Random Brain Dump

Every quarter, Yahoo! holds a hack day when engineers are given 24 hours to dream up an idea and build it out– it’s a way to promote innovation in the developer ranks. I’ve seen some very innovative stuffs in the past. So this past hack day, I worked with two of my co-workers David & Ahmed to build a chat or IM “robot”. Very geeky but also very cool…

A chat or IM bot is basically a piece of software that acts like a real chat buddy: you send it a message and it replies with a response to you. We called our bot Alfred, Batman’s confidante and assistant. The idea is that this is an all-knowing chat buddy. You send it a question like “How do I make a grilled cheese sandwich?” and it will return to you an answer by searching Yahoo! Answers database. In this case, the bot will send back a chat message with instructions on making the sandwich! You send it a command like “tell me about 2008 Olympics” and it will return you the popular links del.icio.us users have bookmarked about the 2008 Olympics.

I had a lot of fun hacking Alfred, probably the most satisfying piece of code I’ve written at Yahoo! Check out Sarah Bacon’s coverage of our hacks at the official Yahoo! Messenger blog, including a screen shot.

An analyst has recently concluded that Apple is making about $831 per iPhone! This includes $18 per month from AT&T. Sweet!

Apple is going to have a monster xmas season!

Okay, I know I’m dating myself for blogging this, but I don’t care..

  Back in the early PC days, the Amiga grabbed a lot of attention. It was the dream machine at the time. I remember one day casually walking by a computer store on Main street in Alhambra, oh I don’t know mid ’80s. I saw an Amiga on the window, displaying the classic animation of a bouncing red/white checkered ball. I was quick to ditch my friends and went in to check it out. I still remember that I thought it was the coolest computer I’d ever seen. I was blown away!

I had been reading about the Amiga in Byte magazine. I was a kid with a $200 Commodore 64, green with envy at all the rich kids at school who owned IBM, Atari & most of all Apple II. So it wasn’t like my parents were going to get it for me. Don’t remember the price, just that it was ridiculously expensive. Technically, the Amiga was best in the market at that point, but it was mismanaged and eventually flamed out– just a footnote in computing history and another of many duds left on the wayside by IBM & Apple.

Anyhow, Arstechnica features an on-going series of articles on the history of The Amiga. Very intriguing geeky read, highly recommended from yours truly!

1. genesis
2. birth of Amiga
3. 1st prototype
4. enter Commodore

Here’s a funny excerpt:

Amiga, Inc. didn’t have a lot of money left over for shipping its prototype to the show, and the engineers were understandably nervous about putting such a delicate device through the rigors of commercial package transport. Instead, RJ Mical and Dale Luck purchased an extra airline seat between the two of them and wrapped the fledgling Amiga in pillows for extra security. According to airline regulations, the extra “passenger” required a name on the ticket, so the Lorraine became “Joe Pillow,” and the engineers drew a happy face on the front pillowcase and added a tie! They even tried to get an extra meal for Joe, but the flight attendants refused to feed the already-stuffed passenger.

Tonite, after processing some of the pictures of the kids I took earlier in the evening, I uploaded a few of them to Flickr. In the process, I discovered something a bit troubling. The uploaded images on Flickr looked washed out! I looked closely at the settings in the Flickr upload tool and discovered it resizes the uploads due to size limitation. While JPEG is a lossy compression, resizing should not produce visible differences between compressions– otherwise, the format would be useless.

After reconfiguration, I re-uploaded a file in its entirety. I looked at the different sizes on Flickr and again, the image simply didn’t look faithfully replicated! Could the bits be altered I thought? So I downloaded the picture and compared it against the original JPEG. No difference in file size, good! I viewed the 2 files in Photoshop and they look identical, again good!

This meant that there is a visible difference in the rendering of the images on Flickr in the browser. A partial screen dump above shows the browser on top of Photoshop, both displaying the same image of the same size. The difference in coloration is obvious. But at this point I no longer suspect Flickr and began to suspect the browser; so I loaded the original JPEG file into Firefox & IE. Eureka, I see the same difference between the browser and Photoshop.

I didn’t get it, while I understand HTML is limited to web color space, I always thought JPEG is rendered in the browser without such limitation. Then I remember reading about Safari rendering JPEGs better than other browsers. I hit Flickr with it and bingo– chalk up more love for Apple from me! Safari rendered the image faithfully!

It turns out some systems (devices or software) are built without color management. Vista and Safari render photos faithfully because just as Photoshop, they have color management and will take into account the embedded ICC profiles in their rendering algorithms. Whereas other system like IE & Firefox and my printer, don’t have color management and render photographs with unpredictable color maps.

This was a lesson in color management for me. For a good example on color management in web browswers, check out this article.

I’ve been using Zoundry as a blog writer client last few years. It’s free and works better than most of standalone clients I’ve tried. Just downloaded the beta version of Windows Live Writer tonite and I’m impressed. Some of the things I like include:

1. WYSIWYG mode applies styles straight from the blog CSS. I’ve never seen this implemented on other clients I tried.
2. Images in a post are even automatically uploaded (including auto-thumbnails).
3. Inserting a map is a cinch (Microsoft map of course)!
4. Templates

Pretty sweet…

I received a phishing attempt in my inbox this morning. Phishing is a fraudulent attempt which fake emails are sent to unsuspecting users tricking them to surrender sensitive user information usually by linking the user to a site that is forged to look legit.

This particular email disguises as Bank of America informing me of an "unauthorized activity". First, I am not BofA customer and secondly, the email was poorly done (spelling error for example). It was a dead giveaway, so I spot it as a phish right away. The link included in the email is simple bare URL, linking to a site in Tanzania! I’m insulted! 🙂

Pictured above is the screen shot I made from the fraudulent site in Tanzania, forging as BofA. It’s tricking users into entering BofA user IDs & pass codes. Bastards! Some of recent phishing attempts are very clever. Some of my co-workers at Yahoo even fell to victim to recent schemes.

Phishing is becoming more prevalent, so be prudent…

Subject: Unauthorized Activity

Dear Bank of America client,

You have received this email because you or someone had used your account from different locations.For security purpose, we are required to open an investigation into this matter.
In order to safeguard your account, we require that you confirm your banking details.
The help speeed up to this process, please access the following link so we ca complete the verification of your Bank of America Online Banking Account registration information.

http://www.data-exchange.co.tz/boa/ssl/online/

If we do no receive the appropriate account verification within 48 hours, then we will assume this Bank of America account is fraudulent and will be suspended.
The purpose of this verification is to ensure that your bank account has not been fraudulently used and to combat the fraud from our community. We appreciate your support and understanding and thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

One day 2 weeks ago while hitting the gym, I lost my cell phone. I also lost our corporate pager. A few days later, while trying disconnect their UVerse TV service, AT&T inadvertently took down my DSL. Then while hacking some PHP code, I inadvertently brought down this site.

I was left feeling totally disconnected all of sudden. Didn’t take long for me to realize how dependent I’ve grown to these things.

DSL is finally back on, the site is restored (obviously since you’re reading this), Yahoo! replaced the lost pager. The cell phone (which is fairly expensive to replace btw) is still missing.

It took me long enough, but I had decided to take the plunge and upgraded my blogging software. I wanted new functionalities and a new look to the site. Change is good…

I migrated my blog to WordPress 2 years ago. It’s the best blogging software I’ve used to date. It serves me well, but recently my blog was deluged with spam bots. While WordPress doesn’t make spam comments public, I got tired of having to delete hundreds of them daily. The newer version contains a plugin that fight spam very effectively so far (none has made it through!). In addition, some of the new extensions seem really cool.

So I upgraded the blog system and will be experimenting with various things. I’ve de-installed Gallery which I used to run my photo galleries. The photo galleries don’t render and some links are broken for the time being. In its place, I plan to install a flash-based system. I’ve taken a look at a few of the free ones out there, but haven’t seen anything I like just yet. I may just have to write one myself…

For the next few weeks, I’ll be hacking the site a bit. So put on the hard hats and please pardon me until the dust settles!

Web-based applications like the ones Google is developing are appealing because they are cross-platform, cross-computers and requires no installation. On the flip side, being web apps, these require constant connectivity. I always thought this is what prevents a wider and more serious adoption of web-based office applications we’ve seen so far.

So when I read about Google Gears yesterday, I was floored. I see this as a great strategic move by the company. Google Gears is a browser plugin enabling web applications to work off line. This addresses the biggest downside with online apps: connectivity. I think if the company pulls it off, Google Gears can pretty much negate the notion that Google apps aren’t suitable for serious usage. I think Google also did a very smart thing, making Google Gears open source– earning them mucho brownie points with the developer community.

How does this impact Microsoft? At best for Microsoft, this will not make a large dent in their Office revenue in the short term (nobody in the right mind would expect Office get displaced readily given its dominant market share). At worst, this signals a significant encroachment of the web onto the traditional desktop. The ramifications are difficult to speculate, but I can easily see a serious challenge to Redmond’s dominance on the desktop.

This might be a milestone product for Google and I suspect platform technologies like this keep Bill up at night.