40 Spiritual Leaders on Awakening in 40 Days of Teleseminars

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February 8, 2010 · Posted in spirituality  
This event looks awfully good. Forty different spiritual leaders from a wide range of spiritual traditions and paths, including a number of household names, will offer teachings via MaestroConference hosting between Feb. 17 and April 3. No cost but time. I plan to get to as many of these as possible.

Let me know if you'll be participating, too; maybe we can chat here in Facebook about what we're learning.

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Is Microsoft Creatively Dead?

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February 8, 2010 · Posted in Technology  
A former Microsoft exec opined in a New York Times editorial that the company has lost its ability to innovate and in the process created a dysfunctional culture that means the beginning of the end of its dominance of the computer world.

As is so often the case, The WEEK magazine offers a nicely balanced set of takes on the subject including a quite rare take from Microsoft's own official blog. My take is that this is all pretty much irrelevant. Microsoft is so huge and has such amazing momentum that if it were to begin an immediate and precipitous decline today, it would still be a measurable force in our industry in five years.

I'm sure that somewhere there is a study of some sort done by some bright Ph.D. candidate proving that the larger a company gets, the less it can innovate as it becomes a slave to its installed base of existing products and technologies. Thus the pace of innovation inevitably slows. One reason Apple is so much more innovative is its relatively small size. It has less to lose by breaking with the past as evidenced by the revolutionary evolution of its operating system in the past few years. Meanwhile, remnants of DOS remain in Windows because the perceived cost to users of changing those pieces would be too great.

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HOLY CRAP! SAINTS WIN!!

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February 7, 2010 · Posted in Football  
Wow. What can I say? I was hoping and praying and mojo-ing against all odds and the Saints — America's New Team — pulled off a major and convincing upset. One of the best Super Bowls of all time. What a game. What a win. What a huge message. I am loving it!! Whodat?

Wooooooohooooooo!!!!!

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I Would SO Love the Saints to Win Today, But…

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February 7, 2010 · Posted in Football  
I love New Orleans. I mean really love it. I love all the stuff everyone else loves: music, food, ambience, people, history….the whole nine yards. And I, like most people who have spent time there, have a lot of my own special memories that keep me romancing the place in my mind and my vision.

This afternoon my time when the Saints take on the Indianapolis Colts machine in Super Bowl LXIV in Miami, I will be hoping and praying and meditating and mojo-ing for them to beat the tar out of the smart-alec, technocratic Peyton Manning bunch. I really will. I've scoured the Web and found a few intrepid souls who think the Saints might not only have a realistic shot today but that they might even win this one.

But I'm suspicious that the Colts will prove too much for my second-favorite football team on the planet. "Whodat" is likely to turn into "Who WAS that?"

In many ways, this game epitomizes the numerous dichotomies in our American culture. It's the efficient technocrats against a bunch of "just guys" whose style is more freelance. It's the perennial and historical winners against the perennial and hysterical losers. It's regimented Sousa marches against invisibly disciplined jazz. It's method vs. passion.

If I've learned anything fundamental about America's socio-political makeup in the past decade, it is that as a people we seem to prefer streamlined, passionless bureaucratic efficiency over the sometimes messy and undisciplined serendipity of the impassioned compassionate leader who somehow manages to do the Right Thing almost accidentally. We prefer predictability over surprise, clear-cut "good" and "bad" guys in a world of infinite shades of gray.

In that world, my Saints don't have a chance. But I hold out one hope and that is that the power of hope and joy and love and bliss and belief can and sometimes does overcome the ruthless efficiency of the Machine. If that happens today, you can be sure of one thing: I'll be shouting and screaming and doing what passes for dancing in my life. If the likely outcome comes out, though, I'll congratulate the Colts and tune in on TV Tuesday when the Saints have their Super Bowl win-or-lose-because-we-love-you parade in the Big Easy. Meanwhile, I'm going to see if I can find a recipe for white chocolate bread pudding like they make at The Palace in the Quarter and put on a little Terrence Blanchard.

Y'all enjoy.

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CAPTCHA Alternatives Abound

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February 6, 2010 · Posted in Web technology  
After my earlier post about an alternative approach to CAPTCH that I discovered today, I decided to spend a few minutes looking at what alternative approaches are being used and how accessible they are to programmers. I must say I was impressed by my findings, particularly since I focused this particular search only on WordPress plugins.

Why WordPress? Three reasons:

  1. I've been studying WordPress lately for some actual site work I'm doing for myself and two clients.
  2. WordPress has such a huge following that it borders on being a standard.
  3. It is pretty easy to find WordPress plugins without spending hours rummaging around the Web's attic.
I found that several different CAPTCHA approaches are available as easy-to-configure plugins for WordPress, including:

  • Saber which allows you to choose from among image, math or text tests, set the complexity of math challenges, email link confirmations before post, and a number of other altrnatives
  • NoSpamX uses an interesting idea of creating hidden form fields that a human wouldn't see and therefore wouldn't fill in but that a spambot would find and fill in because it blindly fills in all fields on a form.
  • WP Captcha-Free creates two hashes, one for login and one for comment post and compares them to detect the probability that a bot is at work.
  • WP-NOTCAPTCHA takes an interesting approach. It presents the user with three icons and instructs him or her to rotate them so they are properly oriented. I find this one particularly intriguing because not only would it seem, at least, to be all but unbreakable, but it is language-independent as well.
  • Mollom is like NoSpamX and WP Catcha-Free in that it is transparent to the user. It uses intelligent text analysis to filter out probable spam and then confronts suspected spambots with a dynamic CAPTCHA challenge so that only suspects get the experience.
I'm sure there are libraries in PHP and other popular programming and scripting languages to implement these same strategies but clearly the world of CAPTCHA is one with lots of attention focused on it.

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A Much Better Form of CAPTCHA

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February 6, 2010 · Posted in Web technology  
I really hate most encounters I have with CAPTCHA. Visually obscured random groups of distorted letters and numbers tend, for those of us in the older-Netizen crowd, to become sometimes insurmountable barriers to accomplishing a goal on the Web. Last week, I abandoned an attempt to do something on a Microsoft site (I can't recall now what; I found a non-Microsoft alternative) after 12 — that's right 12!! — failed attempts to reproduce the CAPTCHA code in an entry form.

Today I had a CAPTCHA encounter of a different type. I'm reviewing a product called Titanium Appcelerator and I ran into a question about one of the SDKs it supports. I logged into the forums and posted my note. At the end, I was face with the question, "The opposite of down is" followed by a box into which to type my answer. A second use resulted in my being asked a similar question, one a human could read and easily answer (even if English weren't one's first language) but which a bot roaming the Web looking for forums in which to spew spam would utterly fail. This is a great idea. I realize it might be less secure than the obfuscated characters or words used in most such systems but almost all of which is being protected against bot-spam is not of such enormous value that attempting to make it absolutely impossible for a non-human to access it is worth the aggravation of driving even one qualified human away from your site.

Wikipedia says, "Even an audio and visual CAPTCHA will require manual intervention for some users, such as those who have visual disabilities and also are deaf. There have been various attempts at creating CAPTCHAs that are more accessible. Attempts include the use of JavaScript, mathematical questions ("what is 1+1"), or "common sense" questions ("what color is the sky on a clear day"). However they do not meet both the criteria of being able to be automatically generated and not relying on the type of CAPTCHA being new to the attacker." I'd disagree. First, the "such as those" is too limited. I encountered two CAPTCHA challenges in the past two weeks that had audio assist but in both cases the audio had also been badly distorted. I couldn't understand it and neither could three much younger people I asked to try it. Second, although it's true this type of CAPTCHA can't be auto-generated, it does not rely on the type being new to a would-be attacker or bot, just that the question be new or unpredictable. Again, as I said above, this type of security doesn't need to be ironclad, just strong enough that all but an inveterate hacker will be unable or unwilling to expend the effort to defeat it.

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An old product cover painting

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February 5, 2010 · Posted in Personal  
Back in the heyday if Apple’s HyperCard, I wrote a program called Dan Shafer’s ScriptExpert. My good friend David Gewirtz of HperPress published it.

For the package, he commissioned a custom painting. I still have a framed copy on my wall. It has a lot of levels of meaning and significance for me.

I thought it worth sharing.

Sent from my iPhone because my MacBook Air is just too heavy. :-)

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Yep, I’m Focusing Much More on Web Tech These Days

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February 5, 2010 · Posted in Personal, Web technology  

I got a nice note from a long-time reader this morning. She said, “Gee, Dan, it seems like you’ve sort of backed way off commenting on politics and sports and are focusing more on Web technology and smartphone stuff with a smattering of spiritual content. Does this reflect a conscious shift on your part or is it just how news and awareness are happening for you these days?”

Good question.

I’d say it’s both. I think they’re interrelated (but that’s a spiritual discussion for another topic!). It has seemed to me that sports and politics are among the most common blog topics. There are literally thousands of folks who spend a huge amount of their time and energy on those topics and I find that I seldom if ever present a really fresh perspective on these ideas. I may from time to time find a way to express an existing idea or insight more clearly than perhaps others have, but that’s a pretty small contribution.

Tech, of course, is probably the most discussed topic on the Web, but here I think I do offer not only fresh insights but an unusual if not unique perspective, that of a semi-pro programmer with a very broad, eclectic background in languages and technologies who truly champions end users. Also, my day job keeps me very focused on Web app and smartphone technology, so I am exposed to a lot more material in that area than in any other.

As for spirituality, it’s my real passion, my real life. I am in fact moving steadily toward a major shift in that direction this year but most of my writing time is spent not on relatively short blog entries. Rather, I’m revising my first spiritual book and playing a lot with my second one, gearing up my new online community membership site to launch this spring, and doing lots of teaching. That leaves less time for bloggy stuff, but I know the day is coming when I’ll be focusing half or more of my time and energy there, so I’m good with it.

Meanwhile, continue to look for me to emphasize Web and smartphone app development where the common thread is at least JavaScript if not the entire HTML5 suite of tools and approaches. I see these as the new frontier for the person I describe as the Inventive User (a phrase I coined 30 years ago in the halcyon days of HyperCard).

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Study: Web Apps Will Outpace Phone Apps for a While Yet

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February 3, 2010 · Posted in Web technology  
ReadWrite Web today features an article by Richard MacManus highlighting findings from a study by mobile search company Taptu of the market for smartphone apps by type. The conclusion Taptu seems to draw is that for some kinds of apps (notably commerce and social) HTML5-based Web apps that run in the browser are going to be dominant while for others (primarily games & entertainment), dedicated apps will be the rule. They also predict that Web apps will grow much faster than standalone apps. Taptu estimates that there are 326,000 “Mobile Touch Web sites” (their phrase for Web apps aimed at mobile consumption) worldwide, which they say compares to 148,000 iPhone apps in the App Store and 24,000 apps in the Android market.

I tend to agree with both conclusions. If anything, I think Taptu may be fudging a bit on the side of smartphone apps. For the next year or so, I think shifting specs and the absence of a truly complete cross-platform development environment for smartphone apps combined with the increasing visibility and popularity of HTML5 are going to make Web apps more and more attractive as vehicles for deploying hand-held and iPad content. Even before we factor in the Flash vs. HTML5 battle — in fact, before HTML5 is a major issue — Web apps constructed with the proper coding to behave properly on a smartphone will be a much faster and more intelligent route to getting stuff working on the iPhone and iPad.

It’s the direction I’m going to take, for sure.

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Flash “vs” HTML5: Excellent Summary on CNET

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February 3, 2010 · Posted in Web technology  
Stephen Shankland at CNET.com has an excellent analysis and profile of the burgeoning Flash vs. HTML5 “war” brewing among Web developers. The subject is extremely important to those of us interested in building Rich Internet Applications and multimedia-centric Web experiences. It seems safe, for the moment at least, to conclude as Shankland does that there won’t be a single clear winner in this one any time soon. Supporting both approaches will continue to be necessary for at least another 18-24 months, perhaps longer.

One important point his article brings up is the notion that Adobe isn’t going to sleep through this battle with Flash unmodified. In fact, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch — easily one of the brightest and most insightful tech folk I dealt with in my years as a full-time tech journalist — has said that there are lots of enhancements coming for Flash in the near future. Shankland also points out that Adobe has a lot riding on both of the horses in the race. Not only is Flash important to the company but its Dreamweaver product is easily the leading HTML designer/editor on the planer and must be kept current with new versions of HTML as they emerge.

Apple’s role in all of this still seems a bit murky to me. Conventional wisdom — promulgated by Apple — is that it will not support Flash in its iPhone and iPad product lines because it causes too many crashes and otherwise degrades th Apple Holy Grail User Experience. But Lynch says that Flash 10.1 is now being adopted by every other smartphone manufacturer, implying Apple is either arrogant or has a hidden agenda or both. Probably both.

This one is well worth keeping an eye on.

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