Voo2do.com Replies

Shimon of Voo2do.com discusses its server outage in a reply to an earlier post here. A good time to add my voice to those who've mentioned how convenient and easy to use the site is, which is to say that a lot of work has been put into it. Nice ride.

Inventory Spoofing: An Interesting RFID Exploit

According to
http://www.bof.nl/nieuwsbrief/nieuwsbrief_2006_16.html (in Dutch), Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, has developed a prototype of a device capable of:

• Detecting all RFID chips and scanners in its neighborhood
• Keeping an inventory of all RFID chips you carry on your person, and alert you to new additions to the "inventory"
• Block the reading of any RFID you carry
• Spoof a given RFID

More details at http://www.rfidguardian.org/ (in English)

ACM Risks Digest

The Risks Digest is a moderated forum on risks to the public in computers and related systems, sponsored by the ACM. It's part of the ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy.

Voo2do is back

The site's manager has weathered a disk failure and put the service back online.

Voo2do.com: "Oops, actually we're not out of business"

As previously reported on this blog, there's no free ride. The mea culpa splash screen, adorned with vegetation and earth tones, is pleasant enough, but low on professionalism. After several days of unacknowledged down time, the Voo2do.com manager posted a message today that, so far as can be determined, is predated to the 16th.

We regret to inform you that the server behind these sites has suffered an unexpected failure. . . I apologize for this inconvenience and am working to get things fixed ASAP.

Heads-Up display pricing declines, utility elusive?

IEEE Spectrum reported on a new heads-up display design priced in the $300 range. Those who tried it on the editorial staff at Spectrum were unimpressed with its utility, but found it to be well designed.

Still, the marketing staff at the manufacturer's Myvu.com site quotes reviewer David Pogue of NYT:

"What’s cool is that you can still see by looking around the TV set on either side. Hard to explain, but really neat."

Free Rides on the Web2.0 Highwire

It's an awkward, mysterious place where commerce and Web 2.0 intersect. Open source projects, such as those sponsored by Google last summer, "This Is Cool" projects originated by developers on their own time, and sites hopeful of commercial viability live in a fragile space. Developer attention wanders. Interests shift. Social networks may grow but later shrink as the novelty wears off. Sites may not achieve viability, or fail to attract investor risk-taking.

This may or may not be the case with Voo2do.com, a lightweight personal "project management" site embraced by some adherents of David's Allen's Getting Things Done. It's been a handy tool, and today it's been down all day. Could be a momentary disruption, or the end of an experiment. Its user population is probably modest -- I have no idea -- but it's certainly much smaller than Flickr.

Come to think of it, how much does Flickr contribute to Yahoo's bottom line? Above the line, it must be a large bandwidth sinkhole (though less deep than for YouTube or MySpace). "Web2.0" experiments can be compelling -- e.g., PageFlakes or WidgetBox -- but relying on them for an important application is easily questioned. Never mind "important" -- think about all those family photos disappearing because they weren't backed up at home if Yahoo decides Flickr doesn't pay its way.

Bibus bibliographic database - Windows Notes

At AVI, we're testing Bibus as one of several vehicles for managing research bibliographies. I have used Refworks for more than a year, and also CiteuLike. There are collaboration options with these products, but for various reasons, we are unable to exploit them.

Bibus can be used for Windows, which is the platform of choice in the AVI farm.

There are some two installation-time tips to consider, which appear to affect the MySQL schema and/or underlying code that is installed.

Several screens only appear when the product itself, not a new SQL repository managined by Bibus, is installed. These include adding what is in our case, a necessary modification -- adding some sort of support for keywords. Keywords aren't included in the base product.

When installing, two additional screens appear. The first of these allows a few additional reference types (a la "journal," "book").

The second allows replacement of custom fields with specialized fields. Here we added "Keywords" which are used extensively in AVI bibliographies.

Unfortunately, Bibus does not support keywords directly. Data was imported using the "note" field and moved to the custom "keyword" field via SQL (or manually).

Minor nuisance: SQL must be used to remove references.

THE NEED

• A web service to Refworks or equivalent. Bibus solves an AVI problem but is only accessible through the Company VPN.

Learn Like People Do, Silly

Decades ago the AI community kicked around the idea that there was a rationale for teaching machines to learn in ways that resemble how people learn. At the time, there was little appreciation for how difficult that might be, but it was a healthy debate that has been lost in the "I can code that in ROR" wave.

Courtesy of Awesom-O, I was reminded of this by a recent announcement by Anybot that its robot learned to walk using machine learning methods.