Stand By Me | Playing For Change | Song Around The World from Concord Music Group on Vimeo.
Time for a different kind of engineering. Not software, but beautifully constructed nonetheless. At first I didn't see what was going on with this video. But then I realized it's from worldwide asynchronous sources.
Jerry Cheung, co-founder of Outspokes, is one of those developers who makes you feel better about projects. No matter how harrowing the ordeal, how intractable the critical bug seemed, he would show up with a smile, a welcoming demeanor, and an patient attitude of figuring things out. I worked with Jerry when he was a graduating student in 2008 at UC Berkeley. He was one of our programmers at RSSP, and took primary responsibility for Ruby applications development. Even during the worst of finals and class projects, he'd still, much to my surprise, find the time and energy to whittle down the bug list. He really delivered. I was sorry to see him move on to the private sector.
Seeing one of his personal endeavors take off is something I can't help sharing. And believe me, it's not just because I've seen him work. It's because he's got this web application that blows my mind. Who knew you could do so much within your own website?
So if you're developing something cool that needs quick and relevant feedback, take advantage of this offer. Just check it out. A line of code added to your site and you'll have expanded your feedback engine by leaps and bounds!
Get a $10/mo premium Outspokes account for free through January 2010!
Outspokes is a great new collaboration tool for anyone involved in creating or managing a web site. Whether you’re a freelancer with an outspoken client, a consulting firm dealing with design by committee, or just a remote team all producing the next great web application, Outspokes can help you communicate faster and more clearly.
Just follow @Outspokes and tweet the following:
Excited to get my free premium @Outspokes account, thanks to this tweet!
RT to get yours: http://bit.ly/3RSgrPThen we’ll message you to confirm your account and get you on the premium plan!
What happens in January? If you love us, please stay on our paid premium plan. Otherwise, we’d be happy to provide you with our current free plan.
And here's a cool interview article by Serena Wu: Spotlight: Outspokes by Arthur Klepchukov and Jerry Cheung.
Let the record show that Big Brother was established by us, the mobile camera-wielding public. In response to all the would-be police brutality videos captured by anyone with a phone, San Jose has started their own CYA program to document and record all interactions using TASER AXON video recording technology.
When we wonder how we got to a world where someone's always watching, blame ourselves. Think about it. How does someone monitoring you change your true behavior? Is this for the better? Welcome 1984
If you cannot see embedded video, download it here: http://serve.castfire.com/video/181873/181873_2009-10-26-233050.mp4
Congratulations to Outspokes for a successful launch on Sept 15, and the cool demos in the Demo Pit of TechCrunch 50.
For those not familiar, let me quote their site:
With Outspokes, you instantly gather the feedback of your entire team by doing nothing more than sending them a link to your site. No more arduous screenshot annotation or endless email ping-pong. Empower your team to express their feedback about your website the easy way: on the site itself.
I've beta tested it, and thought the web application service quite impressive. The ability to collaboratively change elements and annotate while looking at the live site is something I've never considered and yet so common sense. And, just like any Google widget, it takes only a line of html code to enable it for almost any website. At TechCrunch 50, I overheard one attendee say, "When working with webdesigners on my site, I'd have to take a screen shot, copy that into a Powerpoint, then add highlights and comments for what I'd want changed."
With Outspokes, you can directly receive site feedback from QA, beta-testers, developers, designers, and even marketing without burdening anyone with screen shots or mockups. Change the look-and-feel, report bugs, modify text formatting, add comments, and even agree or disagree with other users' feedback.
So why do I post about it? I once worked with one of the founders, Jerry Cheung, at UC Berkeley (I hope to say that often in the future when he's famous). I am amazed that co-founder Arthur Klepchukov's CS 169 software project has taken off into its own company. I wish them success in their new startup, and encourage you to incorporate Outspokes if you have any kind of website.
Unix time, the time calculated as seconds since January 1, 1970 UTC (not counting leap seconds), will reach 1234567890 today at 15:31:30 PST. This is a momentous event for geeks worldwide, but I highly doubt many will notice except for a small number of L337 tech people.
BTW, unix time 1234554321 lapsed earlier today at 11:45:21 PST.
Before the Internet, there was an effort to distribute news to the 2000 or so home computer owners in the Bay Area. It only took over 2 hours to download an entire newspaper over the phone at a $5.00 per hour usage charge, now that's tech!
If you haven't heard already, there is a whitepaper out on how to crack WPA (Wifi Protected Access, supposedly the "more secure" version of wifi encryption). I'm trying not to echo too much net security news on this blog because others tell it quicker and far better than I. However, I just couldn't resist mentioning this because the implications touch on something I've long believed about wifi: Don't use it if you can avoid it. If you want the quick run-down, check here. In essence, the hack against the formerly "more secure" WPA security takes a while, but is indeed hackable, thanks in part to the 802.11i standard itself.
I've always been one for preferring wired, myself. But who wants to run wires everywhere? And what about cafes and conferences? How will we survive without wireless?
With the advent of things like karmetasploit (Karma wifi tools + HD Moore's hack-enabling leetness), it is so easy to unknowingly hook into a tainted wifi access point. But now as the very technologies we've been advising people to switch to now have practical hack whitepapers written about them, I'm just about ready to throw in the towel about reliable wireless security.
My recommendation, if you must remain mobile, is to switch to EVDO mobile wireless, or at the very least only use WPA2. Not entirely feasible, I know. Especially if you're bored at a local coffee shop and see 20 free hotspots that invite you to reconnect to your precious RSS feeds and email.
Do so with the knowledge that it's not difficult anymore to steal your traffic.
