one fell swoop. There may be 10 inches less diagonal on my desktop, but the new LG 24" panel that arrived this morning more than makes up for it in clarity and quality. The colours leap out you, and I'm seeing things in my photographs I'd missed in the pink tinge of the slowly fading panels.

It's an HDMI panel, so digital all the way from the monitor to the graphics card - and there's no fuzzyness or flicker from analogue signals fighting with the RF and EM that fills the office aether. That's one of the reasons for the clarity, the other being, well, half a decades-worth of LCD technology. Five years is a long time in the technology world! I haven't started fiddling with the controls yet - as it seems to work just fine with the default settings (though I may run a calibration scanner over it in a day or so - I've got a couple of Pantone calibrators on the shelves I can try out with it).

One of the things that impressed me the most was the stand - it's easy to position the monitor just the the way I want, and the smooth rise and fall of the central column is a delight. Of course my old monitor stand took three different-sized screwdrivers just to tilt a monitor a few degrees, so I may be a little biased.

317440 less pixels. That's still more than a couple of million to play with...

New desktop PC, new monitor. That's me set until 2013 then...

Right, back to writing about HTML 5.

I've just ordered one of these beasties to use with any spare SATA drives that I come across. You just drop in a SATA drive (it works with both 3.5" and 2.5" drives), and the drive's ready to test, or you can use it to quickly extract the data you're looking for...



Nice and cheap, too.

It does make me think of more than one TV crime show, though. You could just see Sebastian Stark or Brenda Leigh Johnson sanctioning the use of one to get the data they need to put away the bad guys. And I'm sure Garcia has one or two of them in her office in Quantico...

Over on our other blog at IT Pro I get a little ranty about bad UI and lousy installers...

You know the feeling. You've just installed a piece of software, and you're ready to get on with your work when you discover something like this:



It's the dialogue that won't go away - with the radio button that doesn't do anything.

Pop over there and add to the list of annoying technology "features"...

CES is like every trade show you've ever been to, all rolled into one, and then pumped (and pimped up) by an order of magnitude.

We've been writing about it on our IT Pro blog (when we've not been in meetings, walking the endless halls, in more meetings, standing in queues, in yet more meetings, walking more halls, standing in more queues, sitting in buses in traffic jams, and driving round in circles looking for somewhere to park^*).

Here are a couple of pieces. First, from marypcb on the arrival of her ideal laptop (which is also pretty much my dream machine, too...):

Today has been such a long week; CES is the best and worst of every business trip turned up to eleven. But some of the new products will make our next business trip easier.

Ever since I got my hands on the first slew of tablet PCs I've been begging Toshiba to do a tablet version of the Portégé ultra-portable range; I've had the Portégé 2000 and now the R100 and they're excellent lightweight long-life notebooks (up to 9 hours with the also lightweight extended battery). The R400 is exactly what I've been wanting; a tablet version of the range that's only a smidge heavier and thicker, which makes it as thin as most slates. There's a UWB wireless dock that connects your ports and monitor; get the R400 close enough and it all just connects automatically. And an OLED strip down the side shows you email,calendar and other Vista Sideshow information without you having to turn the machine on.

Secondly, my take on some of my favourite technologies from the show:

Three conference centres and more exhibitors than you could believe possible, CES is the ultimate technology playground. Forget the shiny toys in San Francisco - CES is where it's really at. While it may be a Consumer Electronics Show, there's a lot on display that will help the IT professional.

Need a new monitor for the wall of your NOC?Sharp's 108" Aquos LCD display should more than suffice. It's a technology demonstrator at the moment, but will be sold as a professional quality display and high-end TV sometime towards the middle of the year. You're more likely to get one if you're setting up an advertising hoarding in the middle of London, but it's a sign of things to come as Sharp's new LCD fab comes online.

Enjoy!

^*Try Harrahs - it's not so popular, has plenty of self parking, and (bonus) has a monorail station.

Drew Benvie at Lewis PR was wondering what social media tools various folk use. His list is pretty decent and has given me a new tool to try out...

So what are my five tools?

Newsgator: it's my standard RSS reader thanks to its Outlook integration, and it synchronises with its online reader well. The online side needs a bit of work to catch up with Bloglines or NewsAlloy, but it's pretty decent all the same. On the road I tend to use RSS Bandit, as it's small and fast. However, I'm looking forward to what the Newsgator folk do with the RSS technologies in Windows Vista and 2007 Office System. I keep a local archive of my RSS feeds and index it with Lookout. That gives me a whole long tail on RSS that turns it into an excellent research tool.

Trillian: IM is the ultimate in social media tools. While I use Skype and Skylook for work purposes, most of my social network is managed through IM (friends, colleagues, contacts, folk from previous jobs), and having a single tool that gives me access to MSN, AIM, Y!, ICQ and Jabber is vital. Its metacontact tools make managing all my many IM contacts incredibly easy. Now that my main blogging tool has turned on a Jabber server it's opened up a whole new layer of interaction - that's already more than proved its worth.

LiveJournal: my main blogging platform with a built in social network tool. LJ's "friends" model may be a combination RSS reader and buddy list on steroids, but it does give the LJ platform something lacking from other blogging tools - a community. As I've got a permanent LJ account bought several years ago when the service was needing new servers urgently, I get a lot of benefits that have more than paid for my $100 contribution to the service - and I've mapped my LJ blog to a personal domain. I also use Wordpress for a more esoteric occasional technical blog that I really must do more with... LJ's also blessed with a whole range of offline blog editing tools, which leads me neatly on to...

Semagic: an excellent free blog post editing tool. It works with LJ, Blogger, and Wordpress (even MSN Spaces!) - and also links to online photo hosting services. An excellent little tool, with a lot of powerful features. It's also free. It's not the only tool I use. I keep a copy of PocketPoster on my Windows Mobile 5.0 device for moblogging, and I occasionally use the Firefox Performancing extension for quick blog posts without leaving my browser.

Flickr: I photoblog a lot, and a good image hosting service is important - and it needs to be social media friendly. Flickr wins out by a long way here. It also has good tool support - and API that lets me do and find out interesting things with and about my pictures.

So there you have it - five social media tools (and combinations of tools) that are an essential part of my day.

What do you use?

Well, the Origami Project teaser site that I mentioned the other day seems to have quite a lot of people all over the blogosphere wondering just what Microsoft's Origami might be. And it looks like my guess is wrong...

The folk at blink.nu tracked down a brand strategy firm called Digital Kitchen, who have a concept video for Microsoft Origami on their Work site (all Flash - so click Enter, then Work, then Brandtheatre, and finally Microsoft Origami to see the video), which shows a device larger than a PDA, and smaller than a tablet PC, with fast wireless connectivity (WiFi and 3G) and handwriting recognition, plus the return of Smart Display.

marypcb instantly recognised it. She was at last year's WinHEC, where Bill Gate's demoed a concept model of a device with all those capabilities called Haiku. It was only a mockup, with a print out for a screen. At Fall IDF, we saw Intel demo a new form factor that would use low power Pentium and Xscale chips, calling it the Handtop. It looks like we're about to see these two ideas come together. I wouldn't expect to see shipping hardware much before the end of the year, though...

I suspect we may see hardware at Spring IDF in a week or so.

Another bit of the spring 2000 .NET concept videos finally coming to life?

marypcb was wondering whether a Business Readiness review would cover kittens.

Well, it already does!

While domestic cats are a common feature of many computing environments, IT review sites have proven oddly unwilling to investigate this popular computer room accessory.

....

Clearly, and despite competing opinions, a kitten is substantially preferable to a puppy. It's also, incidentally, obvious that a new video card is 1.5 times as desirable as a baby.

In their favour, babies can be made at home and offer superior resale value.

The kitten, however, is obviously the better option.

So kittens rule.