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Unbelievable

Sunday, August 28, 2005

Read this!

URGENT – WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW ORLEANS LA
1011 AM CDT SUN AUG 28 2005

..DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED

HURRICANE KATRINA
A MOST POWERFUL HURRICANE WITH UNPRECEDENTED
STRENGTH…RIVALING THE INTENSITY OF HURRICANE CAMILLE OF 1969.

MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS…PERHAPS LONGER. AT
LEAST ONE HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL
FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL…LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY
DAMAGED OR DESTROYED.

THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL.
PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED. ALL WOOD
FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. CONCRETE
BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENTS WILL SUSTAIN MAJOR DAMAGE…INCLUDING SOME
WALL AND ROOF FAILURE.

HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY…A
FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT.

AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD…AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH
AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY
VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE
ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS…PETS…AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE
WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK.

POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS…AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN
AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING
INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF NATIVE TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY
THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING…BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED. FEW
CROPS WILL REMAIN. LIVESTOCK LEFT EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL BE
KILLED.

AN INLAND HURRICANE WIND WARNING IS ISSUED WHEN SUSTAINED WINDS NEAR
HURRICANE FORCE…OR FREQUENT GUSTS AT OR ABOVE HURRICANE FORCE…ARE
CERTAIN WITHIN THE NEXT 12 TO 24 HOURS.

ONCE TROPICAL STORM AND HURRICANE FORCE WINDS ONSET…DO NOT VENTURE
OUTSIDE!

MSZ080>082-282100-
HANCOCK-HARRISON-JACKSON-
1011 AM CDT SUN AUG 28 2005

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Dawn – Katrina – catagory 5

Sunday, August 28, 2005

Oh my, Katrina is now a category 5 hurricane. Hopefully she will both weaken a bit and not hit New Orleans.

New Orleans is like a bowl of chocolate pudding with the city pressing down on it’s skin. You can stand on the street in New Orleans and gaze up and over the levee to watch the huge ships above you..

John McPhee’s most excellent book Control of Nature has a section about all this.

Levees are an beautiful exemplar of public goods. Public goods come in various structures and levees are at one of the extremes. The quality of the levees is defined by the worse section of the leeve. The minimum over the set of all contributions defines the quality. In the early days, during a storm, men would get in a boat and head across the river to break the levees on the other side.

In the last century the Army Core of Engineers has spent vast sums of money keep the Mississippi river flowing past New Orleans. It really badly wants to switch to a different course far to the west.

Later, around noon east coast time

“Mayor Ray Nagin ordered an immediate evacuation Sunday for all of New Orleans … police and firefighters would fan out throughout the city telling residents to get out. … police would have the authority to commander any vehicle or building that could be used for evacuation or shelter … The hurricane’s landfall could still come in Mississippi and affect Alabama and Florida, but it looked likely to come ashore Monday morning on the southeastern Louisiana coast, said Ed Rappaport, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. That put New Orleans squarely in the crosshairs.

‘If it came ashore with the intensity it has now and went to the New Orleans area, it would be the strongest we’ve had in recorded history there,” Rappaport said in a telephone interview Sunday morning. “We’re hoping of course there’ll be a slight tapering off at least of the winds, but we can’t plan on that. So whichever area gets hit, this is going to be a once in a lifetime event for them.’… “We’re in for some trouble here no matter what,” he said. (more)

The photo at right is a sheet of plywood driven thru a palm tree by Hurricane Andrew, the last category 5 storm to this the US. More pictures here and here are pictures from Camille another category 5 storm which hit near New Orleans in 1969.

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Ker. Ching. – using network effects to dominate tiny markets

Sunday, August 28, 2005


In growing markets new buyers lack information to select the best vendor, the one that fits their needs best. In this absence of information they grasp at straws; other measures which they can understand. Proxies for quality. The simplest model for why you get highly skew’d distributions, like those seen in market share numbers, is to have new entrants link to whom ever already has a lot of links. Market share in one time period generates market share in the next; not just a little bit, but a lot! This is why early movers can have so strong an advantage. They can then create a brand – and a brand is nothing if not a proxy for doing the real work checking if a vendor fits your needs.

GapingVoid is yet another blog written by a consultant who’s attempting to puzzle out how the Internet is reshaping his craft. He’s a marketing consultant. For example he’s currently experimenting with liqouring up gatherings of bloggers to see if that rebounds to the benefit of one of his clients, a vineyard. One of his success stories is English Cut, a high end tailor – $4K/suit. This posting muses about how successful that experiment has been. It’s kind of guilty gloating. He quotes an observer who notes how the English Cut has captured the hub for high end tailoring. It’s become the brand in high end tailoring. He also muses that this kind of tailoring isn’t a particularly scalable business; double your customers doubles your work. Which is trouble if you have to do it all by hand yourself.

All this is very mysterious. Clearly blogs inject more information into the market. Since lack of data aids early movers blogs would appear to tempering early the mover advantage of the mindless linking to what ever is popular. But just as clearly blogs don’t do that. One reason they don’t: the blog gets caught up in it’s own early mover effect. Observe any class of blogs and you’ll find few hubs that arrived late to the game. Worse yet the late arriving hubs often appear to be explained by their association with older or larger hub. That skewed distribution means that if your a winner then it’s Ker. Ching. and if your not then your a dead body.

This seems to it implies that the globalization implicit in blogging is very damaging for small players. If the market doesn’t expand tremendously then blogging is just another tool for consolidating an industry. That blogging, in this case, is just another distribution channel – a distribution channel of marcom. Distribution channels define the links, The links lead to the skewed distribution. The skewed distribution creates a pile of dead bodies. Traditionally some industries, like high-end tailoring, because they don’t scale the participants don’t threaten each other and the members can be quite collegial. Enter the internet where the network effects rule and that collegiality at risk. It’s winner take all.

Filed in business modeling, power-laws and networks | Comments (0)

Trip to the Market

Friday, August 26, 2005

Got to wondering about the cost of that trip to Haymarket. The trip is about 15 miles round trip and I get about 20 miles to the gallon on that drive.

Let’s do this per day. The typical American drives about 30 miles per day. If I’m getting 20 miles per gallon overall then at $2.60/gallon that’s $3.90/day. The insurance is about $1.25/day. The car’s maintenance is about $2.50/day (for example the new tires will cost me $260 over the internet). I estimated the 5$/day depreciation using kbb.com. If capital costs me 5% a year and the car is worth $12K; then the cost of capital is about $1.60 day.


  $3.90  -- gas
  $5.00  -- depreciation
  $2.50  -- maintenance
  $1.60  -- cost of capital
  $1.25  -- insurance
---------
 $12.65  -- Total/day

   $.42   -- cost/mile assuming 30 miles/day

The 15 file trip to Haymarket included a dollar for parking so the trip to Haymarket cost about $7.33.

The IRS has 40.5 cents per mile for it’s standard milage rate. While these numbers for new cars are 15 or 25 cents higher.

Taking a cab would have cost about 4-5 times that much. The cost of the bus/subway combo pass is $2.34 per day. One reason I got to thinking about this was that we just shipped my son’s junk off to college and UPS charged a “fuel” surcharge; which let me to wonder what percentage of their costs actually are fuel. Shipping him, i.e. his plane flight, is amazingly cheap. 7.1 cents a mile.

So far I’ve updated this a few times. First because I had the wrong #s for the insurance; particularly because we just dropped my daughter off the insurance. Secondly because I’d forgotten the cost of capital (thanks Martin). Then we decided that the car’s trip computer is very confusing and I had the wrong distance to Haymarket. A few people have argued that my original $1.50/day for maintainance was too low, so I raised that. I originally estimated the depreciation by just playing with the milage; which got about ten cents a mile. I’ve now played with the age of the car and that adds another 7 cents a mile. Mark Denovich provided the autoclub data for new car cost of ownership. 9/13/05: IRS raises the milage rate to 48.5 cents per mile.

And then we have this poor guy.

Filed in natural-world | Comments (10)

Urban

Friday, August 26, 2005

On Fridays I usually go shopping downtown in Boston where we have one of the very few remaining vegtable markets. That shouldn’t be confused with farmers market, the stalls at Haymarket are run by people who’s only goal is to sell you vegtables; cheap, fast, and often crummy. It’s aggressively competitive down there.

My house is a first ring suburb. Such suburbs were made possibly by the steam train late in the 19th century. Since steam trains took a while to get up to speed and a while to bring to a stop these suburbs where, originally, surrounded by farms. The farms were driven out, progressivly, by the street car and then the automobile.

It’s a 15 mile drive from my house to Haymarket, or about $4.00 in gas round trip at current prices. It costs me another dollar to park at Haymarket, since there’s a deal. I easily save that much by buying my vegtables, sausage, cheese, etc. inside the competitive market. (Notice that rising gas prices should allow Walmart to raise prices. )

But I mostly do it because I love the dense, crowded, diverse, urban experiance. I like buying my sausage at the butcher with a cat. I like buying my pita bread from the eight year old son of the halal butcher who’s shop is in a basement. I like buying my green pepers from the amazingly old Italian lady, who unlike other vendors tends to sell only 2 or three things each week. And I always enjoy watching the tourists.

I’m a huge fan of cities. I really dislike the American enthusiasm for the rural. I agree with Steven Johnson’s comment: “I think the long tail premise has a tacit anti-urban bias to it, since it used to require big city scale to find obscure long tail books or albums that are now readily available to anyone with an Internet connection.” I’d go further and argue that all the vast majority of the happy long tail stories involve the emergence of a commercial entity that substitutes for an urban or civic institution; but the story tellers are carefully to remain blind to the risk that such private entities abuse the power that results.

Is the Internet good or bad for cities? Now there’s a question that merits some further work! I think it’s clear that cars, for example, were very bad for cities. Is the Internet better or worse than cars?

For example I find it facinating how the Internet can be a huge help in finding information about vendors and services in low density areas but if you look for similar information in the Bronx, Brooklyn, or down town Boston you find hardly anything. My hypothisis about that has been that vendors seek ways to connect with their customers and that if your issolated then the Internet provides a welcome way to create connections; but if your embedded in a dense urban area then the Internet is only yet another way to create connections.

Steve has a short article in Discover magazine that takes a look at this question. He talks a bit about how cities enable people to rondevous. So like my hypothisis it’s about connections. But he talks about things that benefit from physical connections. And he talks about how we might be able to build Internet systems, ala meet-up or dodge-ball, which have are synergistic with the city. What I found neat in the essay was the thought that there may well be a class of systems waiting to be built that strengthen and leverage urban density; systems that have little if any value for rural and suburban densities.

If such systems exist it would be a strong argument that the net can be good for cities.

Meanwhile the real mystery is what in the world was the guy in the suit buying six pounds of ginger root for?

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Authenticating Web Bugs

Thursday, August 25, 2005

This is a long rambling post about an authentication trick I’ve not observed used in the wild. But it’s analagous to two tricks often observed in the wild. This trick is a way to do authentication. It is a hybrid of the web bugs, used by firms to build models of user behavior, and the trick of creating personalized Ads. Like Amazon does for it’s donation buttons.

Here’s the scheme. All authentication schemes sooner or later work by having some third party vouch for the user. At that point there are always, at least, three parties in the game. The user who wishes to be authenticated. The site that wants to get to know him. And finally the third party that already knows the user and who the curious site also trusts.

Lots of third parties get used for this. Paypal has a trick where they satisfy their curiosity by depositing some pennies into your bank account and then you prove that it’s your account by telling them how many pennies they deposited. They also get you to reveal your bank account data as a bonus.

Google recently adopted the trick of sending a SMS message to your cell phone. As an added bonus they get you to reveal you cell phone #.

The most typical technique is to have you reveal your email address and then the curious site sends you an email and you prove that is in fact your email address.

The bank, the cell phone company, the email address provider are filling the role of third party that can vouch for you. Of course these are more or less trustworthy. Any third party with a ongoing relationship might fill this role. You library, you government, your ISP, Amazon, Yahoo, Google, your OS vendor.

So here’s the trick. Any of these could offer a service to curious sites. When you go to set up a new account the curious site could place a web bug or larger image on account set up page.

The trick involves what we put into that image. What if we put a one time pin into that image? The user then copies the pin from the image into the account sign up page. The site he’s signing up with then takes that data and queries the 3rd party site to setup the account.

Of course a firm like DoubleClick can offer fraud protection services without the bother of getting permission from the user, and they could use web bugs to do that. But the key thing here is that the user is explicitly in the loop, he is implicitly granting permission for the trusted third party to help with authenticating him as he sets up the account.

Notice one key thing. While in the examples above the users bank account, cell phone #, or email address was revealed to the curious site. In fact the higher the level of trust the 3rd party enjoys the more serious the bit of information revealed. This scheme breaks that pattern. The 3rd party doesn’t need to reveal anything beyond the fact that they know the user. They don’t have to give up any account data. The user can remain pretty close to anonymous. Of course if more information needs to be revealed that can be arranged.

This scheme is slightly analagous to OpenID. In that system users are prompted by the curious site for their OpenID url. The site then uses that to fetch a page of info about them, and on that page is a pointer to a 3rd party that can vouch for them (well vouch that they control the page in quesiton). But actually this is quite different because the OpenID design forces the user to reveal a universal identifier, i.e. his OpenID url. While this system requires only that the user admit he has a relationship with the the trusted third party.

This is also analagous to the common scarab systems where a site places a branded scarab on their page and the user is encouraged to click on it to authenticate. These scarabs don’t need to be web bugs and usually aren’t. So unlike the Amazon donation scheme only the third party’s brand appear on them and nothing showing how the third party recognizes this users.

Scarab schemes didn’t gain traction in the market. The curious sites hated them because the threatened their customer relationships. The scarab vendors, like Passport, looked like they would stick their nose into the middle of the relationship. One term used for that entanglement is “account linking” the authentication site and the curious site both have account relationships with the user and part of the design for most of these systems involved linking these accounts. Another way to describe the fear that the scarab vendors would intrude on the the relationship of the curious sites is to say that they feared that one account would become subordinate to the other one. For example that before the user could get to his eBay account he would need to pass thru his dominate Passport acount.

The scheme outline here involves no account linking at all. The in this scheme the trusted third party X is only providing a single service – a means for the user to prove to the curious site that he has a relationship with X. That’s it. That’s less likely to threaten the curious sites.

The point of all that is that we reduce the threat to the user and the curious site.

This is also analagous to the capcha schemes. They present a puzzle to the user that by solving increases the site’s confidence that the user is a human. In this case we are asking the user to prove he has a sufficently high quality relationship with a third party site. Since such relationships are, presumably, difficult to obtain – i.e. they take time.

While there are two things I like about this scheme – very little is revealed about the user and no long term account linking is done – it is tempting to do a modicum of durable linking.

After the user enters the pin presented to him the curious site then queries the trusted site to see if that pin is valid. The trusted site can reply yes, no, or it might send back something more complex. Anything more complex implies either more revealing or more linking.

If the third party site hands back a token representing the user that allows further transactions about that user. For example if the curious site uses this to prevent spam his blog that token could be used later to report a spam event back to the trust site. that seems like a fine use. Of course it could also be used to send back more private or slanderous info about the user.

Tokens like the one in that example are common in account linking designs. They denote the linking.

Meanwhile if you suffered thru this entire thing I’m amazed! But here’s an amusing variation on this idea. How about a scheme were you can only comment on a blog if you make a small donation to one of the set of charities selected by the blog’s operator.

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Upgrade your Open Source License, Cash back on your cell phone bill!

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

This is a note about how to save a few hundred dollars on your Verizon cellphone bill, and why you should seriously consider switching from a BSD or old Apache style license to the new cooler Apache 2.0 license.

Standards reduce the diversity of behavior. Reducing that diversity creates efficiencies and free up resources for other activities, other kinds of diversity. In some cases the efficiencies are huge, as in the example standard of driving on the right. In other cases the efficiencies are subtle, as in knowing somebody is in your tribe and can be trusted to share a stake in the tribe’s commons.

To get a feel for how diverse a range of behaviors appears in the real world it helps if you can get a statistical distribution. For example I’d love to know the distribution over various forms of greetings: the quaker handshakes, namaste, high-five, etc.

Generally these distributions are power-law. The chart on the right shows the distribution of various open source licenses. It’s pulled from an earlier posting.

When a new kind of behavior appears on the scene you get a lot of diversity. People experiment with assorted approaches. Different people care about different things. Some people want a very short license. Some people want credit for their work. Some folks are concerned about protecting the commons. Other people want to encourage adoption. People revise sentences to make them more readable. Lawyers practice their craft, inserting proven boiler plate or look out for whatever they happen to think is in their their clients’ best interests.

These processes generate a lot of diversity, a lot of bogosity, and some innovation. Clearly the entire idea of an open source license was a huge innovation. The discovery that the license could protect the commons was huge. That licenses effect how your code creates and taps network externalities is still not fully understood and even less fully appreciated.

There is a lot of mimicry and random mutation. For example the Apache Group mimicked the license on BSD. A lot of people mimicked the Apache license. Some of those mimics just change the name of who held the copyright, but a lot of them added, removed, or rewrote clauses for various reasons.

This early stage, the bloom of diversity, is followed by a period of consolation. At one level that’s kind of sad. Some cool innovations die out, for example some of the rewrites that made the license more readable don’t survive. Some of the innovations fall by the way because they aren’t tied to the wagon of one of the big winners.

Some of it is good, very good. Craft knowledge accumulates. Interoperablity is enabled, Resources aggregate around the winners. The good ideas are aggregated. The newer Apache license is a perfect example of this process at work. The new license maybe a lot longer, which sad, but it’s a lot more robust. It solves a number of important problems. Problems that really need to be addressing. For example it is a lot more careful about protecting the code from malicious infection by contributor IP rights. It also solves some perfectly silly problems, like how to avoiding having to put your entire license at the top of every source file.

It’s interesting how the revision of licenses is exactly like the problem of upgrading an installed base of software. All those licenses that mimic the older Apache license are like an installed base. It’s very hard to get them to upgrade. The classic metaphor for upgrading an installed base is: Build them a golden bridge, and then set a fire behind them. I doubt anybody can implement that plan in the open source licensing world. I suspect people will try. But that metaphor is an interesting example of how a seemingly minor detail in the license in one time frame can become extremely valuable in a later time frame. It’s one reason that many agreements between a firm and a consumer typically contain a clause that allows the vendor to casually change them later. I gather that Verizon recently changed their cell phone contract and one fall out is that the subscribers can bail without paying the early termination charges.

It is clear to me, that people in the Apache or BSD licensing community would be well served by upgrading their licenses to the new Apache license. Just to be clear that doesn’t imply assigning copyright to the foundation. The new license is just plain better than the old one.

The license is here and the FAQ is here.

Filed in open source, standards | Comments (0)

Monday, August 22, 2005


That chart should say: $57K per household; or around $500 a month.

The chart is based on four predictions about the future:

  • Government services: track GDP
  • War: exit strategy lowers the cost to a third of current levels
  • Taxes:
    • Alternative Minimum Tax is revised to not bite the middleclass.
    • Bush’s tax cuts are extended.

You might be curious about how the Congressional Budget Office is manipulated into making assuptions about those that are so very different. For example why the war is entirely off their books.

Each of these has it’s constituency so you can see how the political battles are going to play out. For example there is $1.7 trillion in the Social Security Trust Fund. For example, at $100 dollars a barrel the Iraq oil reserves are worth $30 trillion.

Or you could come at from the other side and wonder who’s going to lend us that money. Currently Asia governments are said to hold $2.3 trillion of our paper.

Filed in General, politics | Comments (0)

emacs & ssh directory tracking via tramp

Sunday, August 21, 2005

I use tramp a lot in emacs to edit files on various machines. I also use ssh and shell buffers for all my terminal interaction. This patch lets you set ssh-directory-tracking to use tramp. The patch didn’t apply perfectly to my version of ssh.el, so there was some minor hand work. You then need to set the dir tracking to T. I also needed to change the ssh-tramp-tracking-mode from “sm” to “scp”. It made me happy.

Update:

My current version of emacs (Aquamacs) has this functionality baked in.  So now I have this in my startup file.

(require ‘ssh)
(require ‘advice)
(defadvice ssh (after ssh-fs-hook activate)
(message “tracking…”)
(ssh-directory-tracking-mode))

Filed in programming | Comments (0)

Asterisk: The Greasemonkey of Telephony

Saturday, August 20, 2005

I love it! GreaseMonkey as role model.

But, it’s an excellent analogy. Asterisk is a cool platform for clientside hacking. I gather there was a time long long ago when all the innovation in telephony ask taking place around PBX being sold to corporations. I gather that bloom of innovation was rolled up and moved back into the central offices after a while.

There is another round of innovation happening around asterisk.

Brian discussed some really creative uses, like an Asterisk based system using a webcam and other components costing under $100 that will ring the line of your choice when it senses movement. Or one of his students, who’s built an Asterisk based wakeup call system built for and used by his peers. Or a system that pings connections for his wireless ISP, and if receiving five timeouts places a call to the support technician including directions, problem description and more. Or a system that allows for a business with offices in geographies as varied as Boston and Tokyo to not only route support calls automatically to the office that’s open, but allow for local calling between them.

Asterisk isn’t particularly friendly, but even so none of those is particularly difficult. I wonder if there is a web site like userscripts.org for asterisk hacks; the closes thing is voio-info.org but that’s more a developer support site rather than a hub of hacks.

Filed in open source, programming | Comments (0)