Downloads from MS Research. Interesting bag of stuff up here – Downloads

National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. Finally read this over the weekend. One glaring hole I saw was the lack of treatment of vendors of cyberspace equipment as a class separate from enterprises/businesses.

A motivating example: I have, on my Windows XP system, software and hardware created by the following vendors: Microsoft Corp, Award Software, Intel, ATI, Creative, Voxware, DSP Group, Sipro Lab Telecom, Fraunhofer Institut, Radius, Toshiba, HP, Buslogic, SCM Microsystems, Lotus, Adobe, AOL, Macromedia. These are just the vendors I could identify. This is just the software and hardware that comes on the PC as I bought it.

Additionally I have installed software (sometimes downloaded, sometimes purchased at retail) from the following vendors: Microsoft, Symantec, PersonalBrain, Xteq, Panterasoft, Lavasoft, RIM, Caesius, tamosoft, EasyDesk, Macromedia, Paramind, Apple, Dummysoftware, Winzip. Alkonost, Izymail, Groove. And probably two dozen more that I have uninstalled and no longer have a memory of.

In each of these cases, the corporations that created the software may or may not be located in the US, and if outside the US, may be located in countries whose interests are not aligned with those of the US. Even if located in the US, the companies may very well use foreign development offices, or may subcontract development to organizations located in other countries..

How are we insuring that all this software and hardware is performing the functions they are intended to perform, and don?t include some functionality hidden away to be accessed illicitly by some third party? Is there any inspection of this technology before it is made available in our markets? Who is doing the inspecting, do they have adequate access to source code and source design documents? Once inspected, how do we know that changes aren?t made by vendors ? is there any digital signing of executable content to permit detection of changes later?

There are a ton of issues here. Not at all sure what I think the right strategy is. But this is a hole you can drive a truck through.

Air gun. Cool! Save this one away for next year – this would be a great part of my pirate scene.

Winstep. I keep seeing cool content for this on lockergnome. Going to dive in and try WinStep. Ok I tried it. Can’t say I love it. More extreme stylistic control over my start menu, taskbar, but not clear this actually helps me any. Many of the designs are unreadable. Not for me. I want a shell replacement that is more functional, not one that is just different looking and potentially more expressive.

Squeak. Alan Kay’s latest dealie – Welcome to Squeak. Might be worth dorking around with.

UltraEdit. Another reco from Lockergnome that I need to try – Text Editor - HEX Editor - HTML Editor - Programmers Editor - UltraEdit

Halloween Status. Spent the day converting a shipping box into a scary crate. I’ll throw in some straw, some pulsing light, maybe some fog emissions.

BCS. We don’t get BCS ratings til mid-October but look at this – ESPN.com: NCF - Inside The BCS

BCS Projected Top 10 Three of the computers have not yet released their rankings this season, but based on what we have to work with, here is how the BCS Rankings would theoretically stand through games of Sept. 28. 1. Miami 2. Virginia Tech 3. Ohio State

Yee ha! Number 3. Go Bucks.

Buckeyes. Nice game yesterday – good thing Maurice was back. But the offense had a little more depth – Gamble played well, Krenzel started to hit receivers. The dispatch posts a nice photo gallery from each game by the way.

Two more games (Northwestern and SJ State) to work the kinks out before the brutal Penn State/Wisconsin back-to-back. That will be the measure of this team – can they focus and put away these first two teams they ought to beat, and then survive two tough opponents back-to-back. If the Buckeyes are still undefeated on Halloween then they will be quite a team.

Kudos to UW Admissions site. This chart is great, provides very clear direction to students about their likelihood of admission at the U. Last year’s version was even more detailed but this is still great. Wish every university did this.

WIFI Terminology. I love Ray Ozzie’s terminology for WIFI – 11G, 54G. Not sure if he invented or if that is common use somewhere.

War Ringing. Hey Tong you need to do this – a distinctive weblogger ring for your nokia. Another feature for our BlogPhone.

Regression Analysis. I used to run regressions all day long when I worked at Booz-Allen – trying to unearth manufacturing cost behaviour as a function of scale, complexity, etc. Back in those days I used a calculator or a package that was called StatGraphics on the pc, which i see is still around. I remember forcing Booz-Allen to buy IBM PC ATs so that we could run StatGraphics faster.

I just did my first regression in years. Just used the data analysis pak that comes with Excel. Really easy. Flipping variables and observations in and out of the set is not very easy, but the basics work fine. Charts aren’t very exciting either. I bet there is a better add-in to use – Google lists quite a few.

I was analyzing VC returns for most recent funds. What I learned – fully half the variation in returns to date is unexplained by quantitative variables (at least the ones I had at my disposal). Sector focus? Quality of VC staff? Hard to know. Of the rest, returns are most correlated with number of deals, and % of fund invested. Still wrapping my head around this but seems to say: don’t by shy about putting your money to work, and spread it around across a lot of deals (portfolio theory at work)?

Halloween. Time for the Halloween blog color makeover. This weekend is the beginning of the big house transformation. All the external carriage lights get flicker bulbs this weekend, and the floods and uplights go to blue filters. Probably start to deploy fog and sound cabling this weekend too.

A Blogging Phone. Tong and I were riffing today about what a great blogging phone would be. My phone today is a crappy part of my blog lifestyle. I can painfully enter content thru the tripletap/tegic interface and i can painfully see my blog thru the wap browser. But it is all so painful that i never do it. There is work to be done on the input side, and the viewing side, and then on the phone/blog integration side.

Input: There are a couple aspects of current and future phones that are most important. One, the phone is a voice device. Let me call in and place audio content on my blog. Some people are playing around with audio blog content – for instance Audio Blogger – so lets yoke that to a phone so that I can call in from anywhere and place content on the blog. Speech Reco and autoconversion to text would be a bonus (if the reco quality is good enough to be useful). Two, we need to do work on the button set on the phone. One path is to add a keyboard ala the Handspring Treo. There may be another path with a more limited set of blog buttons – the fully customizable skin platform of Wildseed will help here. Certainly the button space dedicated to WAP today could be repurposed to better use. Finally, the wan has a lot of latency and intermittency, so let’s make sure the post model is fully async – that is one of the best features of the blackberry – it doesn’t try to force a sync model on an async network.

Output: I don’t want to see full web pages on my phone. The screen just doesn’t permit that. And the screen is always going to be small, until we have some future magic display technology that unrolls or displays full pages on my retina or something that I am not going to bet on in the medium term. So we need to tailor blog viewing to fit the small screen. Some people have toyed around with voice rendering of content – for instance Blogger, VoiceXML, and TellMe Studio. I think there may be some value there but let’s start more simply and just have an RSS reader/aggregator built into the phone. RSS does a great job of stripping off all the formatting fluff and letting me see the pithy summary, exactly what the phone needs. Maybe you combine this with voice rendering and voice render RSS headlines. But RSS is the start.

Phone/Blog integration. Many cool things to do here. Autopost my call history to my blog – the phone numbers and friendly names as I decide. Autopopulate my phonebook with my blogrollers if they publish a phone number. Autopopulate my blogroll with my phonebook. Obviously configure the RSS aggregator on the PC side. Push my call forwarding rules to my blog and let me edit them there. Publish my voice mail as audio blog items (at my wish). Have the idle screen on my phone display scrolling RSS updates. There may be some cool presence information we could integrate back into our blogs.

I’d love to know what others think we could do to create a great blogging phone. Or how people would use such a device if one existed. I’m going to encourage my friends at Wildseed to put some of these ideas into their product plans.