Michael Glenn's Blog » General

Path, Privacy and Permission

mglenn — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 04:35:12 +0000

Earlier today Arun Thampi published his investigation into data uploaded by the iPhone application Path. Arun was participating in a hackathon when he noticed Path making an API call that indicated it was submitting a contact from his phone. Upon further inspection it was determined that Path had uploaded his entire address book to their servers.

Dave Morin the CEO of Path quickly responded on Arun’s blog when negative sentiment started spreading online about Path’s contact uploading.

“Arun, thanks for pointing this out. We actually think this is an important conversation and take this very seriously. We upload the address book to our servers in order to help the user find and connect to their friends and family on Path quickly and effeciently as well as to notify them when friends and family join Path. Nothing more.

We believe that this type of friend finding & matching is important to the industry and that it is important that users clearly understand it, so we proactively rolled out an opt-in for this on our Android client a few weeks ago and are rolling out the opt-in for this in 2.0.6 of our iOS Client, pending App Store approval.

Dave Morin

Co-Founder and CEO of Path”

The general sentiment on Twitter at least is that Path shouldn’t be doing this or at the very least should be asking user’s permission before uploading their entire address book. I don’t know Dave but it appears from his swift response and continued response on Twitter that this was not a nefarious use of data and truly was designed to enhance the user experience. Dave seems like a stand-up guy and Path will weather this, but it does bring up a good lesson for those developing applications be they web apps or mobile apps.

You must put yourselves in the shoes of the user and respect them.

At my previous job we investigated the use of aggregated, largely anonymous data to compare an individual to a larger peer set. This was essentially utility consumption data (electricity and natural gas) that would be aggregated anonymously such that a peer comparing it would never see the original data points but only see three aggregate comparison groups to their own consumption. We didn’t collect names or even specific addresses but we encountered enormous pushback from various partners that insisted this data could not be shared without explicit user permission.

As a developer and prolific user of online and mobile applications this seemed overly protective and pessimistic. I was initially not able to put myself in the customer’s position. Personal data, any personal data carries with it details about someone’s life. Potentially damaging or life threatening secrets in the case of who you might have in your address book. 99.9% of the time contact lists and information like energy consumption are probably benign but the customer doesn’t know how that information is stored or the entirety of its use.

I think people are concerned for the most part about the things they can’t conceive of, not the things they can. Add to that the general and justifiable mistrust of companies and you can see why many of the comments in Arrun’s blog post are in my opinion exceedingly over the top in terms of criticism towards Path.

I believe Path are taking the right approach. 1. Admit to the mistake, quickly and honestly 2. Deal with feedback in a calm and professional manner 3. Define how you will address the problem

Developers need to be conscious of the information they’re collecting. Keep it to a minimum and ensure your motivations are to improve the experience for the user. Ensure that you’re explaining your reasons clearly and always ask for permission.

Update: Path has issued an update to the app and a statement that they will remove all uploaded contact information and have added an opt-in prompt in the new version when you add a contact.

Thank You Zerofootprint

mglenn — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 15:09:45 +0000

A little more than three years ago Zerofootprint Software Inc. was born out of the not-for-profit Zerofootprint to service the burgeoning green house gas measurement market. Radiant Core, the company I founded along with Jay Goldman became Zerofootprint Software’s initial development team and for the first time I lead a development team on the client side rather than the agency side of software development.

I have learned a great deal about software development in the past three years. The most important lessons have been less about programming and more about the management of people, be that downward, upward or sideways within an organization. The nature of the rapidly evolving green market caused us to have to continually refocus and redefine the products in order to meet changes in legislation or lack thereof and new market opportunities. No two start-ups are alike and although I had previously been in two others this lesson was again apparent at Zerofootprint where new challenges were constantly keeping me on my toes and leading to constant self-discovery.

Along with its products the people at Zerofootprint have changed as well. I want to publicly thank the entire team at Zerofootprint including past employees, current employees and contractors that I have worked with. Each of them have contributed a portion of their knowledge to my learning experience that I will take forward. From all of them I have learned that the start-up is the employee. These are not large bureaucratic organizations that won’t notice a few people that drag it off course. The start-up, due to its size and position must engage all of its employees or risk its demise. Each employee needs to understand they directly affect the outcome of the organization and must continually participate in direction and performance. The current group at Zerofootprint is fully equipped to handle this challenge and I have tremendous confidence in their ability to execute.

I recently had the opportunity to work with a former client from Radiant Core in the travel industry that I simply could not pass up and thus last week my time at Zerofootprint Software came to an end, ready to meet new challenges starting next week. I will take forward all that I have learned in the past three years and move forward fondly remembering the time I had at Zerofootprint.

Lastly, the time spent at an environmentally focused company have profoundly changed the way I look at the world and the choices I make. Although I still continue to strive to be green I will always consider the ramifications of my consumption in a far more critical way. That above all is perhaps the greatest impact Zerofootprint has made on my life.

The Warehouse – the difference between storage and memory

mglenn — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:49:54 +0000

Every now and then I provide computer advice to friends and family. Eventually the subject of their computer’s performance comes up whereby I state that the most cost effective improvement to a computer’s speed is more memory. This inevitably leads to a disambiguation between memory and storage space. So for the record, here is the difference;

Memory is the working area of your computer and the hard drive is the storage area. The best analogy I can provide is a warehouse.

In a warehouse you have floor space and shelf space. When you need to access a package you take it off the shelf, put it down on the floor, open the box and work with the item. When complete you put the item back on the shelf. A computer’s hard drive and memory are analogous. The hard drive is the shelving and the memory is the floor space. There is a noticeable amount time between telling a program to run and that program being available to work with. Like shelf space, a hard drive is optimized for storage and not working with files. The process to retrieve and return items to a shelf is much more time consuming than moving them around on the floor. Memory is designed to be very fast and as such is relatively expensive compared to the space space on a hard drive. So similar to a warehouse there is much more shelf space compared to floor space.

The reason I say that adding more memory to a computer will make it faster is similar to the warehouse floorspace. As you take items off the shelf the floor becomes crowded. Eventually you can’t take anything else off the shelf without putting something back because the floor is full. A computer has this problem as well. Eventually you can’t run anymore programs because the memory becomes full. Computers, much like in a warehouse get around this problem by putting programs back onto the shelf in a special area called swap space. As I mentioned, the shelf space is much slower so as you switch between applications the computer starts to react much slower as it has to put an item on the shelf and take the requested item off.

By adding more memory or floor space to a computer you have more room to work and the computer will spend less time swapping (1) items back to the shelf or hard drive.

A as corollary, if you run out of space to store your application or files such as a glut of digital photos or home movies you need more shelf space and have to get a bigger hard drive. Typically though people run out of memory before they run out of storage space. This is largely due to the fact that each successive version of an application tends to get bigger requiring more memory or floor space when upgrading and users tend to run more programs simultaneously the longer they use their computer forgetting to shut down unused programs or getting more comfortable with multi-tasking.

(1) Computer scientists and geeks will no doubt want to correct the difference between traditional swapping and paging but that clearly doesn’t matter for the sake of this article.

Configuring the ZTE MF668 HSPA Rocket Mobile Internet Stick on Snow Leopard

mglenn — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 16:39:18 +0000

I’m posting this for the other poor souls who’ve purchase a Rogers ZTE MF668 HSPA Rocket Mobile Internet Stick and can’t get it to connect using Snow Leopard.

1. Attach the stick to the computer. It should appear as a mounted volume. Run the Connection Manager install program to install the drivers. If you can’t see this they may already be installed but you can download and install from Rogers the ZTE MF668 MAC OS 10.4 Software.

2. After the install, go into System Preferences > Network. Unplug and plug back in the stick to ensure the device is identified properly. Two devices should appear, ZTEUSBModem and ZTEUSBATPort. Follow the next to steps for each. (Note: the Rocket Stick should have a red light that turns blue when successfully on the network.)

3. Select the device and enter wapuser1 for the Account Name and wap for the Password

4. Click the Advanced… button and in the Modem tab that appears select Generic for the Vendor and GPRS (GSM/3G) for the Model. Enter internet.com for the APN and leave CID at 1. Click OK to finalize the Modem settings.

5. Click the Apply button to apply these settings and repeat steps 3 and 4 for the second device.

6. Select the ZTEUSBModem and click the Connect button to test. If all goes well you should be connected within 15 seconds.

7. Disconnect and exit System Preferences and use the Connection Manager to test the connection again. You can connect using either but the connection manager is slightly easier to open and connect with especially if the end user isn’t that technical.

Weak Passwords

mglenn — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 13:26:29 +0000

You can read this rather detailed Lifehacker article on Weak Passwords by John Pozadzides or you can simply follow these rules.

Change all your passwords to be a minimum of eight characters long
The password must be a mix of lower case letters, upper case letters, numbers and special characters (e.g. !#@$%^&*)
Do not use similar passwords for all your accounts. If one is compromised it’s more likely that all of them will be

Combinatorics can be surprising. Going from seven characters to eight characters using rule 2 increases the possible time to crack your password from two years to two centuries.

Smitten Kitchen

mglenn — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 02:05:24 +0000

My new favourite website is a feast for the stomach and the eyes, Smitten Kitchen by Deb Perelman with assistance from her husband Alex. I have it on my RSS feed list but you have to visit the site to appreciate the labour of love that goes into this site. I’m going to try to make at least one of these recipes a week. I’m not sure if Deb is going for a cookbook after this but the photos that accompany these recipes are incredibly beautiful. Willam Sonoma needs to get in there before the ad rates go up. Follow on Twitter @smittenkitchen and Facebook. Great work Deb!

Medal Count by Athletes and Population

mglenn — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 18:10:40 +0000

Now that we’ve got some medals on the board I was interested in seeing what the points total would look like if we factored in the size of the team or the population pool that the athletes had come from to see how that changes the rankings.

See 2010 Vancouver Olympics Medal Count

Giving Back

mglenn — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:56:37 +0000

I recently started using the mobile location application / game Foursquare. It allows you to share your location with friends and earn points and badges for how often you share. Foursquare also allows you to integrate with your Twitter account to announce when you’ve “checked in” at a location, earned a badge or earned the status of “mayor” at a particular location. I had thought this was all great fun until Mike Shaver popped up on my Twitter feed.

I wouldn’t say that I have a lot of followers on Twitter. 200 people seems like a lot but I’m sure a great deal is SPAM related so when someone like Shaver un-follows it makes me pause to assess the situation.

Twitter can be great fun to let your followers know what you’re up to, where you are, what your eat or what’s bugging you. There comes a time, however when you have to give back to the community. This applies not only to Twitter but to all internet content. If you’re not creating and sharing, you’re not adding to the community.

Also for what it’s worth, I occasionally update Foursquare but have yet to figure out the long term value proposition.

Chest Pain at Toronto General

mglenn — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:03:49 +0000

4:00PM – At the office. Still experiencing mild chest pains from the night before. These don’t seem heart related but I decided to called Telehealth Ontario who had a nurse call me back five minutes later. Ran through a series of standard questions relating to chest pain and advised me to visit emergency at my local hospital even though it didn’t sound like a heart event.

4:30PM – Leave office and walk to Toronto General Hospital

5:00PM – Arrive at Toronto General Hospital. Exterior construction keeps me searching for an entrance for five minutes.

5:05PM – Inspect the multi-stage process for seeing someone in emergency.
Stage 1 – sign out form at triage station
Stage 2 – wait in triage waiting area
Stage 3 – consult with triage nurse
Stage 4 – wait for registration in triage area
Stage 5 – register
Stage 6 – wait for doctor

5:15PM – Waiting for registration. Several people here. “Jeffery” is inibriated with a swollen and probably broken left hand which he announces to everyone in waiting is a result of punching a locked door.

5:20PM – “Rodney”, inibriated, is brought in by EMT team strapped to stretcher. He is being told to behave.

5:25PM – Women asks EMT why her purse is humming. (Purse is not humming. There is a humming noise in the room from the ventelation system).

5:30PM – See triage nurse.

5:32PM – In response to my “I’m alergic to nuts” answer I’m branded with a red wristband that simply says “NUTS”. I’m hoping the staff know this is an allergy and not my assessed mental state.

5:35PM – Register after a brief stage 4.

5:40PM – Jeffery believes Rodney is talking about him and he starts yelling explicatives in Rodney’s direction.

5:50PM – Now at stage 6 waiting to be called. Rodney has been moved in and Jeffery leaves hospital obviously perturbed he had to wait so long. Hand is presumeably still broken as he did not see anyone.

6:00PM – Called by triage nurse to go in. Yes!

6:01PM – Arrive inside emergency room area only to be told that triage nurse made a mistake and there are no waiting rooms. No!

6:02PM – Waiting in hallway chair. Hey, Rodney is nearby sleeping it off! 20 something patient, Grant, waiting with his mom next to me.

6:10PM – Waiting. Realizing there appear to be several more stages to this game.

6:10PM – Rodney is awoken by nurse who is clearly not happy with the prospect that she has to clean him up as she announces to her colleagues that he’s soaken wet.

6:15PM – Rodney protests but she eventually gets his wet shirt off (yes, I thought something else too) and gets him to put on a hospital gown and blankets.

6:20PM – Rodney continues to sleep it off.

6:25PM – Rodney wanders off to the bathroom.

6:30PM – Rodney returns.

6:35PM – Nurse asks me for a urine sample.

6:36PM – Bathroom was one Rodney used. Not pretty.

6:37PM – Realize that the name on top of the now complete urine sample is not my name. Hopefully it’s the doctors?

6:39PM – Confirm that I was confused with Grant 20-somthing next to me. Now know Grant’s last name. Sorry for stealing your sample bottle!

6:40PM – Let Christie know via text that I will confirm the nurses know who I am before accepting needles and medication.

5:50PM – Confirm with nurse that they’re just busy and have not forgotten me.

7:00PM – Rodney now trying to steal medical supplies and disrupt things by dropping a medical waste bin on the ground. Nurse are oblivious to this and seem to be confused after I tell them.

7:05PM – Receive panicked tech related email from work. “Help to retrieve a deleted file!” Sorry, busy in emergency, please call our IT support firm.

7:10PM – Curious to see if I can read the eye chart bottom line from the required ten feed distance. Check!

7:15PM – Cell battery running low. Boot laptop to juice cell phone from laptop battery. Have to keep Christie informed.

7:20PM – Laptop battery now low from leeching cell phone.

7:30PM – UHN – Wireless Guest Network. Score!

7:31PM – Password required. THIS is how you treat your guests?

7:35PM – Waiting. Writing.

7:45PM – Waiting.

7:50PM – Start working on code. No wireless will make this less productive.

8:05PM – Noticing that even with all the signs, charts and process, nurses still seem to be confused as to who is in what room at what stage for what reason. Not inspiring confidence in the process. It seems like a busy night.

8:07PM – Now past the three hour mark.

8:15PM – Starting to think about the dinner I’m not having.

8:20PM – Laptop battery almost dead. Cell phone battery at 80%.

8:25PM – Nurse asked if I’d seen a doctor yet. Nope. Thinks perhaps my chart was misplaced after a doctor picked it up. Great. Checking to see who’s got my chart.

8:30PM – Doctor sees me in the hall and performs brief examination. Examination reveals little. Possibly muscle related based on symptoms related to movement. X-Ray and blood work ordered

9:05PM – Four hours!

9:35PM – Brought to exam room. Confirmed they know who I am.

9:45PM – ECG and blood work.

9:50PM. – Gown for X-Ray.

10:00PM – Waiting at X-Ray. Now five hours.

10:15PM – X-Ray lady returns.

10:20PM – X-Ray lady leaves for the night saying “someone will be with you as soon as possible.”

10:30PM – X-Ray dude shows up.

10:35PM – X-Ray taken. Dude apologized for wait. Busy night.

10:45PM – One hour since blood work.

10:50PM – Rodney is awake now. Laughing his ass off. Go back to sleep Rodney.

11:00 – 6 hours! Doctor says 10 minutes to diagnosis.

11:20PM – Diagnosis, muscle pain. Not through an injury, could be stress Wait a few days.

11:22PM – Discharged! Night Rodney.

My Road to HD

mglenn — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:30:02 +0000

For years I’ve watched with envy as others purchased their high definition flat screen televisions. Then a few weeks before Christmas my wife remarked that HD televisions had come down in price and would we be interested in purchasing one? Yes we would. We’re big movie watchers and have grown to love our PVR for prime time shows. Those two areas were reason enough for me to jump into the fray.

We were suddenly exposed to a world of a thousand flatscreen models and several add-on options. I decided to try to use my eyes to discern the possible differences in models with a quick trip to Best Buy.

Plasma or LCD

The debate starts at a rather large fork in the road. LCD or Plasma? Plasma has traditionally been heralded for its price, larger size and great contrast or rather, keeping the blacks really black. The downside is ghosting and screen burn in. LCDs traditionally have poor contrast ratios, suffer from a trailing effect and have been more expensive, but all that seems to have disappeared based on my research. My wife and I decided that for the size of our place a 42″ would be the largest size we could accomodate, so we thought we’d lean towards LCDs.

120HZ

The first thing we noticed when looking at LCDs is that the cheaper models (below $1,000) suffered from digital artifacting or jaggies around the edge of fast moving objects. What seemed to be the difference? Refresh rate. Or to be more specific, 120HZ.

At 60HZ fast motion in a scene seems to manifest itself in the form of jaggies around objects. At 120HZ the digital artifacting disappeared. I figured if we were going to spend a significant amount of money on a television that we would have for years we should spend a bit more to make sure the image looked clear.

Reviews

Once we narrowed it down to an 120HZ LCD we did some online research using Amazon.com reviews. Fortunately 120HZ is a big selling feature. So much so that Amazon lists it in the title of their LCDs so it was easy to search for “LCD 120HZ” to get a rather wide selection of reviews. Being a guy I of course wanted the largest TV I could get so I was concentrating up around the 40″ and 42″ range. LG, Sharp, Samsung and Sony seemed to consistently get between 4 and 5 star reviews. The LG Scarlett series which is LGs 120HZ models seemed to have some of the highest scores. So it was back to Best Buy with my wife to validate the reviews.

Image Quality

In the end, it’s your eye that does the talking. We honed in on 120HZ LCD models for the side by side test. I was surprised that for me the LG Scarletts did not appear to have the best picture but it came down to the Samsung versus the Sony Bravias. In the end, for us, the Sony Bravias looked the best.

Price

Since we were at Best Buy we decided to fan out to the other nearby box stores to get the best price. Trying to get big box stores to match on price is crazy because if it’s not on the competitors website they won’t believe you can get the lower price. Also, if you’re looking to buy a Sony, the Sonystyle store won’t be able to match prices.

I decided to call G&G Electronics out in Scarborough. I had purchased equipment years ago from Gary who owns G&G and got great prices. Gary did not dissappoint.

The Package

Going in we wanted to buy the Sony Bravia KDL-40WL140. Gary offered us Sony’s new KDL-40XBR6 at a substantial discount (still higher than the 40WL140) but with a Rogers HD PVR for only $20 for the first six months (Sony pays Rogers for six months of a yearly rental). The XBR model had 10bit colour versus the WL’s 8bit, so better colour, and the XBR has a better built in speaker. Since we didn’t have a surround system in the budget for this round the better sound was also attractive. The XBR also has a thinner bezel so the TV actually takes up slightly less visual room. We had difficulty comparing the WL140 with the XBR6 as they were running different content. The picture on the XBR6 was running a Blue-ray disk while the WL140 was on HDNet. The XBR6 looked better but I now realize that television runs at 1080i as opposed to Blue-rays 1080p. In the end we decided the XBR6 was probably the better television and the difference in price was worth it. I would suggest if you’re comparing ensure the source content is identical. The 40XBR6 it was!

Blue-ray and the Accessories

Gary to help sweeten the deal was attempting to disway us from purchasing a Blue-ray player to save money and afford the better model. He explained that he didn’t own one himself and watched all his movies on Rogers Pay Per View. Something in my gut, or perhaps just my technolust was telling me to get the Blue-ray. Plus, we have a small DVD collection and since our previous DVD player was integrated with our old TV we needed a new player if we wanted to watch them at all. So it was a Rogers HD PVR and a Blue-ray player.

We purchased the Sony BDP-S550. In addition to playing Blue-ray discs it also plays DVDs and upconverts them to high definition. Not quite as good as a HD movie but better than a standard DVD player. What most impressed me about high definition playback was Blue-ray movies at 1080P. Sorry Gary, I can tell the difference.

Once we got the Rogers HD PVR authorized and up and running I could immediately see the difference. 1080i or 720p are excellent quality compared to standard definition but 1080p movies are incredibly sharp and free of digital artifacts. It’s probably the combination of only 720 lines of interlaced video compared with 1080 combined with additional compression that Rogers puts on the signal that weakens the quality. In the end the clarity of Blue-ray really blew me away. I’m sure when next year’s budget for a 7.1 surround sound system kicks in I’ll appreciate the audio as well.

I purchased The Dark Knight for our first Blue-ray title and the IMAX content Christopher Nolan shot really shines. Now I’m waiting for Contact, the Star Wars series and the Star Trek series to come out on Blue-ray. The Pixar movies I suspect will look fantastic as well.

Sharpness

I think I found out what we liked so much about the Sony Bravias though I would have to return to the store to test this theory. Most of the competing sets seemed to be too sharp. That is, we saw too many of the pixels which seemed unatural to us. The Sony Bravia didn’t seem to suffer from this and gave us a more pleasing image to watch. Upon renting our first Blue-ray we noticed up close an image that was still slightly more pixely than we liked. It quickly dawned on me that this was probably the default sharpness setting. A quick adjustment to slightly dull down the sharpness and we were very pleased.

I suggest when shopping that you access the sharpness settings first and move up and down the dial to make sure the image your looking at isn’t the result of some over-eagar techie thinking the sharpest setting is the best for the shopper. While you’re at it, if the colour also doesn’t look right try exploring those settings. The Bravia by default has Vivid mode which boosts the saturation and provides for some very colourful but very unatural images. We dropped ours to Standard colour when we hooked it up.

Bravia Motion Enhancer

In addition to a Vivid colour mode the Bravias have a Motion Enhancer option that is turned on by default. Both my wife and I noticed that when watching certain content the actors seemed to pop out from the background. I think I’ve traced this back to the Motion Enhancer which we disabled. Motion Enhancer gets the image to 120HZ through interpolation rather than just repeating the frame multiple times but there is some sort of visual effect that we find distracting.

HDTV

What has disappointed me most about this experience has been the lack of available HD channels and programming on Rogers, or rather in general. It has been almost 12 years since CBS first broadcast in HD and I’m surprised how slowly the market has been to react. Unless you’re a sports nut the content lives mainly in prime time. The slow uptake by consumers probably due to cost, the chicken and egg problem and the high cost of HD television sets. I’m hopeful that since we purchased a higher quality 1080p set which has proven very capable by the Blue-ray content that we’ll have this set for a while as shows continue to roll over to HD.

Should I Buy?

If you’re not into sports on television and don’t watch a lot of movies at home you may be dissapointed by the poorer quality image of standard definition shows on an HD set. That said, if you’re only watching prime time most of your shows may be in HD. Check your television guide for the HD channels and see if your shows have an HD indicator on them (Rogers shows this for the HD channels in the on-screen guide).

If you’re a movie fan then I highly recommend moving up to Blue-ray for the superior picture.