My ETech Presentation

I finally have some time to write about the presentation I helped give at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference this week. I spoke about Disney’s use of RSS, weblogs, and wikis in the workplace.
To be honest, I was a little concerned before I spoke that the crowd would think what we had done was simple and not ’emerging’. I mean RSS and weblogs are nothing new to the people that attend the ETech conference.
Happily, everyone seemed duly impressed and we felt that our talk was worthwhile and of some benefit to others. Many people wrote about the talk. As asmall sampling, take a look at Ross Mayfield’s notes (with a TON of trackbacks), Cory Doctorow’s notes, group notes taken in the session via Hydra, a person at edweblogs.org that gets my message, good insight from Tim Bishop, and more if you want to google or technorati them up.
Before the talk, we discussed if anything was going to raise eyebrows, and we agreed that the RSS vs. Atom thing would probably do so. While many see the choices as between RSS and Atom, we tend to see it as a single choice for the use of syndication. Syndication of information is the real change we are seeing, not the specific flavor. RSS works and has a wide variety of uses. Atom promises to make ingest & reuse of content even simpler. Both will probably have place within Disney.
I am a bit interested in the stats behind the number of RSS aggregators shipped. With Disney’s revealing that the our Motion product is really a RSS aggregator in over two million computers, it’s got to be one of the most widely shipped ones out there.
The talk was fun and I enjoyed it. I guess I better figure out something else cool to work on if I ever want to speak again.

Sean Bonner

I’m back home from ETech and there’s enough calm for me to blog a bit. I’ll make several entries as I can on various topics.
I’ve known for a while that I was going to ETech, since I was giving a presentation. A few weeks ago, one of the local LA bloggers I know, Sean Bonner, posted a note saying he was thinking of going down for the show. Besides running a successful art gallery, SixSpace, he also is part of the teams running blogging.la and weblogsinc.com. He’s probably got a dozen more weblogs, but then again, he has no children to distract him.
I digress. We chatted in email and agreed to drive down together. It’s be nice to have a extra friendly face at the big scary conference. I had met Sean once before in meatspace at a wireless meeting and exchanged a bit of email ever since.
So Sunday arrives and he gets dropped off at my house for the drive. At the last minute I learned that he was a vegan. Currently I’m on the Atkins diet, meaning I eat a LOT of meat. He’s an artist, I’m an engineer. I was wondering how we were going to get along.
Well, we got along great. We chatted the whole way down and it was good to have a partner during the conference to check in with. We talked aobut everything under the sun and compared notes on events that we were both at, but saw in different ways.
The social dynamics of the blogosphere at the conference were of constant amusement to us. We kept watching how people would orbit the A-list bloggers is some attempt to grab a little meatspace google juice from these people. You could do a whole paper on the hierarchy of the blogosphere at conferences. The worlds colliding of the various blogging cliques was funny.
Sean is great guy and his laidback, easy going exterior hides his mischevious interior. It’s a great combo. Sitting quietly in the lounge, Sean would systematically bluejack every bluetooth device in the room. His IRC comments were hilarious and he often had me laughing out loud in sessions, when I was supposed to be paying attention.
So, in lieu of a viable online reputation system, Sean gets the Cruft Seal of Approval.

Wireless security on the road

I’m heading down to a conference where pretty much everyone will be using wifi to stay connected to the net. It’s simple because the wifi access points are open and you can easily connect.
The problem is that pretty much anyone can see what you are doing, except if you take special precautions. For the most part, transmission is in the clear and an eavesdropper can see what you type. That includes user names, passwords, and anything else you do online.
I’ve been to a few conferences with many people using wifi on open access points and it’s amazing what you can see. Wifi sniffers are easy to find and they show everything flying by in the airwaves. An unscrupulous person could have dozens of usernames and passwords in a couple minutes.


There are several solutions to protect yourself. If you have some tech saavy you can ensure you are only using secure email and SSL secured web sites, but for most of us, this is a pain.
The simplest solution is to use a Virtual Private Network, commonly called a VPN. A VPN is a way to tunnel your internet traffic through a secure pipeline that eavesdroppers can’t see through. VPNs are typically used by businesses to ensure that their networks are secure from snooping when staff connect to them via modems or wifi.

Once your data is in a secure tunnel, you can do whatever you want and people can’t intercept your data.
Again, the super tech saavy, can build their own VPN and proxy servers to allow themselves to surf securely. I tried to do it myself, and I decided it was a huge pain in the ass.
Luckily for me I found a service that provides me with a VPN and secure access for a fairly inexpensive rate. HotSpotVPN is made for people that want to attach to open wifi hotspots but be secure. I gave the service a try and it seems to work well. Speed is the real key to pulling this off. To do the encryption and proxy redirection uses resources and you usually see the impact as reduced effective bandwidth.

Here’s the speed of the VPN sitting the dining room connecting via 802.11b to my DSL line. Pretty good. I wouldn’t want to move gigabytes of data, but great for email, surfing, and blogging.

This is the speed of my wifi access without the VPN. Almost three times as fast. This will be the first time I’m using HotSpotVPN and will be able to give a better report on performance in a few days.
I think it’s a reasonable compromise. A drop in speed to protect my usernames and password from flying around in the open.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

Loading Windows XP on a SATA drive

Just in case anyone else has this problem and doesn’t want to spend an hour figuring it out…
If you are loading Windows XP onto a computer with a serial ATA (SATA) hard drive, you will have to manually load the SATA drivers.
As suggested on this usenet post, you need to put the drivers on a floppy disk.
Copy the drivers from motherboard support CD *\DriverDisk\SATA\*.* into root directory of floppy disk. (i.e. root directory of floppy disk should contain \pide and \sata folders, txtsetup.oem, etc. files.)
Then, boot system by Windows XP installation CD, when the message “Press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver” shows up, press “F6”. Then, press “S” to specify additional device when next screen pops up. Put the driver floppy disk you made in and press enter to continue. If the floppy disk is made successfully, the installation program will ask for selecting driver. Please then select “VIA Serial ATA RAID Controller(Windows XP)”.) After SATA driver loaded and Windows XP can recognize the SATA HDD, you can continue to install Windows XP as usual.
This should work fine if you have the drivers on a CD somewhere.
Here’s what not to do:
1) Pull floppy drive from another computer
2) Get lazy and not install the floppy, simply hang it by cables on the side of computer
3) After using floppy, allow the exposed circuitboard to touch the case
4) Watch smoke come from the floppy drive since the power was shorted out
5) Toss floppy drive in the trash





Camera Phone Fun

As I mentioned before, I picked up a Nokia 3650 phone and have been running around taking pictures.
Here’s one I took today on my way to a meeting at work:


The phone has so many functions, I still haven’t figured out how to do one tenth of what it can do.
In other news, I bought the full set of Giant Robot DVDs.

For those that don’t know, Johnny Sokko and Giant Robot is a series from Japan in the late 60s that was dubbed into English and shown in the US in the 70s, when I was a young boy.
My brother and I loved Giant Robot because he was controlled by the young boy, Johnny Sokko. We could easily imagine ourselves being Johnny and would often act out Giant Robots movements.

I played the first episode for the girls yesterday and they loved it. Thanks to the interent, almost anything from my memory is instantly available to me.

Late night update

Sleep beckons…
For the Superbowl, we made yet another Turducken.


Here is demonstrate the layered Turducken

The stuffing wasn’t quite as tasty this year, but it was still enjoyable.
On Saturday I switched Michele and I over to T-mobile and we both picked up new Nokia 3650 phones.
We are still learning how to program and use them, but soon enough I will have some sort of moblog/photoblog going. All in due time.