LookIt

Chuq undershoots

In this mostly-good article about how to create an application that competes with email, Chuq says "What is email? It is:

1. A way to move a message from a sender to a recipient
2. A place to store that message pending delivery (and for long-term storage)
3. A way to get that message to a recipient."

I kind of agree, but have significant changes to all three. It is:

1. A way to move a message from a sender to one or more recipients
2. A method to (a) store that message pending delivery and (b) tell the sender if the message didn't get delivered
3. One or more ways to get that message to a recipient for viewing and long-term storage

Update: Tony Finch sent me a much more succinct definition that also encompasses something both Chuq and I missed: "A way to move a message from a sender to one or more recipients without any prior arrangements".

New factoring record achieved

The technical description is here, and the first (very) non-technical description is here. Basically, they factored a 1039-bit "special" number with a great deal of effort. The specialness of the number means that it is much easier to factor than, say, a typical 1024-bit RSA key. However, Arjen Lenstra strongly hints that there some advances have been made to make the factoring of non-special of this size more realistic in the not-distant future.

Cryptographers (well, mathematical cryptographers) are getting more creative in their attacks, with good results. This new record is a good indicator that 1024-bit RSA keys will probably be insufficient for protecting valuable data in coming years. For now, attacking 1024-bit RSA keys is still terribly expensive for any criminal relative to the value that can possibly be received for a broken key pair. As the technical article shows, even if breaking an non-special key costs the same as breaking this special key, it is still prohibitively expensive. Of course, the cost of such an attack will go down every year as the cost of CPU cycles and the cost of RAM goes down. For almost any application, there is little reason not to start using 2048-bit keys (or elliptic curve cryptography) when convenient in the next few years.

Microsoft and virtualization

People laughed when Apple postponed the next version of OS X because Apple had allocated many of the same resources to getting the iPhone out. It will be interesting to see how many people laugh when they see how few features Viridian (Windows Server virtualization), Microsoft's answer to VMware's and Xen's virtualization products, will have when it is released later this year.

In Microsoft's Viridian features update, there is lots of breathless touting of features that VMWare has had for a long time. But then there's the kicker: they are "postponing... to a future release of Windows Server virtualization" two features that many / most IT departments who are using VMWare or Xen have come reliant on, namely live migration and dynamic adding of server resources like storage, networking, and memory.

It is sad that Microsoft thinks that any significant percentage of their customer base will want to use technology that is far inferior to Microsoft's competition, particularly when that inferiority comes at the expense of runtime flexibility, one of the main features for virtualization. Mike Neil, the general manager for Microsoft's virtualization strategy, says "I believe Windows Server virtualization will be appealing for the core virtualization scenarios, from the mid-market and large organizations to the enterprise. Especially for mid-market customers, they have the greatest need for a virtualization solution that is reliable, offers integrated management tools, has world class technical support, and allows employees and partners to leverage their existing skill sets." Blah blah blah. It doesn't have the best features of its competitors, and there is not specific timetable for those features to be added.

I'm sure that some of Microsoft customers will use Windows Server virtualization, but I'm also quite sure that the IT staff people maintaining those systems will be tearing their hair out when they want to do something as simple as adding a virtual hard drive or virtual RAM to a running system without rebooting the virtual server. When they realize that they can't expand their hardware easily by adding additional physical computers when needed, the screaming will be even louder.

What is life?

The Encyclopedia of Life sounds promising (although Ars Technica asks some good questions about the future of its funding and quality of its data sources). None of the gushing web coverage I have seen has hit on the hardest question for the EoL: what gets put in and what gets excluded? For the past 50 years or so, the biology community keeps getting close to the edges of what might be considered "life" and keeps not coming up a black-and-white definition. The EoL will need one.

It will also be interesting to see how the EoL deals with non-physical features of the topics it covers. For example, which species get a "yes" and which get a "no" for the attribute "sentient"? What about "conscious"? I suspect that these will be too controversial for consideration.

More Boston punk / new wave / hard core

Bless Xeni at BoingBoing: She found a great site with lots of well-produced videos from the Boston club scene around 1980. Many of these were national acts coming through Boston, many are Boston bands.

As I have said previously, Human Sexual Response was one of my faves from the era. The video of "Pound" has all the effects magic of the era. (A warning on sexual nature of the lyrics: "pound" is used here as a verb, not a unit of measurement or an animal shelter.) There are other great HSR videos, including "Andy Fell", which mixes undergraduate angst and deep religious questions in a very danceable tune.

Other great videos of Boston bands from the site include the Lyres doing "Don't Give It Up Now", Le Peste doing "Better Off Dead", Robin Lane and the Chartbusters doing their hit "I Don't Want to Know" (at the Rat, the worst/best dive club in town), Pastiche doing "Terminal Barbershop" (trivia on trivia: the song is about a barbershop of the same name that was two blocks from my dorm at MIT). There's lots of great non-Boston content there as well.

Journler is saving my butt

I am a new convert to Journler for the Mac. It's one of those applications that I wish I had discovered long ago. I see reviews for people using it for GTD (Getting Things Done), but I'm just using it to stop me from using 3x5 pieces of paper that I lose and misfile and can't read even if I find them because my handwriting is getting worse.

Basically, it is an organized drop box for notes, thoughts, information and so on. The organizational part is completely slick and intuitive (tags and categories), and even if it wasn't, the search function works just like you would want it to. The "and so on" part is very nice too: you can store links and documents in your notes, and the integration of those works fine. They have a quite useful support forum.

I can read my notes again. I can find the note that has the ifconfig command I need only once a year. I can see all the notes on a topic in one place. I doubt I will ever use it to journal or brainstorm or Get Things Done or all those other things; no problem there.

Journler is a competitor to Yojimbo, which I almost used but found Journler just before my Yojimbo trial period was up. I am much happier with Journler (even though I very much like the folks at Bare Bones).

Journler is free for personal use (donation requested and, in my case, sent); it's $25 for purchase, which is very reasonable for such a useful program.

Can anyone really make money on stuff like this?

I need to learn a bit about RELAX schemas for XML, so I asked the all-knowing Google. The first hit for me was this site, which probably had a good article on the topic at one time, but the domain owners let their registration expire. Now there is a page which is obviously gibberish: "Shop and compare deals on relax schema at MonsterMarketplace". Note that this isn't one of those dumb ads on the Google page (such as when you search for "slaves" and someone tells you that you can buy them at eBay): it is the top hit in the search results.

Google needs a "report as wrong" button on the top responses on the results page similar to the "report spam" buttons in email clients.

Internationalizing @

Patrik beat me to this, but only because he lives in an earlier time zone. To me, the interesting part of this is not the new character that this company created for their business, it is the language bits behind it. In Danish, "aa" is sometimes but not always spelled as "å". From their web site, you can see that this company's name starts with "Aa", not "Å". It seems like they decided to use the ring over the @ to emphasize their Internetiness (order groceries from the web!) and their Danishness.