Signs, almost, of spring

left, fall. right, almost spring.

Q: How do you know it’s almost spring in Massachusetts? A: There’s a lot of sunlight on the latest six inches of snow, and it’s heavy and wet instead of light and fluffy.

Lisa’s parents came up this weekend for the flower show, and got to enjoy another heavy snowfall while they were here. But the snow stopped overnight, and when I took the dogs outside this morning, it looked like the whole street had burst into bloom with a profusion of white flowers. Comparing the trees behind the house this morning to the same trees this fall, I’m not sure I don’t prefer the winter version; after all, I won’t have to rake those snowy “leaves,” even if getting the snow off the driveway strains a few muscles.

Followup: Smithsonian Global Sound

In January, I bitched about the fact that the pivotal Folkways recordings of world music and American folk were only available on MSN Music. Sometime last week (I don’t know when, I’m behind in my posts), the Smithsonian partially redressed that market inefficiency by opening Smithsonian Global Sound, their own online music store featuring $.99/track downloads (though some longer tracks are more expensive), a wide catalog of field and folk recordings, and a choice of two DRM-free formats—MP3 and FLAC. That’s right, you can buy lossless recordings from the store. Add downloadable liner notes and we’re all in business.

I do have one criticism of the store. This is a good place to buy a la carte from the massive Smithsonian archives, but not a good place to buy albums. There doesn’t seem to be a per-album price, meaning that if you find an album with 20 tracks, you’ll pay 20 dollars. And I think “by the album” is the way that most people will want to explore this music. After all, it’s not as though you’re coming to the Smithsonian looking for “hot singles.” Another, lesser critique: there is no persistent “wish list”—your shopping cart is emptied when you leave your session and there is no other way short of managing a list offline to keep track of songs that you might want to buy at another time.

What’s confusing about all of this is the supposedly exclusive agreement that MSN Music had to sell this music through September of this year, according to the original New York Times article. It sure looks like the same catalog to me.

I’m not complaining, though. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some downloading to do.

Last HBS follow up, I swear: John Dvorak

Tech columnist John Dvorak weighed in yesterday on the ongoing MBA admissions brouhaha in his unofficial blog. His original post came down on the side of the “hackers”; I followed up in his comments to point to my post, and today he wrote the following:

OK after all my rants and various philosophical concepts the actual instructions for the student URL re-direction in the Harvard scandal is revealed here on the PowerYogi site. Reader/blogger Tim Jarrett sent me the link. Jarrett also takes a hard line approach to what I’d now call a script kiddy violation or simple curiosity. But, if indeed, there was a complex and dubious procedure then there may be some justification for complaint. In this case the indication is that the students should have known this was traceable. Making such an error shows bad judgement.

I still think the colleges should have sut up and not showboated and exposed the fact that they were using flawed software. And I’m still not convinced this can be considered “hacking” in any real sense. But I now retract my earlier comments and criticisms made today.

As Adam said in my comment threads, this whole thing has the makings of an excellent business school ethics case. There are so many dimensions, so much going on, that it’s impossible to take a hard line on it without looking at the facts.

I’m actually grateful to the folks who found the flaw and the lousy programmers at ApplyYourself, because I’ve had more honest and productive discussions about business and personal ethics and the Internet in the last four days than the last four years.

Microsoft ties the knot with Groove

My former employer purchased Groove today, making official what was already a very close working relationship. I’d like to be optimistic about what the acquisition will mean for the information worker part of Microsoft’s business.

But let’s look at the track record that the Information Worker business unit has in bringing innovative products into the Office mainstream. Live Meeting? Kind of integrated, still largely a standalone product, but it’s out there and fighting for market share with WebEx. PowerPoint? Visio? FrontPage? OK. All standalone apps, all acquired, that fill a niche in the information worker workspace.

But what about XDocs? This brave internal project came out of ashes of NetDocs as a “smart client alternative to Office.” Where is it now? InfoPath, which is being marketed primarily as a forms app.

Will Microsoft tap the benefits of Groove and make them available in a rich way throughout the desktop? Or will Groove just end up looking like the next version of SharePoint, which currently looks like the next version of a generic company intranet tool?

Excellent additional coverage from Robert Scoble, John Evdemon, Scott Rosenberg, Ross Mayfield, and Alex Barnett.

And incidentally: Alex points to Jef Raikes talking about a product announcement that I missed earlier this week, the launch of something called “Microsoft Office Communicator 2005.” Sounds interesting. Go try to find something about it on Microsoft’s Office site. Did you find it? Did you try searching? Did you try changing the search dropdown from “All Office Online” to “All Microsoft.com?” Ah, there we go. Hint to our friends on the Office web site: If you want to sell a product as part of the Office family, it would be a good idea to make it findable from the Office web page.

Chris Lydon gets a new gig

The Boston Globe says that Chris Lydon is returning to Boston airwaves with a new show, “Open Source,” designed to bridge talk radio and the blogosphere. (See Chris’s press release here). Sounds pretty good—and I smell a new podcast coming…

Interestingly, an article in the Globe today says some students at WUML, who will be co-producing the show, are a little upset that the school’s administration has put Lydon on their schedule—the students feel they’re losing control of their schedule. The administration says that Lydon will be helping to create a broadcast major. It sounds like a win-win for the school and Lydon, but I can definitely see how the students would feel marginalized in that discussion—especially since this isn’t the first time the school has taken air time for “adult-supervised” programming from the student DJs.

The FEC is full of FUD

Ars Technica: Followup: The FEC, FUD, and the blogpocalypse, Round II. Meant to post this yesterday as a followup to my earlier comments on the FEC’s commissioner. This is the other shoe, how it looks from the perspective of a Democrat, Ellen Weintraub, on the commission:

Reports of a Federal Election Commission plot to “crack down” on blogging and e-mail are wildly exaggerated. First of all, we’re not the speech police. We don’t tell private citizens what they can or cannot say, on the Internet or anywhere else. The FEC regulates campaign finance. There’s got to be some money involved, or it’s out of our jurisdiction.

Second, let’s get the facts straight. Congress, in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, limited how one can pay for communications that are coordinated with political campaigns, including any form of “general public political advertising.” The commission issued a regulation defining those communications to exempt anything transmitted over the Internet. A judge struck down that regulation as inconsistent with the law. So now we’re under a judicial mandate to consider whether anything short of a blanket exemption that will do. For example, can paid advertisements on the Web, when coordinated with a particular campaign, be considered an in-kind contribution to that campaign? Context is important, and the context here has everything to do with paid advertising, and nothing to do with individuals blogging and sending e-mails.

Third, anyone who says they know what this proposed regulation will address must be clairvoyant, because the commissioners have yet to consider even a draft of the document that will set out the scope of any such rule…

So that’s interesting. Going after bloggers isn’t an option, but going after paid advertising is. What about going after paid bloggers?

Enough winter.

We got about five additional inches of mixed snow and ice yesterday and last night. This was just after a day or two of warmer weather that allowed me to briefly glimpse my lawn again. Now I have to get the snowblower out one more time…

At least it’s just water coming from the sky, not ash. Even with all this snow, I’d much rather have sunny days like the one that we have today than the months of uninterrupted damp gloom that we had in Kirkland. Although by now we would have started to see our spring flowers… sigh.

The B-school admissions case: Sloan drops another shoe

Boston Globe: MIT says it won’t admit hackers. There have been a few developments since I wrote about this case yesterday, and this is the big one. There have also been some questions raised about a few points in the case. Philip Greenspun points out how ridiculous it is to call something this easy a “hack”—I agree. It’s more like an exploit. That doesn’t make it any more justifiable, of course. That’s maybe the hardest part of this case—where is the line?

As I wrote in response to a comment on yesterday’s entry, there is no hard and fast line on cases of unauthorized access like this, because I’m curious about how systems work too and have been known to tinker with URL strings. That’s why I looked at the “exploit” instructions before I made my judgment call. If it had been a simple matter of substituting a login ID and PIN into the URL string, I might have felt differently. The fact that a prospective user of this “exploit” would have to dig a hidden value out of the source of the form should have tipped off the prospect that “hey, maybe I shouldn’t do this.”

I want future Sloanies to be smart enough not only to apply an “exploit” like this, but to understand that there may be consequences if they do it.

HBS gets tough on ethics. Are they right?

Boston.com: Harvard rejects 119 accused of hacking. Following up the revelation that the third party company that manages online B-school apps got hacked, it looks like HBS (along with the Tepper School at Carnegie Mellon) is taking a hard line on admissions and blanket rejecting the 119 people whose admission files were hacked, while other B-schools (including Sloan) are taking a wait and see approach.

Does this mean that the other schools are soft on ethics? Maybe not, if the opposing perspectives in the article are correct:

Theoretically, at least, a hacker might have been a spouse or parent who had access to the password and personal identification numbers given to a business school applicant…

…[Cambridge Essay Service admissions consultant Sanford] Kreisberg said some applicants may had inadvertently tried to access the files, without realizing they were looking for confidential information, after they were e-mailed directions from other students who had copied them from the BusinessWeek message board.

It’s hard to tell from the articles, which don’t discuss the nature of the exploit. So let’s take a look. On the PowerYogi blog, the exact procedure used to do the hack is disclosed. Briefly, it appears that the hack relied (past tense, the info is no longer accessible) on a known URL that displays a dynamic page containing admission decision information, if any has been entered into the system. The parameters required to get the decision information are the applicant’s unique ID, apparently known as the AYID (or ApplyYourself ID) and a second ID number. The AYID is disclosed to the applicant on the URL for other pages that the applicant would normally visit. The second ID number can be discovered by viewing source on publicly accessible pages. Though the decision page is addressed via HTTPS, once you know the AYID and the secondary ID, you don’t need any other authentication information to access the page.

So the question is, could people have been tricked into looking at their records, as Kreisberg suggests? Answer: probably not. Following the directions to get the ID values should tip the applicant off that they’re going to see something they shouldn’t be seeing. And I don’t think it would be common for people to share out their user IDs and PINs for their online applications, so the odds of someone else checking your application status without your knowledge are pretty slim.

Bottom line: I think Sloan and the other business schools involved should take a hard line on its applicants’ files who were compromised as well.

And I think that all the schools involved should look at another vendor for online applications. ApplyYourself’s system doesn’t appear to meet even minimal standards for securing the sensitive information with which it is being entrusted. Hopefully Sloan CIO Al Essa is already looking closely at this situation.

In defense of plain ol’ SQL

Philip Greenspun Weblog: How long is the average Internet discussion forum posting?. I’m less interested in Philip’s answer than I am in the methodology: simple SQL select statements that give you very important product design data.

People talk about “data mining” and “business intelligence” as though they’re complicated, new skill sets, but really all you need sometimes to make the right call is a simple SQL query. And the right data set, of course…

Managing aggregator overlap

Brent Simmons talks about the issues with feed items that are about the same thing showing up in an RSS aggregator. I’m reposting the comment I made on his post here because I think managing the relationships between items is an important feature for RSS aggregators:

The ability to group feed items together based on what they link to is the only feature I miss in NNW from Dare Obasanjo’s RSS Bandit. It’s important for three reasons:

  1. It saves time. Some of the other comments cover this point [specifically, by grouping items that are about the same thing, you can read them all at once or just mark them all as read. Otherwise, you keep finding posts about the same thing all the way down your list of items.]
  2. It helps me follow conversations. Think of it as a client side version of Technorati–limited, of course, to the feeds I subscribe to.
  3. It aids in triangulation. I want to be able to quickly scan all the opinions of a new announcement, or quickly see the full original post that an item linked to so I can form my own opinion.

Maybe it’s not grouping, but some sort of optional “related items” UI that could show you items that link to the same things that are linked from the item you’re reading.

R.E.M.: Up (CD+DVD reissue)

rem post bill berry, photo by david belisle

When R.E.M. released Up in 1998, long time fans were polarized. Some, expecting the trademark R.E.M. sound, were surprised and disappointed by the drum machines and electronic textures. Others, aware of the band’s necessary change in direction following the departure of founding member and drummer Bill Berry, listened with an open ear. I fell somewhere in the middle: I thought there were some outstanding tracks but overall felt that the performances were tentative and uneven. Now Rhino has reissued the album in a new 5.1 DVD mix (along with all of R.E.M.’s other Warner Brothers output), and with a new mix and seven years in between, I’ve got a new perspective on the album. Up shows a band in transition, but much more solidly grounded in their old sound than it seemed at the time—and writing some of their finest songs of their entire career.

Up’s sequence is probably the least satisfying part of the album. Opening with “Airportman,” a buzzing, ambient track with no discernable lyrics, the track is both unapproachable and unmemorable—not a good omen. But from there the album scales some serious heights, particularly on “Hope” and “Walk Unafraid.” The former remains a spine-chilling portrait of mingled hope and fear in the face of some unspecified grave illness. The latter may be one of the top ten songs R.E.M. has ever written, as shown by their electrifying performances of it on tour in 2003. So what’s the problem? With “Walk Unafraid” as track 9 of 14, there are five lesser tracks between it and the end of the album. Anticlimactic, for sure.

I approached the reissue hoping that it would clean up some of the fuzzy production and allow for the sort of revelations that hearing the material live provided. I got some of those moments—but few. The band really was feeling their way through new musical styles, and no amount of sonic wizardry can keep layers of drum machines and keyboards from dragging down some of the songs (“Diminished”). However, “Airportman” gains an increased sense of presence and menace and “Walk Unafraid” sounds more vital. And “At My Most Beautiful” reclaims some of its promise as a Brian Wilsonesque sonic tapestry (though the deaf-in-one-ear Wilson would have preferred mono to the 5.1 mix)—in particular, a gorgeous cello line that’s buried in the stereo mix pops to the front on the 5.1 version. It’s interesting that Elliott Scheiner, the producer on the remaster, opted not to clean up the original recording—the fractional second of studio chatter is still there just before the mandolin enters on “Daysleeper,” for instance, but if anything this humanizes the occasionally too-spacious sound of the 5.1 mix.

Hearing the newly reengineered songs opened my ears to them all over again. I think the slightly flat mix of the original release was partly responsible for my muted reaction. Up has now regained its place for me among R.E.M.’s top albums. More emotionally naked than just about any other release, and more sonically adventurous than any of their other later albums, this is a band confronting massive change head on and doing it with refreshing honesty and maturity.

A word about the reissue: fans looking for bonus songs will be disappointed, but that’s not to say there’s nothing new. The package contains a CD that is essentially identical to the original CD version, a booklet with excellent liner notes, and a DVD containing the 5.1 mix of the songs, a bonus video shot during the studio sessions with live-in-studio versions of “Daysleeper,” “Lotus,” and “At My Most Beautiful,” lyrics, and photos. There’s nothing revelatory in the video, unless it’s that the group was clearly thinking hard about live performances of this material even while the record was being made.

This reissue is one in a series of R.E.M.’s Warner Brothers albums to be re-released in CD+DVD format. Also available are Green, Out of Time, Automatic for the People, Monster, New Adventures in Hi-Fi, Reveal, In Time: the Best of R.E.M. 1989–2003, and Around the Sun. (Linked titles point to BlogCritics reviews of the reissued albums.)

(Originally published at BlogCritics.)

Customizing bought furniture for electronics

new media cabinet

Have you ever noticed that very few people make stereo cabinets any more? All you can find in most stores is the “entertainment center,” big walls of wood or particleboard designed to hide all your equipment away. Those of us blessed with a nice big fireplace as the focal point of our small family rooms don’t really have a lot of places to put an entertainment center, though. Our solution, until this weekend, was to use the rolling metal cart that we bought when we were living in our Worthington Place apartment in east Cambridge. The cart fit the aesthetics of that apartment—big, loft-like, exposed pipes & brick—but not our 1941 Cape Cod-style living room. (The steel cart didn’t go well with the dentil molding under the mantel.) So we decided to start looking for a cabinet that would both hold our electronics and fit our aesthetics.

The trick was dimensions. If you stack all our equipment in one pile, it’s about 25 inches—but that doesn’t include the height of supporting shelves or air clearance for ventilation. More pressingly, most home electronics components are about 17 inches wide and 14 inches deep, with some, like our DVD player reaching as much as 22 inches in depth. There are very few cabinets available that approach those dimensions.

But we finally found one—at Crate and Barrel. They call it the Springdale Cabinet, but it looked like a stereo cabinet to us! The issues: the DVD player wouldn’t fit (too deep) and there were no holes to run cables in the back. Fortunately both of those were simple problems to rectify.

After assembling the cabinet, we loaded it with the components, without cables, to identify where each component would sit. We took into account a few key things, such as heat production and headspace, as well as the location of the one fixed shelf in the unit. That dictated the final placement of the components. I would have preferred to put the amplifier higher in the stack, since it produces the most heat, but the number of ways I could load the shelves in was limited. I did, however, make room for our turntable for the first time in about eight months, which was pretty cool.

I then took a pencil and marked the location of access holes on the inside of the cabinet. Some components, like the CD or the turntable, could get a way with a single one-inch hole through which power and audio cables could pass. Others needed bigger holes: the DVR needed a wide slot, the amplifier a large open rectangle, and the DVD needed a hole as wide and tall as it was so that the excess depth could extend through the back of the cabinet. Fortunately the back panel doesn’t provide a lot of structural support for this cabinet since I was cutting so much out of it.

I then cut the holes. For the simple one inch holes and the slot for the DVR I used a one-inch spade bit and simply cut the holes. For the larger panels, I used a smaller spade bit and marked the four corners of the hole, then went to the back of the cabinet and used a straight edge and a jigsaw to connect the holes. It was a little loud, but only took a few minutes to complete all the cuts.

Loading everything back in and getting the cables connected took the longest, but fortunately I had made notes about which inputs were connected to which and everything was pretty straightforward. We hooked it up and turned it on and it worked the first time. Sweet.

We now have a much less obtrusive AV cabinet that fits the architectural details of our room much better. The only compromise we had to make was TV placement—unlike an entertainment center, the cabinet left no place for our conventional 27″ tube, so we ended up sitting it atop the cabinet. When we pick up some additional income streams and buy a flat panel, we’ll be able to place it on the mantel and slide the AV cabinet further back into the corner—making it disappear that much more.

I took some pictures as I was loading everything in that show the holes we cut and the hidden extra airspace for the DVD player. You can see a little of the “before” in the first picture of this album.

Ten things I’ve done (that you probably haven’t)

It’s probably a sign of my impending intellectual bankruptcy that I’m succumbing to memeposting, but I like this one (via Todd at Frolic, who got it from EveTushnet.com, and who also points to these folks). Do I have ten things? Well…

  1. Been a state spelling champion. (What, you didn’t know there were state spelling champions? Only in Virginia.)
  2. Shaken James Michener’s hand wearing clothes that I had flown in the day before, since my luggage had gotten lost en route.
  3. Sung under the baton of Robert Shaw, twice—once at the Kennedy Center.
  4. Jammed—and recorded—with Dave Brubeck in the Washington National Cathedral.
  5. Fractured my sternum.
  6. Sung for President Bill Clinton and NBC anchor (and Wahoo) Katie Couric on the same day.
  7. Asked six or seven senior Microsoft executives when they were going to stop pissing off a substantial community of potential customers by calling Open Source Software a “cancer.”
  8. Helped build software that’s saving American lives and taxpayer money in places like Afghanistan—and supporting humanitarian missions in Cambodia.
  9. With the help of 15 close friends, sampled beer from more than 50 countries in one sitting.
  10. Driven cross country in four days.

What’s interesting to me looking back at this list is that many of the items are about my singing—which I haven’t really done since I got back to Boston. Time to change that.