Diner 21

Information may not be reliable

Exit lights really can come in handy when you are trying to find an exit. Let me share a story about how exit lights came in handy a few days back. At the mall last week I was eating in the food court when I spilled a giant root beer all over my lavender pantsuit. It looked awful and I was mortified. I got up as quickly as I could and made my way to the bathroom. After assessing the damage in the mirror, I knew I needed to head home and change. I needed to get out of the mall quickly to limit the number of people that would have to see my soda drenched clothing. As soon as I stepped out of the bathroom door I saw the beautiful glow of the exit lights. Luckily I made it to the door without seeing anyone I knew.

The next thing I know, Clinton’s media liaison asked for the still photographers to follow her. Given that I was shooting photos and not video I joined the procession. We were then led outside and into the crowd of students, and waited one last time while the Secret Service decided how to proceed.
Dellums and Clinton Celebrate
It’s difficult to say how long we stood around snapping photographs and capturing video of students slicing and dicing, but we waited at our new location long enough to make conversation amongst ourselves in an effort to stave off the boredom and monotony of documenting the students prepare fruits and vegetables. In fact, the teacher had to ask the students to stop cutting at one point because they were running out of food. One journalist suggested that the Clinton campaign’s motto should be “hurry up and wait.” I agreed with him, and pointed out that such a credo is probably appropriate for for all bureaucracies including anything having to do with government or politics.
The press was escorted away almost as quickly. We returned to where Clinton would be speaking; the 100 or so seats were now filled with men and women dressed in suits and business attire. A cursory look at the audience revealed that it was mostly filled with administrators from the colleges along with a few faculty members. Despite the fact that the event was taking place on a college campus, there weren’t any students present and I listened keenly as a couple reporters commented on the students’ absence.
The next thirty minutes were spent waiting to return. When the Clinton camp finally allowed us back inside we were immediately ushered back to the classroom with a newfound sense of urgency. The entire flock of journalists were soon running at full speed with our gear in hand. While the classroom was now found with students hard at work, neither Clinton nor the Secret Service had arrived.
The speech itself went off without a hitch with both Mayor Dellums and and Senator Clinton speaking for a total of about 30 minutes. Clinton’s speech focused on neighborhood empowerment. She championed Oakland; calling it a model for the nation, she promised to seek Dellums’ wisdom and experience to help guide her leadership and end the war in Iraq. The Senator also asked Dellums to chair her campaign’s Urban Policy Committee.
After waiting for what seemed like an eternity, Hillary Clinton arrived accompanied by Mayor Dellums and the students immediately returned to their diligent food preparations without any prodding from their instructor. The two politicians made a quick course through the room offering very brief remarks to the students and left within five minutes after they had arrived.
In the end, Clinton never did greet the students, but a portion of the people gathered out front were given an opportunity to come inside to hear the Senator speak. Surprisingly, these students and community members were let inside without passing a security check point and allowed to stand around the outside perimeter and listen to Clinton.
We had received word early in the day that the senator would be speaking at 2:00PM, and were told that we’d need to arrive and set up by 12:30. We arrived at the student center a few minutes after noon and began setting up our gear. After we set up, Clinton’s media liaison guided us through the day’s activities. Prior to her speech the senator would be stopping by a culinary arts classroom to meet the students, and we were led to the classroom and told where we would be permitted to stand. After returning from the brief tour we were greeted to the sound of police dogs barking. We were instructed to leave our equipment while the Secret Service, the local police, and the dogs performed their sweep.

Senator Hillary Clinton paid a surprise visit to Laney College today to announce that Oakland’s mayor, Ron Dellums, has pledged his support for Clinton’s bid for president. As an employee at peralta.TV, I had the opportunity to participate alongside the rest of the media in covering the event.

Thanks to @Dsilverman for the tip!
Twendz tells you what people on Twitter are feeling about a certain topic. In this case it's the new iPod Shuffle.
This is cleverly wrapped up into an ever-flowing stream of new user tweets, the speed of which you can control anywhere from a slow crawl to two new tweets per second. It’s also able to dig up a past history of how many people have posted something on the topic which goes back five hours. Each hour also shows you whether the overall sentiment was good or bad, which on a long enough timeline can tell a story.
In the meantime, this is a great way to figure out what people are talking about without actually having to read their tweets, something that Twitter’s own search lacks and third-party software tools like TweetDeck haven’t quite nailed.
Beyond streaming in new Twitter messages, which Twitter’s own search can do (albeit requiring the user to refresh the page), the user sentiment engine is where the tool really shines. For instance, the new Apple iPod Shuffle, currently the top trending topic on Twendz, is getting an overall positive user sentiment. However, the tool also shows some of the main gripes people are having, both through the use of a tag cloud and often-repeated keywords.
My only beef with the tool is that it goes through a little song and dance each time you start monitoring a new keyword. The results that begin to filter in are two hours old, and finally catch up to near-real time in about a minute. It would be nice to simply skip to the latest tweets and analysis while cutting out the older messages. It would also be fantastic to be able to pit two trends against one another in the same window.

Normally, PR firms are pitching us start-ups, not creating them. That’s not the case with Twendz, a new Twitter tool from the folks at Waggener Edstrom. It pulls in the latest tweets on any given topic, and shows you what the overall user sentiment is, be it positive or negative.

It’s easy to go off on a tangent about the necessity of monitoring the cloud, but the real issue is one of communication. If Microsoft wants to be taken seriously as a hosting provider–especially one defining a very nascent wave of technology–there needs to be more information beyond what a single admin updates on an MSDN forum.
• Transparency: The performance and availability data needs to be freely available. Don’t hide these metrics behind a login or some complex credentials-only mechanism. Companies who use this rule will succeed, and they will set the standard and force the rest of the industry to follow.
Microsoft became a true cloud provider this past weekend as it experienced nearly 22 hours of downtime on its fledgling Azure Services Platform. The cause of the outage has not yet been disclosed to the general public or the Azure user community.
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• Trust: Above all else, report accurately. The most important asset a cloud services provider has is its reputation. Customers will forgive a service disruption–we all know computer systems have their periodic hiccups. Customers will not forgive anything that is less than honest and forthcoming.

This leads to one of the larger questions about cloud adoption: what happens when things go wrong? And are you prepared when things go bump in the night?
• Visibility: Give customers immediate (real-time) visibility into the availability and performance of the services that you are delivering to them.
Availability is paramount to any other perceived risk of using the cloud. Issues like security and latency have always been concerns, but nothing else matters if the cloud platform or application isn’t available.
Of course, we would also assume the same thing of other cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, and Salesforce.com, all of whom only provide the most basic uptime details (green=good, red=bad) with little to no explanation as to what exactly is being monitored. The obvious argument is that users don’t need to know…until something goes wrong and information is scarce.
In contrast to on-premise systems, in which the user is responsible for dealing with infrastructure problems, a big part of the appeal of the cloud is the fact that you don’t have to manage your own systems, or deal with the inevitable failures that occur.
As a user, what is your backup plan if your cloud provider fails?

As a provider, do I have the run-book in place for a large-scale outage?
In the case of Azure, there aren’t yet many commercial applications currently running. Still, it’s Microsoft’s responsibility to be on top of the status of their services and be constantly communicative when things go wrong.
One interesting technical aside: Azure appears to have a required five-hour, full reboot of the system, which is probably fine now as the user base is fairly small. But just think about how long it would take to reboot all of Amazon Web Services. (An AWS total reboot is unlikely to happen as Amazon’s service is built in zones. But hey, you never know.) Or how about the impact of 17 hours of intermittent availability plus 5 hours of reboot time in the context of AWS? Literally hundreds (thousands?) of businesses would wind up offline in some manner.
Third-party services such as Hyperic’s Cloudstatus.com provide additional insight, but cloud vendors themselves have to become much more ardent about system status and the implications. How can vendors help to assuage issues related to outages?

Well, Shaq then maintained a Twitter silence. While Cuban made the plot thicken during the game between the Mavs and Shaq’s Phoenix Suns on Sunday by tweeting: “Gotta Love @The_Real_Shaq ’s heart. dude never lets up.”
It all began on Saturday when Shaq, who has almost 600,000 followers, tweeted: “I’m lookin foor u mark cuban”.
They have different styles but their fingers seem rarely to leave their keyboards. Perhaps one can even blame sore Twitter-finger for Shaq’s poor free-throw percentage.
However, I have been following a bizarre Twitter exchange between the two NBA personalities, one that has now blossomed into strong rumors that Shaq wants to be traded to Cuban’s Dallas Mavericks.
Shaquille O’Neal and Mark Cuban are deeply confirmed Twitterers.
(Credit: CC BelieveKevin/Flickr)
The Dallas Mavericks owner replied: “you know where i live..” Which he then followed up with: “And make sure to wear your best ShaqAlbert outfit to the arena tomorrow”.
You see, Shaq is a committed Twitteronian
The first ever Twitter-brokered NBA trade? Stranger things have happened. But not many.
It seems that a meeting between the two was then arranged, as Cuban tweeted to Shaq at 6:50 a.m. on Monday: “Not happy about it, but will be there.”
A couple of hours later, he tweeted again: “shaq found me. wish I could say what happened. I kept my cool.”
However, just when I had decided that this must merely have been one weird conversation between the two of them, I noticed some deeply researched gossip suggesting that Shaq might, indeed, wish to continue his tweeting days in Dallas.
I, too, wish I could say what happened between these two most engaging of characters. Did they have a row or a love-in? Did they have a free-throw competition? Why did Cuban need to keep his cool? Did Shaq claim he was a better tweeter?

PARK CITY, Utah–Jason Kohn, director of last year’s prize-winning Sundance documentary Manda Bala, shot his every frame to be seen on the big screen, but now realizes “most people are going to experience it in DVD.”
HDi is Microsoft’s implementation of the interactive layer in the HD DVD format, the company said in a statement. It takes advantage of mandatory features in every HD DVD player, including a secondary video decoder and an Internet connection.
“It fills a weird little niche that I didn’t even know existed,” he added, noting that in documentary filmmaking in particular, you often have lots of extra footage, which HDi can help showcase.
“We never would have been able to afford this,” he said at a press conference at the Microsoft House, a Sundance Film Festival venue created to show off the company’s digital media technologies.
Given the latter, he said he was excited to have been awarded a new grant from Microsoft, announced here Sunday night, that will allow him to create a disc using the software giant’s HDi technology. HDi enables him to complement the movie with interactive and Web-enabled features such as viewer polls, song downloads, or picture-in-picture commentary and character biographies.
The grant, worth about $100,000, also includes support for production of the finished product on HD DVD.
The HDi grant, awarded in conjunction with the Sundance Institute, follows Microsoft’s other efforts to support independent films, the company said. Another example is the 1,000 HD DVD Indies Project, which gives indie filmmakers free access to HD DVD authoring and on-demand replication. Microsoft is also offering digital rentals of festival short films on its

Since then, it’s had quite a reincarnation. Friendster estimates that 78 percent of its 80 million users, concentrated primarily in Asian countries like the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia, do not use Facebook. If so, it would be to a developer’s advantage to make an app available on both platforms.
Long before Facebook was a household word, Friendster was the first big social-networking site to take off in the U.S. But in 2004, plagued by technical problems, Friendster lost significant ground to MySpace (now owned by News Corp.) and later Facebook.
“Friendster’s support of both the Facebook and OpenSocial platforms is a big win for business and individual developers, as well as for Friendster users,” David Jones, vice president of global marketing for Friendster, said in a release. “For the developers that have invested resources in developing and launching a Facebook app, Friendster has now made it very easy for them to ‘port’ these applications to Friendster…For Web 2.0 companies that have developed apps using Facebook and OpenSocial APIs, they now have the flexibility to choose between approaches when launching applications on Friendster.”
Could another social network do the same? Probably. “With an open platform, it’s quite possible that others will embrace it,” Roberto said.
Another social network, Bebo, now owned by AOL, announced that it would implement support for Facebook’s platform late last year. Friendster marketing director Jeff Roberto told CNET News that Friendster entered into a licensing agreement with Facebook, which has since made most of its developer platform open source.
Developers who have created applications for Facebook’s platform can now bring them over to social network Friendster. This means that Friendster supports both Facebook’s code and OpenSocial, the standard created by Google for social-network widgets.
In August, Friendster raised $20 million in venture funding and hired former Google employee Richard Kimber as CEO. Last December, it debuted its developer platform, and in September released OpenSocial support.

Or, in some cases, even more.
According to the Mail’s report, the defendant originally claimed the Facebook threat was written while drunk. However, police discovered that the threats remained on her Facebook page for 24 hours.
The young defendant allegedly wrote on her Facebook page that she would kill another young woman, the Daily Mail said. The two had been at school together, where the defendant’s bullying of the victim allegedly began.
In Worcester Magistrates Court of England, an 18-year-old woman was allegedly sent to three months in a young-offenders institute after being found guilty of posting death threats on Facebook, according to the Daily Mail. It’s thought to be the country’s first jail sentence for cyberbullying.
F may be for Facebook, but not always for friendly.
In a week in which Google was ordered to reveal the identity of the “Skanks in NYC” blogger who may have defamed model Liskula Cohen, a landmark judgment was also reportedly reached in the United Kingdom.
It is tempting to think of this case as an isolated and extreme incident. But, as has become increasingly clear, people tend to use social-networking sites to reveal just as much of their persona as they do in person.
The defendant already had two previous convictions stemming from her bullying of the victim, one for assault and one for criminal damage.
(Credit: CC Benstein/Flickr)

Electronic Arts/Maxis)
For those of us eagerly awaiting the release of Spore, from The Sims creator Will Wright and his Maxis studio, Tuesday was a day for whetting the appetite.
Not so many. In fact, just this one.
And it’s clear that one of the reasons people like myself are so excited about Spore is because, one, how often do you get to play a brand-new game from Wright? And two, how many games do you get to play that let you work your way all the way up the evolutionary chain from nearly meaningless microscopic ooze to galaxy-conquering demi-god?
One of the other cool things coming down the pike in the Spore-osphere is the June 17 release of the creature creator. This will be a piece of free software that will allow people to create creatures for the game, even before they own Spore. And that’s really smart because, having played with this tool before, I know that it is a lot of fun. And people will be able to save their creatures, share them with others, and then use them when the game comes out.
With Spore, the innovators at Maxis have created what they’re calling a massively single-player game. This is a way of explaining that though the game is for one player only, it allows people to create all kinds of content–creatures, spaceships, odd buildings, and so forth–and then upload that content into the larger Spore universe. And that means that everyone gets to share in the entire community’s content creation, even if you can only play the game by yourself.
So what is the cell stage? Well, I could explain it. Or, I could let Maxis give you the goods: “Cell stage is your introduction to the fundamentals of Spore. You play a simple organism which is dropped onto your planet by way of meteor. The stage takes place in a top-down 2-D environment and you can play as an herbivore, carnivore, or omnivore. You earn DNA and collect parts to improve your creature’s abilities…Avoid larger, carnivorous organisms while feeding on smaller organisms or algae–all while being tossed around in strong ocean currents. Eventually you will grow large enough to sprout legs and crawl out of the water and up onto land.”
In the cell stage of Spore, players can try to evolve from simple little spore-like creatures into more significant, larger and stronger beings.
On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I’ll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South’s most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I’m doing on Twitter.
That’s because Maxis, an Electronic Arts studio, released a little crumb for us, a video from the cell-stage of Spore.
Now, with the cell-level video, Maxis is letting the public see a little bit more detail about the game, which is slated for a September 7 release.
The game, as you may already know, is an evolution game: It tasks players with growing their characters from little spore-level creatures step-by-step up the ladder to the tribe level and then on to cities, whole civilizations, and eventually on to the galactic level.

A million search queries have been “poisoned” at dozens of well-known Web sites over the past several weeks, according to security analyst Dancho Danchev.
“This means that a Web user would need to do a search query using one of the terms picked by the attacker to hit a poisoned page,” Evers said. “This is in contrast to previously seen attacks where just visiting a site would launch an attack. This reduces the severity (of the most recent attack) somewhat.”
Evers added that the Web is quickly becoming one of the most popular means to attack users. This is due in part to improvements made to e-mail security and filtering and also because Web vulnerabilities are a new frontier, he said.
Attackers are using programming errors to hijack keyword searches by automatically attaching malicious HTML code to specific search queries. Unwitting visitors who type in the selected key words while performing a search at the affected sites are then redirected to booby-trapped Web sites.
Among some of the Web sites that have been attacked are USAToday.com, Target.com, ABCNews.com, Walmart.com, and several sites owned by CNET Networks, the publisher of News.com. A CNET employee confirmed that the attack had occurred but did not know to what extent it had affected site visitors.
Updated at 11:22 a.m. PDT Saturday to include a comment from Wal-Mart.
Representatives of CNET and USAToday could not be reached on Friday night. Wal-Mart spokeswoman Amy Colella on Saturday said the matter “has not impacted our site in any way,” adding, “We take these matters very seriously at Walmart.com, and continuously use measures to protect our customers from any fraudulent online activity.”
This is where the attackers attempt to install malware onto the victims’ computers.
The attack differs from other IFrame injection attacks in that the traps are being set in the search results and not on a Web site’s main pages, said Joris Evers, a spokesman for security firm McAfee.