Category: Technology

Collateral Damage

The US Government yesterday shut down popular file storage site Megaupload (I can’t link to it because the site is down). The Feds have a very well written, 72-page indictment indicating the illegal activity that was going on there and the fact that the stuff pretty well knew that they were making their millions by selling files they didn’t own. That aspect of the case will be covered in court, and, whether or not you agree with the circumstances, it’s not what I want to cover here.

The problem is, of course, that there are tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of users who used Megaupload for perfectly legitimate, legal storage of files. As of yesterday, all their access to those files is gone. Work documents that groups were collaborating on, family photo albums, insurance records, and other valuable documents, now completely unavailable.

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Stop PIPA and SOPA

I have the regrettable honor to live in the congressional district of Lamar Smith, sponsor of the more regrettable SOPA and PIPA bills. Here is the letter I sent him this morning:

Dear Sir,

SOPA and PIPA are bad laws that fundamentally affect the freedoms enjoyed by Americans. I do not want to see the USA using the same techniques as China and Iran to control our citizens. Moreover, I have worked in the Internet industry—previously, as an engineering manager for Yahoo!, and currently as a software architect for Rackspace hosting—and I can tell you that these laws, if passed, would create huge burdens on providers while actually doing very little to stop piracy.

I encourage you to drop your support for these laws. No businesses have ever been successful in the long term by using the legal system to repress competition, and these acts will simply NOT stop the mechanisms used, nor the motivations for, sharing illegal content. The solution to intellectual property infringement is NOT to place a huge burden on businesses to enforce someone else’s rights, and I, for one, am appalled as the loss of freedoms that have occurred in the USA to such an extent that such laws could even be conceived.

Yours sincerely,
Glen Campbell

Pile up the photos

PhotoPile.me is a really cool site that lets you view all of your Instagram photos at once. Ok, maybe not all of them, but a nice big pile of them that’s really quite striking. Here’s mine (click through to see the live site):

Very cool (at least if you use Instagram).

How I invented Web 2.0

I recently took down all of my Siteframe-based websites. Because of the innovative nature of some of the technology (if I may be so bold), I’ve written up a brief history of Siteframe for your perusal.

Let me know if you have any questions.

 

Siteframe

In 1997, I acquired a Contax T*IX camera. It used APS film, and was small and light, and had an extraordinary Carl Zeiss lens. After a year or two, I upgraded to a Contax G1, an innovative autofocus rangefinder camera in 35mm format (which also had superb Carl Zeiss lenses). Looking for more information, I found an Internet mailing list for other Contax G enthusiasts. By 1999, I had purchased the domain contaxg.com and had set up a primitive website for sharing photos among the members of the mailing list. People would email me the photos, and I would manually edit the pages and upload the images.

In 2000, I moved from England to Silicon Valley. I converted an old PC to run Linux, and I started running contaxg.com over my DSL line. Managing the site manually had become a burden, so I built a somewhat less primitive site using PHP where people could upload their own images. I had never had a lesson in the Internet protocols, and I didn’t know the difference between GET, POST, and HEAD, so I made a lot of mistakes, but I learned a lot, too.

I took that learning and created what I called a “website toolkit,” a set of code that could be used to deploy an image-sharing website. By February of 2001, this had become the first version of Siteframe, a website framework that encapsulated much of what would become known as “Web 2.0″—it supported user-submitted content, it allowed online editing, it had comments, notifications, “skins,” and most of the features that differentiate dynamic, user-managed sites from the static websites of old. The web had become a toolbox, not a display window.

My experience with Siteframe helped me get my first Internet-related job as a PHP developer at Yahoo! News. Siteframe went through multiple iterations; it was used as a legal search engine and it was used as an internal content-management system for some Yahoo! sites. When the Indonesian tsunami hit in 2005, someone used Siteframe to set up a website that was used for the next several years to share documents and information among various international relief agencies.

At its peak, I was receiving about 20,000 email registrations per year for Siteframe. Alas, the pressures of time and family and other commitments kept me from working on it, and it stagnated. As hackers became more and more sophisticated, more and more security vulnerabilities were revealed. Techniques that were commonplace in 2002 for building a website turned out to open gaping holes in the site’s (often minimal) defenses.

Earlier this year (2010), someone used a vulnerability in Siteframe to hack one of my servers and use up more than 22 terabytes of bandwidth in just a few hours. The resulting charges caused me to take down all my remaining Siteframe sites.

The code for Siteframe is now available on Github, but I strongly recommend against using it for a production website. Hopefully, someone will take it over and maintain it, but I would not bet on it. There are newer, better technologies available for the same purpose.

I like to tell people that I invented Web 2.0 and, to a certain extent, it’s true. contaxg.com allowed people to take control of their web content long before sites like Flickr and Picasa came on the scene. I learned a lot about photography, PHP, HTTP, the Internet, and security. And I met a ton of really creative people along the way. Many thanks to everyone who participated.

Glen Campbell
San Antonio, Texas
28 December 2011

Links

The Kindle Fire

Thanks to the kindness of Santa Claus, I received a Kindle Fire for Christmas. Here are some of my first impressions.

First, as many others have noted, this is not really intended to be a generic tablet device aimed at toppling the iPad’s dominance of the market. It really is an upgraded Kindle with enhanced abilities to consume Amazon’s content: books, music, and video. It performs those tasks extremely well. Moreover, you can install selected apps from the Amazon App Store, so I can also view my Netflix movies in addition to the Amazon ones. Should I need to, I can check my email, though it must be said that the setup and usage is a sad disappointment to those of us who are familiar with Apple’s flawless execution in that department.

Let me expand on that point a bit: Apple’s iOS does things so well, users come to expect it. My primary email is on Google Apps; when I set it up in iOS, I specify “Gmail” as the provider, give it my email address and password, and voila! everything is set up perfectly. On the Kindle, I have to fill out an entire page of information, supplying the IMAP and SMTP server names and choosing authentication methods (Plain? CRAM_MD5?). Once set up, however, it worked fine.

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Remembering Steve

Steve Jobs passed away yesterday, and the tributes from the world were immediate and overwhelming. He’s been called the greatest inventor since Thomas Edison, a visionary, and even Bill Gates said that it was an “insanely great honor” to have known him. It’s hard to imagine another individual whose life has touched the world in quite the way, or to the same extent, than Steve Jobs.

IBM may have made the “personal computer,” but it was Steve Jobs who made the computer personal. Personally, I cannot imagine how the world would be different without the effect his singular vision has had on how computers and machines interact with each other. He was perpetually pushing us to “think different” and to do things better than we ever imagined. The list of his successful products are being listed all over the web.

But I’m also interested in his failures; if ever there was a person who learned from his mistakes, it was Steve Jobs. Do you recall the “Cube,” the beautiful but feeble Macintosh? He learned that beauty was not enough to make a good product; it also had to have performance.

The original “iPod Phone,” made in conjunction with Motorola, was a joke. With a crappy user interface and limited to only holding 100 songs (can you imagine?), this worst seller forced Jobs to confront the real problems in the phone business, resulting, ultimately, in the iPhone, the “smart phone” that changed the entire industry.

The Apple TV was, and still is, one of those “little projects” that Apple still plays with. It has its enthusiasts, but it’s never really caught on in the wider populace. Yet Apple keeps tinkering with it, convinced that there’s “something there.” Will Apple ever get it right?

So much product development consists of tiny, incremental changes. Much of it is based upon user feedback; this is good, but users don’t think outside the box. They don’t imagine things in a vastly different way than they already exist. When all personal computers had a command line and a 24×80 character display, Jobs envisioned (with the help of Xerox PARC) a fully graphical user interface in the hands of every single computer user. While the iPod wasn’t the first music player with a hard disk, it was the first to offer an online store, with the full participation of record labels, where users could simply purchase and download music as opposed to ripping MP3′s from their CDs. When every computer “had” to have a floppy disk drive, Jobs sold the iMac without one. (Side note: when my wife and I got our MacBook Airs, she insisted on getting the plug-in CD drive. We’ve never used it.)

The world is a better place because of you, Steve, and we will miss you.