Global Nerdy

For a web developer, “I’m going to RailsConf!” has the same excitement behind it as the old exclamation “I’m going to Disneyland!”. RailsConf 2006 sold out in only a couple of days, and the official Rails blog reports that even with double the capacity, RailsConf 2007 sold about one-third of its registrations mere hours after registration opened.

This year’s RailsConf takes place at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon from May 17th through 20th. The main conference takes place on the 18th through 20th with additional tutorial sessions taking place on the 17th. I’ll be there for the whole thing: not just the main conference, but the all-day Rails Guidebook Tutorial session on the 17th, whose proceeds will go to the charity of my choice (I picked Second Harvest).

I remember the slightly muted applause during the opening keynote of RailConf 2006 when they announced that RailsConf 2007 would organized by O’Reilly. There were nervous sideways glances everywhere, and I remember saying “I think the admission price just tripled” to the guy beside me. Thankfully, this is going to be one of the less expensive O’Reilly conferences — while the registration fee isn’t as low as RailsConf 2006’s $400, you can get an early bird registration price of $695 for the main conference. It’s much cheaper than other O’Reilly conferences (ETech will set you back about $1200 for just the conference sessions only) and an ultra-bargoon when compared to JavaOne’s $2500 (plus, it’s Java. You’d have to pay me a registration fee to attend).

This is the developer conference that I’ve been looking forward to this year. If you’re thinking about registering, think fast — this one’s going to sell out very soon.

Here’s a Japanese Mac magazine cover illustration that I don’t think the MacAddict design team would never consider, courtesy of my friend Miss Fipi Lele:

It might be too little, too late, but Chris Pirillo’s got an offer that Microsoft might want to consider: give him a million dollars, and he’ll market Vista. He writes:

You’ve got your work cut out for you with a mindnumbingly lackluster launch – and the remainder of your media blitz needs to be coherent. You need to begin illustrating Vista’s biggest strengths and benefits:

• The new Start Menu can help you find things faster
• Fast USB sticks can speed up your system instantly
• Program-independent volume control will keep your sounds in check
• The Windows Explorer exposes tons of file metadata
• Parental controls will keep Mom and Dad happy
• Checking for updates and problem solutions has never been easier
• Guided Help takes interactive learning to the next level
• Both wired and wireless network management are smarter
• There’s an infinitely more stable video driver model in place
• Hardware-accelerated eye candy on the desktop is awesome

That’s a decent list: a mix of geek- and layperson-friendly stuff. I’ll have to look at some of those features as I do my “Tainted Vista Reviews”.

I’m not so sure about the wireless network management being “smarter” — when I take the Ferrari laptop home from work and fire it up, it takes much longer than my PowerBook for it to realize that I’ve changed locations and that different wireless nets are available. Half the time, I have to tell Vista to join my home network, while the Mac silently does it.

Link

When I have a little more time, I’m going to have to try this: there’s an interesting remote exploit for Windows Vista if the user has a microphone, decent speakers and speech recognition activated. The trick is to con the user into allowing the machine to play a sound file of spoken commands, such as telling the computer to shut down or erase all files in the Documents folder and then empty the Recycling bin.

This exploit isn’t likely to affect many people, as it requires a very specific set of circumstances. As for conning the user into playing a sound file, it’s easier than you think. Many people leave their browsers open to a web page while they run off to do other things. It’s possible to construct a page that waits for a specified period of time — perhaps a half-hour, to ensure that it’s likely that the computer is unattended — and then have it play the malicious command after the waiting period has elapsed.

This isn’t a new trick, either: I got my first Mac — a Quadra 660AV, which had out-of-the-box speech recognition capability — to play back recording of me giving it commands. If you’ve seen Sneakers, you might remember the “My voice is my passport” bit. Any of you who’ve read Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid might be reminded of how he demonstrated a computer science concept called the Halting Problem through the “This record is unplayable on record player X” story.

Links:

• Vista Speech Command exposes remote exploit
• Microsoft confirms Vista Speech Recognition remote execution flaw
• Issue regarding Windows Vista Speech Recognition

I had no idea Getty Images had a “socially awkward” set of stock photos.

[via Reddit] “Internet dating,” said one rather cynical programmer with whom I am acquainted, “is a web of lies and obesity.”

And to a certain extent, he’s right. According to a recent article in Scientific American titled The Truth About Online Dating, lies abound, from little white lies such as overreporting your height by an inch or underreporting your weight by a few pounds to using a picture of someone else in your profile (people I know have been lied to in both these ways).

One study cited in the article says that women underreport their weight by an average of 5 pounds in their online dating profiles in their 20s, but women in their 40s are pushing the believability envelope: on average, they shave 19 pounds off their profile.

Just as real-world daters have developed mate-attracting tactics — the Wonderbra, expensive clothes, driving a fancy car, “Axe” body spray — online daters have done the same. They realize, whether they know anything about databases, that combing through an online dating site is essentially the repeated execution of SQL along the lines of:

SELECT * FROM people WHERE AGE [ is between 24 and 35 ] AND WEIGHT [ is somewhere in the range of the female doctors from "Grey's Anatomy" ] AND interests INCLUDE....

Some daters specifically lie when entering data used for search criteria (such as age and weight) and tell the truth in the “tell us a little bit about yourself” section. They even admit the reason for the deception: if they didn’t lie about their attributes, they’d never end up in anyone’s search results.

Of course a little deception is to be expected — it’s part of any relationship, whether it started in “real life” or online. After all, little white lies keep society from seizing up completely:

Comic from Overcompensating for September 29, 2004. Click the comic to see it on its original page.

There’s also the matter that people generally have two notions of themselves — an “ideal self” and a “real self”, who’s just a temporary stop on the way to the ideal, if they could only get the time/money/whatever to bridge that gap.

The article calls into question the effectiveness of “scientific” personality tests and profiling quizzes. The author, who has 30 years of test research and 15 years of test design under his belt, expresses doubt that any of these tests are more effective at matching you with your soul mate than doing so “the old-fashioned way. He writes that for all their claims to being scientific, none of their tests have been subject to any serious peer review in a journal.

Also covered in the article are the discrepancy between the high levels of reported user satisfaction in dating sites’ advertising versus the much lower levels reported in surveys, the Pew Internet and American Life study in which 66% of internet users feel that internet dating is a dangerous activity and the difference between reported membership and actual paying members.

Still, as more aspects of our lives go online, internet dating is expected to remain a growing phenomenon. Any of you who plan to develop a dating site — or even social software — should take a look at the article; there are some interesting insights that you’ll have to factor into your designs.

Link

Over at the ToRANTs blog, there’s an article that looks at Apple’s iTunes Store’s environmental impact. In the article, authour “chiggs” writes that the current rate of 5 million songs sold via iTunes per day is the equivalent of selling 416,000 CDs daily. “By buying your music from the Apple Store,” writes “chiggs”, “you are helping to prevent a stack of CD’s (in their jewel cases) 2.6 miles high from having to be manufactured PER DAY.” The ensuing discussion in the commentshas a back-and-forth over other aspects of iTunes’ environmental footprint, including the electricity consumed by a computer rather than a CD player, the environmental impact of discarded iPods, and so on.

Reading the article, I was reminded of another piece whose author suggested that Google could save the consumption of 3000 megawatt-hours a year by simply changing the background colour of their pages from white to black. The reasoning: an all-black page consumes about 15 watts less than an all-white one. Multiply by the 200 million queries Google gets daily and assuming an averageof 10 seconds of viewing results, and you get 550,000 hours’ worth of Google viewing on desktops worldwide. A fifteen-watt savings on each monitor makes for 8.3 megawatt-hours saved every day, or about 3000 megawatt-hours saved every year.

BBSpot — a site that you might want to think of as The Onion for nerds — has posted a Windows Vista Upgrade Decision Flowchart, a small portion of which appears in the picture above. While it’s really meant to be a humour piece, the flowchart’s advice is generally valid:

• If your machine is running something that predates Windows 2000, the best way to upgrade to Vista is to buy a new computer with Vista pre-installed.
• If your machine runs Windows 2000 or XP:
  • If it’s an office machine, wait until Service Pack 1 is released before upgrading.
  • If it’s a home machine:
    • If someone else maintains it, ask that person’s opinion.
    • If you maintain it and have money to burn, go ahead an upgrade to Vista.
• If you’re running Mac OS X or Linux, relax.

The flowchart is available in both JPEG and PDF formats.