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  1. It’s nice when someone rationalizes failure without throwing dirt

    December 14, 2005 by Saar Drimer

    Ari Paparo‘s article explains the failure of Blink.com to become the del.icio.us of today back in 1999. He is lamenting now that Yahoo! purchased del.icio.us (for $25mil?) about what he and his colleagues failed to see back then. It is always refreshing to read people’s account of failure without them throwing dirt at the ones that succeeded… saying stuff like “we were wrong” instead of… “they are idiots with a lot of luck” or “we were visionaries before our time.” People who can do that, like Ari, are commendable…. I thank him for the insights.

    Category reviews, tech | Tags: | No Comments

  2. Reddit karma junky? link to Reddit praise, Dilbert, Paul Graham, Lisp…

    December 7, 2005 by Saar Drimer

    I like Reddit; I was skeptical at first, but it won me over. I don’t bother that much with slashdot or digg as much as I used to. The simple interface, no comments and up/down moderation is the right combination.

    Things have changed at Reddit in the last few months due to increase in users, — I’m not talking about the conversion to Python, a fact that I couldn’t care less about, but seemed to rock that little world for odd reasons — you can no longer get karma boosts from random news articles from BBCNEWS or CNN. This is a good thing, because if I want news articles from them I’ll go there directly, I don’t need Reddit as the middlesite.

    The flip side is that these days literally every post from some weblogs are being submitted and moderated up. Examples are Dilbert, Schneier, Paul Graham and freaknomics to name a few. These are the best blogs around, no doubt, and highly popular (yes, I know Graham’s not a proper weblog.) Do we need Reddit to keep linking to them? Once or twice is enough, the rest I can get directly if I like it. It’s clogging the nice interface. When I see articles from popular weblogs (some of which I read,) I moderate the link down regardless of how I liked them (Adams’ and Graham’s posts are consistently awesome, but I still moderate them down.)

    In short, I want Reddit to inform me of original content I wouldn’t otherwise get to. It does. Some of the time. Linking and encouraging links to highly popular weblogs/news outlets is not going in the right direction.

    The other thing that bothers me is the incestuous self feeding at Reddit. Think about slashdot linking to itself, or to an article saying how great it is. Legitimate, but unpleasing. I can’t figure why people moderate these posts skywards. Early on, I submitted “reddit.com” just to see what happens… people moderated me down to oblivion.

    So, are you a karma junky? Why worry about how the algorithm works? Link to Reddit praise, Dilbert, Paul Graham or Bush bashing.

    My current Karma is 230, I’m going to link to this post, I’ll update what that figure looks like after the hoards of Reddit zealots find this offensive or informative. Who knows. Who cares.

    Category rants, reviews | Tags: | 20 Comments

  3. book review: The Art of Deception

    October 17, 2005 by Saar Drimer

    Subtitle: Controlling the Human Element of Security.

    Kevin Mitnick is a talented social engineer with a frank admission that some of the myths regarding his activities are simply not true. “Social engineering is the practice of obtaining confidential information by manipulation of legitimate users.” In this (3 year old) book Mitnick outlines social engineering attacks and recommends how to help prevent them, or make them more difficult to execute. The book has some organizational flaws that make it both fascinating and boring.

    The Art of DeceptionThe first thing I learned when “they” tried to beat English writing into me in college was to define an audience. Mitnick hasn’t done that; his audience range from the casual reader through a security professional to a social engineer looking for new tricks. This book should have been split into two shorter volumes. One with a description and storytelling of social engineering attacks for the casual interested reader (fascinating) and the other for information security professionals who are looking for a guide on how to manage information vulnaribilities (boring.)

    So, if you got the time and interest in social engineering, I’d read the first 2/3 of this book. If you are someone looking for defining a security policy for your corporation, you’d probably be better off with a book dedicated solely to this topic (or read the whole book as a good addition.)

    If there is one sentence you should take from this book, this is it:

    “The truth is that there is no technology in the world that can prevent a social engineering attack.” p.245

    SaarStars: 2.5/5

    Authors: Kevin D. Mitnik and William L. Simone.
    ISBN: 076454280X
    Amazon, BN
    Kevin’s company: kevinmitnick.com

    Category reviews, security | Tags: | 1 Comment

  4. another interesting internet fad

    September 12, 2005 by Saar Drimer

    A 21 year old came up with a clever idea to cover his university fees and still be left with (lots of) change. The result is theMillion Dollar Homepage. This is another one of those internet fads that have an interest spike that quickly trails off. However, the original innovator gets to make a good sum of cash in the process, while the imitators don’t get to make much, if any, money. I doubt that the guy will be able to cash-in more than $20K or so before the interest dies out. (This prediction excludes the chance that goldenpalace.com would buy a banner size ad from him, of course; they are the ones who bought the 10 year old “virgin mary grilled cheese sandwich” and other crap on ebay for publicity.) Still, that’s good profit for a good idea like that. I wish him all the best and once again, disappointed that I did not think of it myself.

    (imitators here and here.)

    Maybe I should have my own “The $1000 For Your Name On The Thanks Section Of My PhD Thesis Homepage” to fund my studies. You think that would work?

    Category ideas, reviews | Tags: | 4 Comments

  5. review: give “reddit” a try

    August 27, 2005 by Saar Drimer

    Paul Graham, who writes magnificent articles IMO, ran his “summer founders program” this summer. He gathered people with ideas he thinks are worthy of investment and gave them seed money and an incubator style development setting (9 companies in all, IIRC.) I wished I could have attended it, but it didn’t work out. One of the resultant websites is Reddit. From their faq:

    A source for what’s new and popular on the web–customized for you. We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it. All of the content on reddit is from users who are rewarded for good submissions (and punished for bad ones) by their peers. You decide what appears on your front page and simultaneously, which submissions rise to fame or fall into obscurity.

    redditBasically, you submit links to what you deem interesting and others vote on them. If they like them you get more “karma” points, if they don’t you lose them.

    I gave it a try and was moderately successful until I thought it would be clever to submit “www.reddit.com” itself (hey, would anyone vote against it???) Other users didn’t think that was clever at all and I was demoted to the rank of scum; I guess people didn’t want to give me any shortcuts, fair enough . I then recovered some, but it still hurts my geek pride. (my user name is “elric” if you want to raise me to a very short-lived obscure stardom.) I am not sure how they prevent geeks with nothing else to care about from registering multiple accounts and self-promoting themselves. Maybe they don’t care because they rely on many concurrent users that would make that scheme ineffective. I really liked the simple layout of the webpage and that there are no ads. I think I’ll give it another serious look when there are more users participating since I think their overall algorithm and scheme relies on it; it will then be a bit more live and dynamic. Give it a look.

    All considered, it’s a nice concept to play with for a little while but I think I’ll stick with Slashdot for now. I did find some very interesting articles that I would not have otherwise, so that was refreshing.

    I wish the founders all the best with this interesting endeavour. Good job.

    Category reviews | Tags: | 1 Comment

  6. online airfare

    July 24, 2005 by Saar Drimer

    airplaneThe airline industry is very interesting. I’ve always found their structure, incentives and operation intruiging. The way they structure their airfares is a mystery. I mean, you can sit next someone on a plane who paid 10 times the amount you paid, for the same seat. You can also fly within Europe for 1 Euro with the cheap fare airlines.

    Over the years, I’ve purchased many tickets online. I found that when looking for the best fare, you must check with all online travel sites. There is no single site that has the best fares everytime. Sometimes I found the best fare on the airline’s site itself (United.com, round trip to London from San Francisco for $450 last summer.)

    The following are webpages I typically visit:

    QIXO is a little known “airfare search engine” that gets the best fares from many sites. I found great deals here and is where I go when I narrow down my travel times. It also works for travel not originating in the US. They charge $20 service fee.

    orbitz.com has two advantages: It can search +-3 days and mix and match airlines for your route which is often convinient. However, the trip must originate in the US.

    travelocity.com/yahoo travel has a flexible date search that is very good if well, you are flexible on the dates.

    expedia.com, cheaptickets.com and the others have nothing special about them, but are required when you are airfare hunting (for my next trip, I found the ticket on expedia.)

    ryanair.com and easyjet.com are the cheap airlines of Europe. They fly to main cities, but to the more remote airports than the main hubs. Airports like London Stansted, Oslo Torp and Frankfurn Hahn are 2-3 hour bus ride from the city centers and main airports.

    Category personal, reviews | Tags: | 1 Comment

  7. Virtual Network Computing

    July 21, 2005 by Saar Drimer

    Virtual Network Computing (VNC) is one of the most powerful tools in my arsenal. Simply put, it lets you control another computer remotely. It is fast, nimble and intuitive to use. I often find myself “revealing” this tool to coworkers and friends in order to make their life easier by helping them remotely connect to their home computer, not to go to the lab for every little click and even work from home.

    BarcroftAt Xilinx, I developed and ran the Rosetta experiment. This experiment measured the frequency of FPGA configuration bit flips caused by ambient radiation. These occurances are called “Single Event Upsets,” or SEUs. The experiments ran remotely 24×7 at various elevations: San Jose (California,) Albuquerque (New Mexico,) Mauna Kea (Hawaii) and Barcroft Station (California) which is part of the White Mountain Research Station near Bishop. These many experiments were all in the network (some using VPN) and were controlled using VNC from my cubicle desktop; I was able to do almost anything from my cube (unless the network was down.) I designed the experiments to be nearly autonomous, emailing me when any problem occurred and keeping meticulous logs for analysis. This was a great project to develop.

    Our group’s lab was a 5 minute walk away, and often it became tedious to do it hundreds of times a day. At the beginning of an experiment I installed VNC on the lab machine and was able to run or monitor most of the activity from my desktop once the experiment was setup. Adding the powerful capabilities of ChipScope on-chip logic analyzer made it even better.

    Many versions of VNC are available, such as RealVNC, TightVNC, UltraVNC and more. The basic editions are free.

    Category reviews, tech | Tags: | 1 Comment

  8. unintended consequences of “matching technologies”

    July 10, 2005 by Saar Drimer

    A couple of good friends are getting married next week. They met through match.com nearly a year an a half ago. We discussed the success stories these dating services have on their webpage. Some stories tell of couples getting hitched within a month or two and swear that they have found the love of their lives. Alright, maybe. The first few months of a relationship are always the most exciting. However, if you get married during that time it is most likely a result of the daze induced by the prospect of true love. No one should be making life altering decisions under these circumstances. Yet, people have been doing that since before the dating website boom.

    The ultimate goal of these services is to get people married. The more marriages, the better the supposed “matching technology” is. eHarmony.com has been pushing their “Compatibility Matching SystemTM” pretty hard lately. However, my intuition tells me that all told, they have quite a significant contribution to the eventual divorce of these couples.

    Let me explain. People have a tendency to believe marketing hype. It should be expected that fresh and madly in love couples will believe that the unbeatable matching “technology” can not possibly be wrong in their case. After all, the numerous testimonials prove it to be extremely effective. This extra (and mostly false, IMO) confidence will expedite their decision to get married where otherwise they would have waited and perhaps concluded that they might not be perfect for each other after all. I did not do a thorough analysis by any means, but my guess is that overall these “technologies” increase the percentage of failed marriages by providing a false sense of confidence at the initial stages of the relationship.

    Oh, and another thing…
    Shortly after spending $30k on a wedding, the previously “inseparable” couple decides that marriage wasn’t such a great idea and get divorced. Now separated, they never bothered to delete or edit the raving testimonial on getmarriedfast.com; there, they will forever be a success story of the unbeatable “marriage4sure technologyTM.”

    Category rants, reviews, tech | Tags: | No Comments

  9. google toolbar for firefox

    July 7, 2005 by Saar Drimer

    Through /. I was informed that google released it’s toolbar for firefox. Fine, no reason to get excited. Or is there?

    Well, there is for me because I found how it is going to make my life a whole lot more convenient: It can spell check forms. It will also give you suggestions for correction (in 10 languages!) in a very user friendly manner.

    This means that when I write new posts in WordPress, I can spellcheck them right away in the edit window. Previously, I cut+paste the post to my mailer, spelled checked and cut+paste it back to the edit form.

    (I’ve used the toolbar back in the IE days, so I am not sure of this feature is totally new to this version or not; but it is to me.)

    Category reviews, tech | Tags: | 1 Comment

  10. book review: Freakonomics

    July 7, 2005 by Saar Drimer

    freakonomicsThere are currently 221 reviews on amazon for this book, so I won’t attempt at a long winded one.

    This book was a joy to read; light, fun and very interesting. It was clearly written to be a best seller. It lively reports the conclusions of the authors after analysis of data collected by various agencies and organizations. Questions such as do parents really matter, why real-estate agents sell their own house for more than they sell yours, is there cheating in Japanese sumo wrestling and why drug dealers live with their moms are answered. One chapter explains why legalize abortions led to drastic crime drop during the 90′s. The answers are purely derived from database analysis.

    The authors encourage the readers to ask question and try to figure our the answers, both based on the stimulus from this book. What they fail to mention, is that data mining is typically boring, tedious, hard and often inconclusive; far from glamorous. But that would have distracted from their enthusiastic portrayal of Levitt’s profession, economics, and that is perfectly legitimate.

    I often evaluate books by their index. This book’s is pretty good, although “Israel,” for example, appears several times in the book, but does not in the index. So I’d give it an “index rating” of 4/5.

    Other than that, it would be nice if the book was double in length; I had appetite for more.

    SaarStars: 4.5/5

    Authors: Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner.
    ISBN: 006073132X
    Amazon, BN
    website: freakonomics.com

    Category reviews | Tags: | 3 Comments

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