Geeko friendly's List: IT

• Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES) recently revealed a free plug-in for Google SketchUp that will allow anyone to perform energy modeling on projects.
• The powerful plugin will allow anyone to analyze a building’s energy performance, carbon dioxide emissions, daylighting, air flow, solar analysis, and more, providing functionality that was only previously available in Autodesk’s Revit Architecture and Revit MEP.
• Integrated Environmental Solutions‘ plugin allows designers and architects to configure window size, room type, orientation, building location, and materials in order to reduce energy use - a very important step towards building greener structures.
• Once everything is installed, build a new SketchUp model or begin with one of IES’s models. At this point you will be asked to define the building’s location and function, as well as its HVAC system, envelope, and the distribution of specific spaces throughout the structure.

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• • Wii & Google Earth mashup
• • Google, Yahoo, Mozilla different mashup ideas
• Think it, find it, match it, mash it!
• 'Mash-ups' refer simply to the end result of bringing together two or more different creations or applications that were not originally intended to work together, and the concept is a firm part of the Web 2.0 world.
• Mash-ups date back as far as the 1960s with the mixing and sampling of different songs, and like those creations, the first computer-based mash-ups were largely music or image-based.
• mash-up culture is also booming with software and application mixing.
• The Wii remote control and the Wii fit board have been coded by mashers to be used with Google Earth, enabling you to use it as a flight simulator so you can 'fly' over the globe using the Nintendo controls.
• There is also a Web site which showcases the best of the Web's mash ups and gives out a daily and monthly award. Past winners include "twitzu" where users can send out invites to friends and they can RSVP via twitter. "Typobuddy" users can find misspelled eBay auctions and Craiglist items to get the best deal.
• On a more practical note, the Chicago Police Department uses a system called "Clearmap," a mash-up web application that integrates the department's reported crime database with Google Maps.
• Google and Yahoo both have mash-up editors where users can mash what they will. Just last month the Mozilla Lab announced Ubiquity, an experiment in using natural language to invoke Web services.
• But all of this excitement isn't without controversy. Much of the content that is mashed is done so illegally.
• The largest support for mash-up culture comes from the Free Culture movement and organizations such as the Creative Commons.
• "Mashing up is a good thing... people are being creative and expanding peoples' works.

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• The company is considering deploying the supercomputers necessary to operate its internet search engines on barges anchored up to seven miles (11km) offshore.
• The “water-based data centres” would use wave energy to power and cool their computers, reducing Google’s costs.
• Their offshore status would also mean the company would no longer have to pay property taxes on its data centres,
• The increasing number of data centres necessary to cope with the massive information flows generated on popular websites has prompted companies to look at radical ideas to reduce their running costs.
• The supercomputers housed in the data centres, which can be the size of football pitches, use massive amounts of electricity to ensure they do not overheat. As a result the internet is not very green.
• Data centres consumed 1 per cent of the world’s electricity in 2005. By 2020 the carbon footprint of the computers that run the internet will be larger than that of air travel
• Microsoft has investigated building a data centre in the cold climes of Siberia, while in Japan the technology firm Sun Microsystems plans to send its computers down an abandoned coal mine, using water from the ground as a coolant.
• “The huge question raised by this proposal is how to keep the barges safe.”

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• Personal knowledge management
• Reflection. Continuous improvement on how the individual operates.
• Information literacy. Understanding what information is important and how to find unknown information.
• Organizational skills. Personal librarianship? Personal categorization and taxonomies.
• observational 'cultural anthropology' skills
• Communication skills. Perception, intuition, expression, visualization, and interpretation.
• pattern recognition,
• innovation,
• Understanding of complex adaptive systems.
• Collaboration skills. Coordination, synchronization, experimentation, cooperation, and design.
• Personal wiki
• weblogs (with a Web feed)

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• Next, as I find information I want to collect, I email it to myself using Ubiquity, a new extension for Firefox (Google Toolbar offers a similar email capability). However, instead of emailing it to just my regular email address I add a tag to the prefix by tacking a word on to the address with a plus symbol. To add multiple tags I send the message to multiple plus addresses all at once.

• For example, Nielsen just published some interesting data about health and social networking. I know I might need this later so I select the article and invoke my email command in Ubiquity and send the message to both steverubel+health@gmail.com and steverubel+socialnetworking@gmail.com. The article never hits my inbox. It gets autoarchived where I can get it later.

    

  Now if I want to find everything I have tagged under health and social networking, all I need to do is search for to:+health or to:+socialnetworking and bingo, the article turns up.

• 
• The iPhone has seen tremendous success in the market thanks to Apple's fanatic dedication to good user experience, its willingness (and ability) to strong-arm its carrier partners, and Apple's easy-to-use App Store
• Some developers have already used the platform to make serious money, to the tune of $250,000 in just a couple of months.
• But Apple keeps tight reins on its developers. It has a slow and seemingly arbitrary process for vetting App Store software, it shackles developers with a restrictive NDA, and it charges $99 just to get access to the developer's kit.
• It's a sure bet that many developers, given the opportunity, would flock to a less restrictive environment.
• A big part of the iPhone's success is due to Apple's clout, which enabled it, in effect, to tell AT&T to sit down and shut up about this or that feature requirement. Once other carriers saw the iPhone's success in the United States, they wanted in on that action, so Apple was able to dictate terms globally, just as it had a year before in the U.S.
• Carriers typically retain fanatic control over every aspect of the customer, from the menus on the phone to the applications that customers are permitted to download. Carrier feature requirements dictate the laundry-list of useless gewgaws that most phones sport. (Does anyone ever actually use the "calendar" app on a Nokia or Motorola phone?) And it's that dysfunctional relationship that means most phones are so horrible to use: They're doomed from the start by companies that care more about their own requirements than those of their customers.
• That's why I predict that Android will soon have as many different flavors as there are carriers.
• And that's their right. Because Android uses the Apache license, anyone is free to take it and customize it to their heart's content, even if such customizations are appalling to the open source community.
• (There's also no requirement that customizations be themselves open-sourced for the benefit of the whole Android community.)

  • well that sucks
• In short order, "Android" will become meaningless to consumers, and most carriers won't even advertise the fact that their phones use the operating system. Instead, they'll advertise their phones' features, as they always have, and emphasize the benefits of those features to the users.

• It should designate a few core applications that all Googlephones must have, including Gmail, Google Calendar and other Google apps, such as Google Maps. It should specify minimum requirements for processor capabilities, memory and wireless data access. Perhaps GPS and Wi-Fi support should be required, as well as a minimum 2 megapixel cameraphone (the better to interface with Picasa).

    

  Then Google needs to set up a carrier/handset certification program to guarantee that phones in this program meet the requirements it specifies. Those that qualify gain the right to be called "Googlephones," regardless of which carrier or handset manufacturer they come from. Qualifying phones may sport a Googlephone logo on the phone and in advertisements about it.

    

  The result: Googlephones will become a trusted, branded subset of the Android phone marketplace. No matter what other features a phone may or may not have, consumers who buy a Googlephone from any manufacturer will know that they have guaranteed access to their mail, calendar, contacts and Google Maps. And that guarantee -- which is based on the capabilities and benefits that consumers actually care about -- will help drive the growth of the mobile Google market.

  • what Google shoudl do to successfully compete with the market
• There's just one way Google can forestall this eventuality and triumph in the handset market. The company needs to set up an aggressive "Googlephone" partners program
• If Google doesn't do that, Android will quickly disappear into the morass of poorly-branded smartphone operating systems that consumers don't give a damn about, alongside Symbian, Windows Mobile and the Palm OS. And Google will have lost the mobile game.

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• now dubbed the less-hostile-sounding Future Attribute Screening Technologies (FAST)
• Last year, New Scientist revealed that the US Department of Homeland Security is developing a system designed to detect "hostile thoughts" in people walking through border posts, airports and public places. The DHS says recent tests prove it works.
• sensors could spot people up to no good from their pulse rate, breathing, skin temperature, or fleeting facial expressions
• "We're still very early on in this research, but it is looking very promising," says DHS science spokesman John Verrico. "We are running at about 78% accuracy on mal-intent detection, and 80% on deception."
• Questions remain, however, as to how secure the system is. The machines could reveal health conditions like heart murmurs and breathing problems as well as stress levels - which would be an invasion of privacy.

  • hmm, interesting
• But Verrico says FAST has been through stringent privacy controls (pdf) and that the data is never matched to a name. It is only used to make decisions about whether to question someone, and then discarded.
• The trial technology was installed in a trailer because it is planned to be easily transportable, so that FAST trucks can appear at any sports or music event as required. They look set to become as regular a sight at such events as mobile toilets and catering trucks
• But is going to make a real difference? Or will bad guys learn to play the system and render it another piece of what expert Bruce Schneier dubs "security theatre".
  
    Given that the FAST approach is not much different to the long established - and long established as unreliable - polygraph, that certainly seems plausible.

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• Larry Page, co-founder of Google, lobbied the Federal Communications Commission and members of Congress Wednesday to open up the "great resource" of unused broadcast spectrum for a new generation of mobile and wireless devices.
• "The time is now for the FCC to act, and I think this will happen before the election," Page told a meeting on Capitol Hill hosted by the Wireless Innovation Alliance, a coalition seeking the unlicensed use of unused TV spectrum often called "white space."
• The FCC has been running field tests to determine whether various devices might interfere with TV or wireless microphone signals on portions of the spectrum.
• The debate over the future of white space pits Google, Microsoft, Motorola, Dell and other tech companies against the broadcasting industry and some cell phone companies.
• Page and other tech leaders argued that the interference issue is not real, and that broadcasters simply want to hold on to unused spectrum for future use.

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• Google's patent filing describes "devices, systems and methods" that would automatically poll nearby wireless services to find the best price for a voice or a data connection for a "portable communications device." That connection might come via a cellphone carrier, a WiMax provider, or even a Wi-Fi hotspot. According to the patent, users can either manually select the bid they like best or they can allow the device to connect automatically with the lowest-cost provider.
• The upshot? Just as advertisers know they're always getting the market price for keywords on Google's AdWords system, wireless users would always get the market price for wireless data service -- or phone calls. The system could potentially free users from cellphone contracts and locked phones that tie them to one service provider and allow them to switch from one carrier to another, seamlessly, based on which carrier had the lowest price at that moment.

  • RA
• Granted, a lot of obstacles stand in the way of this vision, not least of which would be the unwillingness of entrenched cellular carriers to play ball. Also, the system would require compatible software not only on handsets, but also on any potential wireless connection points -- a major infrastructure hurdle. But the patent is striking for its scope -- and for the glimpse it gives of Google's lofty wireless ambitions.
• The advantages to the system are clear. It would help users have access to the lowest cost network at all times.
• "In addition to cost as a factor in selecting appropriate telecommunications providers, users may opt for alternative auction models based on maximal bandwidth offered, best coverage/reliability, or some combination of options," says the patent.
• To be sure, the patent may not amount to much. Even Google with its might may not be able to break the stranglehold of telecom carriers in North America, and it is unlikely most wireless carriers or telecom service providers would play ball.

  • RA
• But even if telecom carriers don't sign on, Google can potentially pull this off -- albeit slowly. Last year, the company participated in the federal government’s auction of wireless spectrum in the 700 Megahertz band. Though Google failed to win any licenses, it bagged a commitment from the Federal Communications Commission that spectrum owners, Verizon and AT&T, among others, can't block out internet or telecom rivals.

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• Two security researchers have demonstrated a new technique to stealthily intercept internet traffic on a scale previously presumed to be unavailable to anyone outside of intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency.
• The tactic exploits the internet routing protocol BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) to let an attacker surreptitiously monitor unencrypted internet traffic anywhere in the world, and even modify it before it reaches its destination.
• The demonstration is only the latest attack to highlight fundamental security weaknesses in some of the internet's core protocols.
• Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, noted computer security expert and former member of the L0pht hacking group, who testified to Congress in 1998 that he could bring down the internet in 30 minutes using a similar BGP attack, and disclosed privately to government agents how BGP could also be exploited to eavesdrop. "I went around screaming my head about this about ten or twelve years ago.... We described this to intelligence agencies and to the National Security Council, in detail."

  • RA
• The man-in-the-middle attack exploits BGP to fool routers into re-directing data to an eavesdropper's network.
• The technique, devised by Pilosov, doesn't exploit a bug or flaw in BGP. It simply exploits the natural way BGP works.
• The issue exists because BGP's architecture is based on trust. To make it easy, say, for e-mail from Sprint customers in California to reach Telefonica customers in Spain, networks for these companies and others communicate through BGP routers to indicate when they're the quickest, most efficient route for the data to reach its destination. But BGP assumes that when a router says it's the best path, it's telling the truth. That gullibility makes it easy for eavesdroppers to fool routers into sending them traffic.

  • RA

•   Here's how it works. When a user types a website name into his browser or clicks "send" to launch an e-mail, a Domain Name System server produces an IP address for the destination. A router belonging to the user's ISP then consults a BGP table for the best route. That table is built from announcements, or "advertisements," issued by ISPs and other networks -- also known as Autonomous Systems, or ASes -- declaring the range of IP addresses, or IP prefixes, to which they'll deliver traffic.

    

    The routing table searches for the destination IP address among those prefixes. If two ASes deliver to the address, the one with the more specific prefix "wins" the traffic. For example, one AS may advertise that it delivers to a group of 90,000 IP addresses, while another delivers to a subset of 24,000 of those addresses. If the destination IP address falls within both announcements, BGP will send data to the narrower, more specific one.

    

    To intercept data, an eavesdropper would advertise a range of IP addresses he wished to target that was narrower than the chunk advertised by other networks. The advertisement would take just minutes to propagate worldwide, before data headed to those addresses would begin arriving to his network.

  • explains the process. Not that interesting

• Pilosov's innovation is to forward the intercepted data silently to the actual destination, so that no outage occurs.

    

    Ordinarily, this shouldn't work -- the data would boomerang back to the eavesdropper. But Pilosov and Kapela use a method called AS path prepending that causes a select number of BGP routers to reject their deceptive advertisement. They then use these ASes to forward the stolen data to its rightful recipients.

  • explanation how they do it and not get noticed
• "Providers can prevent our attack absolutely 100 percent," Kapela said. "They simply don't because it takes work, and to do sufficient filtering to prevent these kinds of attacks on a global scale is cost prohibitive."

  • RA

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• print it remotely, and have it delivered to your house in just 10 days, even without knowing any 3D software
• Shapeways is a spin-off from Philips' Lifestyle Incubator. On one side, it's a website where you can upload your 3D models—which can even have joins—or use an online 3D creator with access to everyday models. The online 3D creator is extremely easy to use, so anyone can modify them without any technical or product design knowledge.
• Advanced users to access to 3D packages can upload any model they can imagine in a 3D standard format, like STL, Collada or X3D.

  • RA!!!
• On the other side, there are different types of rapid prototyping machines that can create that model using a variety of materials, from nylon to plastic composites, each with different properties
• Once you select the material and submit your model to 3D printer, you will get it in your hands in 10 days, with an average cost of $50 to $150, including shipping.
• While the system is not perfect yet, there's no color yet and you can get different textures for the surfaces, the start is very promising and the possibilities are endless.
• There are loads of other companies out there doing this. Here in Europe I use Materialise (materialise.com). They're able to print in all sorts of great materials. In the US, I've used RedeyeRPM before. Typically these places just require an .STL file (which can be exported from any 3D CAD program, it's just your design replicated using a triangular mesh).

  • RA!!!

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• Intelligent dashboards are quickly becoming the major way in which people track and manage carbon footprints and environmental impacts. From home energy use to businesses carbon output, all the way up to the green-mindedness of a city, a state, or a country, we are beginning to use dashboards as an effective way to know where we stand.
• The system shows a homeowner what energy resources they're consuming, how much, the cost, and how to cut down. But homes are just the beginning.
• Highlighted was the fact that energy monitoring is a must-have technology if we are to make progress.
• Leading the workshop was Gil Friend (in the above photo) is the President & CEO of Natural Logic, which has partnered with Sun Systems to create OpenEco.org, an information-sharing community for environmentally-minded businesses

  • names of people, companies
• And the key ingredient to making dashboards really work is tapping into human competitiveness.

  • RA

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• The overall goal of Gears is to bestow upon web applications much of the same functionality enjoyed by desktop apps.
• The overall goal of Gears is to bestow upon web applications much of the same functionality enjoyed by desktop apps. And it’s doing so through a browser extension that can be installed for a range of browsers (Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer) on a range of operating systems (Windows, Windows Mobile, Mac OS, and Linux).
• The long-term consequence of this technology is clear: as browsers become more and more powerful with the assistance of initiatives like Gears, there become fewer and fewer reasons to install and run desktop applications

  • !
• But before that can happen, Gears and similar technologies need to truly enable desktop-like functionality within the browser (or more accurately, they need to enable desktop-like functionality for web applications that traditionally operate only within the browser).
• Client-side webpage serving - Gears can essentially turn your computer into a server of webpages and other flat data files for when regular web servers can’t be reached.
• Desktop shortcuts - For web apps to act like desktop apps, they need to open like them, too. So Gears makes it easier for developers to place shortcut icons on the desktop that users can use to open web apps with the standard double click.
• With Gears, it’s possible for users to select multiple files at a time and batch upload them, saving you time and tediousness.
• Geolocation - For mobile devices that can determine the user’s current location, Gears makes this geolocation information available to applications running within the browser.
• Permission to access a user’s position must be granted through a special dialog, preventing unwanted snooping.
• With the so-called “WorkerPool” API, time-intensive processes can run in the background where they won’t slow down your general experience. The result: web apps feel more snappy because they don’t get bogged down as often.
• Progress bars
• File resumption
• On-screen notifications
• In the long run, we might see support for complex 3D graphics that take full advantage of your computer’s graphics card. Upload functionality could get integrated into the menus that pop up when you right click on files. And web apps could get loaded at startup or triggered in any number of other ways throughout your computer’s operating system (and its native desktop applications).

  • future posibilities

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• Matching living things to their names is so notoriously difficult that the problem itself has been given a name: the taxonomic impediment. With insects, the taxonomic impediment is severe. Insects are the glue that holds the web of land-based life together; they are pollinators, soil aerators, and a major source of food. Most of them are as mysterious as extraterrestrials. More than 90 percent of insects, tens of millions of species, have never been described.

  • !
• Insect people were using the back end of a mitochondrial gene known as CO1 to help identify specimens, marine invertebrate people liked the front end, and vertebrate zoologists used a different mitochondrial gene altogether. Hebert's idea was that, out of a hodgepodge of related techniques, he could build a simple, universal identification system — assuming, that is, the same small piece of mitochondrial DNA worked reliably for all the animals in the world.
• In January 2003, Hebert published a paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society in which he claimed his technique could solve the taxonomic impediment.
• As a remedy, Hebert set out his own method of identifying animals through a small, standard sequence of DNA; he shared his data about Canadian moths, and he added some additional data gleaned from GenBank, a publicly accessible repository of gene sequences.
• "We believe that a CO1 database can be developed within 20 years for 5-10 million animal species on the planet for approximately $1 billion," he wrote.
• Bacteria and viruses don't have mitochondria, but most other life does. The CO1 gene is nearly universal. If it worked on the animals he tested so far, it should work on everything.
• At the 2003 meeting, Janzen and Hebert made a deal. Hebert would provide discount barcode analysis for around $2 each. Janzen would use his unparalleled field research operation to test whether barcoding worked, and he would create a prototype system to inventory animal life. Each barcode would link to a reference specimen, with collection notes, scientific name where possible, and detailed ecological data. Nobody in the world had access to as many fresh, annotated specimens of tropical moths as Janzen did. For decades, he had been hacking his way through the taxonomic impediment.
• Barcoding works. When a named reference specimen exists in Hebert's database, the system can accept a bit of tissue, sequence the barcode region, and come up with a species name. Unfortunately, there are only about 47,000 barcodes that link directly to a name, because many of the barcoded specimens still lack a valid, traditional taxonomic identification. But Hebert no longer loses sleep over the taxonomic impediment.
• The barcode simplifies a naming process that, until now, has been horribly tangled. But on the other side of this simplification is not simplicity.

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• The internet is not just changing the way people live but altering the way our brains work with a neuroscientist arguing that this is an evolutionary change which will put the tech-savvy at the top of the new social order.
• Internet searching and text messaging has made brains more adept at filtering information and making snap decisions.
• internet addicts whose only friends are virtual and has sparked a dramatic rise in Attention Deficit Disorder diagnose
• “There is also the big problem of neglecting human contact skills and losing the ability to read emotional expressions and body language,” he said.

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