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Some good links on programming view controllers and table views on the iPhone.

A reader of my OnJava article on discovering a Java application’s security requirements wondered what parsecodebase would look like in Java. Here it is. parsecodebase, a Perl script in the original article, takes the output of the profiling security manager and formats it, grouping on codebase.

A hearty thank you to my friend and author Jason Brittain for mentioning my Java security article in his Tomcat 2nd Edition work. I received a signed copy today from Jason, over burgers, which will sit beside my dog-eared copy of his first edition work on my tech bookshelf.

Jason, nice job on the book. No Tomcat professional should be without it.

The question is why?

From John Battelle, Windows Live gains search marketshare in March, while Google loses a bit.

So I stopped on over to the Live site to execute a search whose results I need for a day trip. I wanted a map of 10th and Fulton in San Francisco. So I go to the FireFox toolbar and type “fulton and 10th avenue, sf”.

The Google results include a second click Google Maps result, which is exactly what I wanted. The Live second click was a link to the SF Chronicle that, as it turns out, did contain a map of the 10th and Fulton area. But I’m not going to follow that link, because a SF Chronicle link could contain virtually anything. Not only that, when I clicked on “Maps” in Live, the search string had not been sufficiently disambiguated for Live to present me with the map I wanted, namely the intersection of 10th Avenue and Fulton in San Francisco, CA. It wanted me to narrow the input, starting with a map of the continental United States. None of the suggested locations matched a location in San Francisco. What?

If Live wants to be taken seriously by a world trained to use Google, it needs to adapt to us, not the other way around. Of course, I’m logged into GMail almost continously for a couple years now, so Google probably knows what links I want based on my history. But until Live can get up to speed and surmount that history-less barrier it has with me, I find it unusable. The results returned are inferior to Google’s, not that Google’s are by any measure always spot-on. But at least I know how Google thinks, and vice versa, so I know how to manipulate it for effect. Besides, with the full faith and credit of Microsoft Research behind it, how many different things is “10th and fulton, sf” likely to mean? Live is linking to literal content rather than meaning behind the search input.

If Live eventually offers a consistently higher quality search experience than Google, I’d probably switch. Every six months or so, I go have a look at Live with some typical search input. And every time I come away with the same conclusion: they’re just nowhere close. And a question: who are these users who are getting value out of Live?

When I was kid, my friend Randy and I would occasionally ride our bikes down to La Benite Park to watch the Missouri River go by. The park is in Sugar Creek, MO, where we grew up. Recently, my interest in the Lewis and Clark Expedition was renewed, and I thought to take a look at their journal entries for the summer of 1804, when they passed through the Kansas City, MO area.

From the Moulton online version of their journal entries on June 25, 1804, we find Clark’s entry describing the camp at Bennett’s Creek. Note Footnote 4, where Bennett’s Creek is considered to be the same as La Benite, the name of the modern park itself, but then referring to a creek on the left hand side (south) side of the river.

Never did I go down to the park and peer out at the river, a thousand muddy feet wide and sweeping everything in its roiling path downstream, that I did not imagine the Expedition moving by, right to left (east to west), wondering what they looked like, what they did, what they talked about, what early 19th century spoken English in the West sounded like, what it would have meant to be with them. Watching and admiring Lewis, personal secretary to Thomas Jefferson himself.

Somewhere at a nearby curio shop I saw a set of after-dinner game cards printed with questions intended to stimulate conversation. One of these questions was: Would you rather spend a week living at some point in the past, or some point in the future? My answer, no contest: in the past, with the Expedition the day they paddled by my hometown.

Karla Starr at the Seattle Weekly writes another thoughtful piece on music discovery. This time the subject is not too little music to choose from, but too much. She quotes a Google executive who observes that in seven years, every song ever recorded will fit in our collective pocket.

The problem is that with this much choice, we don’t bond to any of those songs – we’re too busy skipping around, wanting to sample the next song, or being overwhelmed with choice such that whatever we do finally choose doesn’t satisfy us. Springsteen said something along these same lines: “57 Channels (and nothin’ on)”. Except now make that 1000 channels and counting. With this sort of abundance, music seems to lose some of its value. I remember when DJs chose music for us: yes, those were the bad old days, but when that one song came on that you’d been waiting for all day, the world was right again. We even called the DJ, asking him to play that one special song.

We’ve heard this theme before, when considering why people aren’t happier than they think they should be. It comes down to too many choices. You make a choice, but can’t help wondering whether some other choice would have been better.

Maybe Ford was onto something when he declared: You can have any color you want – as long as it’s black. And if Pandora really wants to help us discover and bond with new music, maybe it should remove the “Skip” button?

Thanks to Paul Lamere for the pointer.

[tags]music discovery[/tags]

Sean Sheedy has a cool post about the possibility of using Sun Microsystems’s SunSPOT technology with amateur radio APRS technology.

SunSPOT at its simplest looks like this: a processor board that includes a small Java based executive and a 2.4GHz RF link, and a sensor board that includes a couple basic sensors plus some general purpose I/O to interface to external third party devices. The development kit is not cheap ($550 USD), but is comparable in price to what you’d pay for a quality scratch-an-itch kit radio (think Elecraft). The dev kit also comes with all the Java libraries to get started programming.

Pretty cool.

[tags]ham radio, aprs, sunspot, embedded java[/tags]

The first step to recovery from any counterproductive behavior is to admit you have a problem. The bad news is that I have a problem in the area of username/password management. The good news is that my problem is not my fault. The problem is a result of just the way things are.

In my house (can’t tell you where), I have two lists of usernames/passwords for the various accounts that have crept into my life in the last ten years. The first list is somewhat long in the tooth, and is four printed pages. I don’t know why I keep that list around, but I do. It even has a number of yellow stickies on it with account information that found its way onto one. The second list contains account information that is more recent. Printed, this list is five pages long. So I have nine printed pages of account information output. Nine pages. Of course, the recent list is encrypted. Heaven help me if I misplace or forget the passphrase.

Unfortunately, account information proliferation shows few signs of improving soon. Microsoft’s Passport and Sun’s Liberty Alliance (remember these gems from way back?) were supposed to solve this problem, but for various reasons never did.

As for contemporary solutions, it looks like OpenID is gaining notoriety, but I don’t see it on sites that I visit with great regularity: Google’s gmail and Amazon come to mind. Come to think of it, I have never seen an OpenID-supported web site in all my travels. And I like to think I get around. Unfortunately, I don’t think we know much about security exploits against systems like OpenID for the simple fact that the world has no widespread experience with them.

Something’s gotta give in this space. I know I am not the only one keeping passwords in flat files, and mine cannot be the only list that is showing signs of unbounded growth. But specifically what to do about I do not know. But I know I have a problem.

Since its debut and addition to my reading list a few months ago, I have been a follower of Internet Evolution (IE). Bill St. Arnaud introduced me to the list (for grid and cloud computing considerations), and he and the founders have kept me reading.

A picture of the founding and contributing editors is emerging that I can get on board with: a sense of charming contrarianism, or perhaps better yet, a sense of Keepin’ It Real. Many posts are good and informative, but some clearly shine through, beaming the values of the founders. It started with Stephen Saunders’s Tokelau eulogy, seconded by his note on Facebook’s time-sink culture and Web2.0 sites that really matter, compounded by Nicole Ferraro’s irreverent account of how officially difficult it is to speak with the man who invented the web, and wraps recently with a vote for humans over the machine in a piece by Andrew Keen. What I most admire about these posts and authors is that they make thoughtful, sensible points without being mean, without being snarky.

Like a great many knowledge workers, I, too, have dozens of feeds in my bloglines reader that I dutifully read each morning. Internet Evolution is shaping up to be one of the most refreshing. Somewhere in the water at IE is a Mencken-like antidote to the cult thinking that the Internet is all there is to life, that digital relationships trump their wet chemistry counterparts, that the Internet makes us happy, that the Internet fulfills our every need. This from someone who lives on the Internet every day, making a good living thereon, and loves it as much as the next guy. But let’s keep it all in perspective, shall we? The Internet serves us – not the other way around. And thanks to IE for reminding us of it in their small corner of the world.

Since its debut and addition to my reading list a few months ago, I have been a follower of Internet Evolution (IE). Bill St. Arnaud introduced me to the list (for grid and cloud computing considerations), and he and the founders have kept me reading.

A picture of the founding and contributing editors is emerging that I can get on board with: a sense of charming contrarianism, or perhaps better yet, a sense of Keepin’ It Real. Many posts are good and informative, but some clearly shine through, beaming the values of the founders. It started with Stephen Saunders’s Tokelau eulogy, seconded by his note on Facebook’s time-sink culture and Web2.0 sites that really matter, compounded by Nicole Ferraro’s irreverent account of how officially difficult it is to speak with the man who invented the web, and wraps recently with a vote for humans over the machine in a piece by Andrew Keen. What I most admire about these posts and authors is that they make thoughtful, sensible points without being mean, without being snarky.

Like a great many knowledge workers, I, too, have dozens of feeds in my bloglines reader that I dutifully read each morning. Internet Evolution is shaping up to be one of the most refreshing. Somewhere in the water at IE is a Mencken-like antidote to the cult thinking that the Internet is all there is to life, that digital relationships trump their wet chemistry counterparts, that the Internet makes us happy, that the Internet fulfills our every need. This from someone who lives on the Internet every day, making a good living thereon, and loves it as much as the next guy. But let’s keep it all in perspective, shall we? The Internet serves us – not the other way around. And thanks to IE for reminding us of it in their small corner of the world.