September 2007 Archives

I went to Carnegie Mellon Career Center to talk with my career consultant about … well all sorts of stuff. Career centers are these great places where students can get help with their career search and also where companies come to recruit students. And there are career fairs and all sorts of other get-togethers to support this process.

To my amazement, I see a lot of US companies hiring students here, but zero European ones. I asked the career people if this is a sort of policy to only work with US companies? They said that they would LOVE to have more European companies here to broaden their offering to students. Similarly, I do know from talking to people firsthand that actually very many US students are extremely interested in expanding their view of the world and doing temporary or permanent work outside the US. So there’s an unfilled niche here for European companies to participate in global search for talent, a lot of which is concentrated in US universities, particularly in many technical fields.

Sure it’s expensive and a lot of hassle for companies. I don’t know what finances are involved for a company to hire students through such career centers, but certainly participating at job fairs, distributing brochures etc comes with a certain cost, and also all the travelling etc. But then again, it’s a continuing global talent hunt competition, and it’s not bound to get cheaper any time soon anyway. So my judgement is that the US university career centers are a great underutilized resource for hiring to European companies.

Studying privacy at school has taken me to the wonderful world of online marketing and advertising that is one of the forefronts of the online privacy debate. For example, did you know about Network Advertising Initiative? Neither did I until I heard about it in class. Apparently it’s a collection of online marketing companies who try to show that they are doing collective action regarding protecting their consumers. They have guides and all sorts of things there.

One interesting part on their site is that if you click on “Consumer Opt-out”, you can actually see which of their members (online advertisers) have placed cookies on your computer. You can then also opt out (which apparently places an “opt-out cookie” on your computer so that they won’t track you any more). I haven’t heard about most of these companies, yet I seem to have cookies from many. I’m conscious about my privacy in various aspects, but cookies isn’t one of those, so I think I won’t really bother opting out of these. But it’s still refreshing to see to those who don’t think about online privacy too deeply and too often. If you surf, you’re being tracked by tons of people, and the tools to help you keep tabs on it and control it still have a long way to go.

There is a story on e-voting in The Sidney Morning Herald. I have a few little quotes there in the beginning and end.

I’d especially like to underline the end quote where I talk about trust. I believe that it’s the same for e-voting and regular paper ballots. The risks in these systems are different, but when you aggregate them, I don’t believe that the risks of e-voting make it inherently more costly to society — there are both risks and benefits and they offset each other. A few high-provile “electronic voting” systems (I put it in quotes because I can’t see the point of having just machines in stations, it doesn’t make things much simpler for the user… true electronic voting is online voting) have been badly engineered in the US and have been heavily criticized by experts, and rightly so. But these cases have also tainted the debate and put suspicions towards systems that are built differently and might not be so bad. It will take a lot of effort, good engineering and even better marketing to clean up this mess and make people feel comfortable with e-voting, similarly as they feel comfortable with doing many other things online.

As part of my studies at CMU MHCI, I’m taking a Human Factors course. I must say that it’s one of my more interesting courses and I’m happy I chose it as an elective. Human factors is a bit similar to usability analysis, but it has less to do with computers and more with actual daily physical objects. It’s pretty much synonymous to “ergonomics”. It tends to involve large systems like ships and airplanes and factories and cars. But the analysis applies also to smaller things. Aviation accidents are often a study of Human Factors analysis, examining the factors that caused it to happen.

Part of Human Factors is also deconstructing the myth of “human error”: although it does happen, in most cases things can actually be traced back to design problems. If a user chooses the wrong button because it’s unclear from the labelling or colors which one is the right one, it’s a design error and not just “human error”.

Part of the course is that we have to do a project, making something better with Human Factors. I must say that I don’t yet have a clear idea of what it would be. I have some small ideas, but am looking for contributions and help here. If something comes to your mind that I could study, then please send the thought my way. It has to be an object from my own daily life, so maybe it’s something that we’ve used together at some point. It could be something like an appliance (fridge? microwave?) with an especially unusable interface, or heating/cooling systems, or something about cars or such.

Thursday, September 19 2007, is 25th birthday of the smiley and it was “invented” right here at Carnegie Mellon. See more here.

Apple kept its word and the iPhone early buyer $100 credit is now available. I received it fine as advertised.

Just watched this week’s keynote about iPods. There were a few interesting things there beyond the iPhone price drop.

First, iPod Touch will be available globally for this holiday season, differently from iPhone whose distribution plans and timing remains unclear. Something tells me that iPhone won’t make it to Europe this year after all. (No info, just a hunch.) So all my friends outside US can now go and get this Touch thing if you don’t care too much about the phone part. Here are the apps the Touch doesn’t have that iPhone has: phone calls SMS, camera, Dashboard-like widgets (stocks, weather), notes, Google Maps, e-mail. All the rest should be same in the two, as the Touch also has wifi and Safari. Plus it will have 16G of storage on the largest model, vs iPhone’s 8G.

One of the great things about going to an interdisciplinary university is that you get to go to talks that are not strictly part of your curriculum, yet they’re highly enjoyable and educational.

Yesterday I saw a talk by Freddy Anzures at Carnegie Mellon University School of Design by Freddy Anzures, a CMU alumnus who’s been working at Converse and frog design and is now at Apple’s Human Interface Group. His most recent public work was on the iPhone, he said this project took three years of his life. Understandably he couldn’t talk about his current and future work, but he shared great insights of his personal journey at CMU design school where he did fun industrial design projects and then at Converse as an intern and all those other things. I’m not a visual designer by trade myself, but I’ve always enjoyed working with them and I liked this talk a lot.

The second talk was of very different kind. Dr Panos Papadimitratos studies (among other things) vehicular communications security at EPFL and this talk was about his recent work about studying security and privacy in these ad-hoc networks. I’m interested a lot in HCI, security and traffic/safety/driving and it’s cool to see talks where these come together, although this was a more academic talk and so there was less HCI element. But there was some protocol analysis and PKI, certification and pseudonyms and key lengths and computation efficiency and such other security things that I’ve been working with a bit before, so I felt quite at home listening to this.

EA released Command & Conquer for free. Download CD images and burn. SCHWEEET!!! One of true classics. And in Parallels, it’s more convenient as you don’t even have to burn anything, just connect CD images and off you go.

But there’s a technical problem. It starts up OK on Parallels and Windows XP if you follow the instructions (enable Win95 compatibility mode etc). But the colors are all interlaced and messed up, as it was in 16 color mode or something so the whole thing is unplayable. Is there an easy Parallels setting or something that could fix this? I really want to play this thing .. but I can’t do so with the broken colors.

iPhone is still a nice thing. And the recent software updates have been improving it. For example, originally you could set the passphrase requirement to either “immediately” or “after one minute”, which was too short for me. But the software updates have fixed this and I can now have a longer timeout.

Yet there’s still one control missing that disturbs me a lot.

When a call arrives, I can only answer it but not reject it.

Sounds frivolous for a phone, doesn’t it? And bordering on completely clueless. Especially from Apple who is supposed to know all about making nice things and nice interfaces… In fact it’s so outrageous that I think I’ll type it again…

When a call arrives, I can only answer it but not reject it.

Ok… it’s not entirely true. When the phone is unlocked and a call comes, there are two buttons as you’d expect: “Answer” and “Decline”. But seriously, when the phone is sitting in your pocket with keylock on (as it is for me most of time) and a call comes and you rush to see who’s calling, there’s only one control: “Slide to answer”. There is no decline, no send to voicemail, no nothing. I’d expect to be able to at least decline, if not send to voicemail. My old phone and all previous phones have been able to decline calls for years. So… seriously, Apple. Come on. The iPhone is a nice thing. And yes, many people are praising it a lot. And I also have found it very useful. But basic phone stuff should still work, eh?

Kai Roer did a security profile with me.

I just did a stupid error that sometimes happens. I was logged in to my web hosting account over SFTP and wanted to delete some files. BUT… the wrong directory was highlighted and instead of those specific files, it started deleting everything in my web directory. OOOOOOOOOPS.

Fortunately, deleting with SFTP takes a bit of time as it has to go through every file and directory individually, and I could hit Cancel fairly fast, so only some files were gone.

But they were still gone and I was panicking a bit. What do I do now??? I didn’t have local backups as, well, Dreamhost is supposed to backup them. But is there an easy way to get them back or do I have to contact support?

Fortunately there’s an easy way. Dreamhost has backup instructions on their wiki, and specifically this one lets you get back stuff easily. Just sign in over SSH, change to appropriate hourly/nightly/daily/weekly backup directory and copy the appropriate files to their actual place. Cool. Well done Dreamhost, that’s some good hosting. If only everything in the world was so easy to recover.

I told some people a while ago that I’d do something that converts directory listings to RSS. Actualy work was something like two hours, but of course it took me weeks and months to get my act together and get it done. Anyway, it’s here, enjoy.