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Show of 1-28-2012

Email and Forum Questions

  • Email from Arnie: Hi Dr. Shurtz, I read an article about Eye-Fi and the fight over SD card standards. This is a good tech talk topics. – don’t you agree? Does this mean one can take a digital photo and somehow send it to a computer, iPad, or other device? What’s this all about?  Arnie McKechnie, Davidsonville, MD
  • Tech Talk Responds: The Eye-Fi card is the first wireless memory card. It looks, stores media, and fits into cameras just like a regular SDHC card. The Eye-Fi card has built-in Wi-Fi that effortlessly transfers photos and videos to your iPhone, iPad, Android device or computer. The issue is that the SD card association (www.sdcard.org) wants to create a wi-fi standard using the intellectual property in the Eye-Fi card. Expect litigation as this moves forward. This is a normal event as standards evolve.
  • Email from K.C.: Dear Dr. S: I cannot afford a smart phone, but I constantly hear and read about smart phone apps that I would like to have and use. Is it possible to use smart phone apps on a computer? (I also do not have wi-fi, in case wi-fi might be a way of using apps.) K. C.Hutchison
  • Tech Talk Responds: Cell phone apps cannot be installed on a computer. However, some apps have been written for both. For install the Kindle reading app can be installed on a PC, Mac, Andoid, or iPhone. Many games are written for all platforms. Search for the name of the application and see if it is available for the PC.
  • Email from Desirable: Dr. Richard Shurtz, I listen every Saturday morning while exercising on the treadmill–You are keeping me Fit : ). I work as a business consultant and it is common to be asked to figure out if something we are posting on a client’s website is 508 compliant. A guy I work with knew about this application–JAWS: http://www.freedomscientific.com/product-portal.asp and recommended I try it out on a 100 slide slidedeck I’d composed.
  • My slides have a LOT of screenshots captured from within the software tool that this PP presentation was written for– to instruct user community on how to use it. Unfortunately, JAWS did not read/recognized the screenshots, nor did it acknowledge the legend I’d created to instruct on what the inserted shapes.
  • Are you aware of an way to meet the 508 compliance mandate while using screenshots– since, after all, using screenshots in a user guide for a software application is very popular with most clients I’ve worked with. Your insights are most appreciated Doc : ) Desirable
  • Tech Talk Responds: Your screen captures are in JPG format. You can convert to PDF and JAWS will read the PDF. If you want a more intelligible reading of the image, however, I would suggest a well written caption when explains each screen shot. There are not other options for images unless you use a separate OCR program. A good JPG to PDF converter can be found on the web. Many are free. Just google “JPG to PDF converter.”
  • Email from Darin: Dear Dr. Shurtz, I wanted to clarify what I just heard about the differences between these two programs. It sounds like you talked about PhotoShop Elements vs Lightroom. The biggest difference is that Lightroom is noted for having phenomenal cataloging capabilities for your photo library, while PS Elements has none. Lightroom is also a little more powerful when it comes to photo editing.
  • Left out of the equation, though, is PhotoShop CS5. That’s the more professional and technical photo editing software that can really get into the nitty gritty details of photo editing. It’s also used for high-end graphic design, which the other two programs don’t really have. The only thing it lacks is Lightroom’s organizational structure. A lot of people (and I need to start doing this too, since I’m terrible at organizing my photos) use CS5 and Lightroom in tandem. Love the show! Darin
  • Tech Talk Responds: Darin, thanks for the clarification. You are right they are complimentary programs.
  • Photoshop is the world’s leading pixel manipulator. There is no other program like it for complete control over the look and feel of your digital image. No other program offers the same level of local image repair or allows such artistic creativity.
  • However, Photoshop is useless when you need to find your favorite images. Searching, sorting, and organizing are not part of its capabilities. These are Lightroom’s strengths.
  • Not only can Lightroom help you organize all of your files but it can also help you manage the whole digital imaging workflow. Lightroom is designed to help you from start to finish. You get the most bang for your buck once you learn to use Lightroom to empty your memory card, to sort through your files, to set your initial raw file conversion, and to push the finished product over out to the web or to your printer.
  • Lightroom handles the whole chain of events with speed and grace whereas Photoshop really only functions as an image enhancer.

Profiles in IT: Matthew Charles “Matt” Mullenweg

  • Matthew Charles “Matt” Mullenwag is an online social media entrepreneur and web developer best known for developing the open source blogging platform WordPress.
  • Matt Mullenweg was born January 11, 1984 in Houston Texas.
  • Mullenweg attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts where he studied jazz saxophone. Mullenweg is also a Dvorak Keyboard user.
  • He loved the jazz saxophone and, as a schoolboy. He would barter websites for music lessons. The websites were awful, but the jazz musicians were pretty good.’
  • In June 2002 Mullenweg started using the b2/cafelog blogging software to complement the photos he was taking on a trip to Washington D.C.
  • Several months after development of b2 had stopped in January 2003, he announced on his blog his plan of forking the software to bring it up to date with web standards.
  • He was quickly contacted by Mike Little and together they started WordPress from the b2 codebase. They were soon joined by original b2 developer Michel Valdrighi.
  • He liked b2 because it was PHP and MySQL.
  • At the time Mullenweg was a freshman at the University of Houston, majoring in philosophy and political science.
  • He co-founded the Global Multimedia Protocols Group in March 2004 with Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik. GMPG wrote the first of the Microformats.
  • In April 2004 with fellow WordPress developer Dougal Campbell, they launched Ping-O-Matic which is a hub for notifying blog search engines of blog updates.
  • In October 2004, he was recruited by CNET to work on blogs and new media.
  • He dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco from Houston, TX.
  • Mullenweg announced bbPress (www.bbPress.org) in December, which he wrote from scratch in a few days over the holidays.
  • Mullenweg and the WordPress team released WordPress 1.5 “Strayhorn” in February 2005, which had over 900,000 downloads.
  • During late March and early April, Andrew Baio found 168,000 hidden articles on the WordPress.org website. Mullenweg admitted the mistake and removed all articles.
  • Mullenweg left CNET in October 2005 to focus on WordPress and related activities full time, announcing Akismet several days later.
  • Akismet is a distributed effort to stop comment and trackback spam by using the collective input. His penance for accepting questionable advertising.
  • In 2005 he started Automattic, a company designed to capitalize on WordPress.
  • In April 2006, he raised $1.1M. He raised an additional $29.5M in January 2008.
  • In March 2007, Mullenweg was named #16 of the 50 most important people on the web by PC World, reportedly the youngest on the list.
  • In October, Mullenweg acquired the Gravatar service and was rumored to have turned down a US$200 million offer to buy his company Automattic.
  • WordPress.com was ranked #31 on Alexa with 90 million monthly page views.
  • In September, Mullenweg was being named to the Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30 by Inc. Magazine and one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web by BusinessWeek, again the youngest on BusinessWeek’s list.
  • In  2012, Automattic is profitable, with 35 employees, and an office on Pier 38 in SF.
  • He writes the blog,  ma.tt..

iPhone Unlock Update

  • iPhone are offered by AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon.
  • According to the blogs, Sprint and Verizon will unlock your iPhone for international travel. AT&T will not.
  • Here are the actual experiences of a Verizon user and an AT&T user.
  • As a Verizon user, I called Verizon and requested an unlock. Verizon logged onto the Apple website and request an unlock, which moved my IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) number to the unlock authorized category. This was completed in less than a minute.
  • AT&T customer was given the runaround (against Apple policy, against the law, not technically possible, against ATT policy). They were told to buy an unlocked phone from Apple for $800. AT&T would not even unlock an iPhone which has an expired contract.
  • The Verizon phone supports both CDMA and GSM. On the trip, the left my Verizon SIM in place and did not disable data roaming. I also signed up for the internal data plan $30 for 100MB for India.
  • Unfortunately it did not cover Qatar. Roaming data was $20 MB. When I landed my phone downloaded 30 emails at a cost of $50.
  • When in India, I got the Vodaphone In SIM card. I was connected to the hotel wi-fi. As soon as I rebooted with the new SIM card, my phone activated through the wi-fi connection. The activation process logged into the Apple servers and checked whether my IMEI was authorized for this new SIM card. I was up and running within minutes.
  • My AT&T user, also bought a SIM just to check. He was told that he had the wrong SIM card and could not be activated.
  • When he returned to the US, the AT&T user went to the Apple store. They recommended WiGoClinic cell phone repair, which shops in Fairfax and Arlington. WigoClinic will unlock the AT&T iPhone phone for $30, but this will void the warranty.
  • My advice, dump AT&T if you have an iPhone and travel internationally. My second piece of advice is don’t do data roaming. Use wi-fi only.

History of QWERTY Keyboard

  • This layout was devised and created in the early 1870s by Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer who lived in Milwaukee.
  • With the assistance of his friends Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule he built an early writing machine for which a patent application was filed in October 1867.
  • The first model constructed by Sholes used a piano-like keyboard with two rows of characters arranged alphabetically.
  • His “Type Writer” had two features which made jams a serious issue. First, characters were mounted on metal arms or typebars, which would clash and jam if neighboring arms were depressed at the same time or in rapid succession.
  • The solution was to place commonly used letter-pairs (like “th” or “st”) so that their typebars were not neighboring, avoiding jams.
  • While it is often said that QWERTY was designed to “slow down” typists, this is incorrect – it was designed to prevent jams while typing at speed, yet some of the layout decisions, such as placing only one vowel on the home row, did have the effect of hobbling more modern keyboards.
  • In November 1868 he changed the arrangement of the latter half of the alphabet, O to Z, right-to-left. In April 1870 he arrived at a four-row, upper case keyboard approaching the modern QWERTY standard.
  • Dvorak designed a keyboard which minimized the movement required by the typist. A more efficient design, but few use it because it is hard to learn to type again.

CTO Aneesh Chopra Stepping Down

  • When President Obama came into office in January 2009, the Administration found a Federal government relying too heavily on 20th century technology.
  • On his first day on the job, the President created the position of “Chief Technology Officer” to modernize our government while helping the country meet its goals from job creation, to reducing health care costs, to protecting the homeland.
  • Aneesh Chopra was sworn in as the Nation’s first Chief Technology Officer on May 22, 2009.
  • Our mission is to assist the President in harnessing the power and potential of technology, data and innovation to transform the Nation’s economy and improve the lives of everyday Americans. – Aneesh Chopra
  • Aneesh helped design the President’s National Wireless Initiative, including the development of a nationwide public safety broadband network.
  • He established a set of Internet Policy Principles including the call for a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights
  • He led the implementation of the President’s open government strategy focused on unlocking the innovative potential of the federal government to solve problems.
  • Aneesh found ways to engage the American people using technology, from electronic health records for veterans to modernizing government records so that they are available online.
  • While I don’t agree with much of Obama’s policies, his initiatives with Aneesh have been timely and innovative.

Obama is Wrong: The Future is not Manufacturing!

  • Yesterday afternoon, Apple released its quarterly earnings. They were good! They are an indication of America’s future.
  • Apple is competed globally. Yet their devices are manufactured in China. But it is the software that is magic.
  • Barack Obama has said he have to bring the manufacturing job back. That wont happen. Manufacturing always goes to the lower cost labor pool. With regulations and unions, the US is not competitive in this area.
  • Apple would be a better vision of the future for Obama.
  • What really makes the iPhone work isn’t the hardware. The transformative part of the phone is the software. The code behind the touch-screen was written here; the iOS operating system was written here; most of the apps that we use are written here. Thousands of companies, in fact, have been started here to write apps for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.
  • Software remains a great American expertise, and it’s only becoming more important as processors shrink into ever more powerful forms.
  • Computer code is transforming industry after industry, and writing code is something that Americans are very good at. It’s also something that requires creativity, which isn’t fostered in giant factories with guards guiding people through crowded doorways.
  • Perhaps Obama should have talked more about the things that he could do to keep software jobs here. He spoke of federal funding for university and scientific research.
  • But a real pro-software agenda would also include reforming patent law to stop trolling; increasing H-1B visas for highly skilled coders; stopping Congress from defunding DARPA, whose research helped create Siri, the iPhone’s talking assistant; and opening up the unused, federally owned wireless spectrum.
  • That agenda wouldn’t bring Apple’s manufacturing jobs back, but it would help to keep the company’s coding jobs here.
  • And it would certainly help develop “an economy that’s built to last.”

Software Piracy Bills Delayed After Protests

  • Just two days after broad Web protests of the proposed anti-piracy bills known as SOPA and PIPA, lawmakers have delayed action on the measures.
  • The main sponsor of a House bill targeting online piracy announced Friday that he will postpone further action on the measure that has triggered fierce protests, blackouts from Internet sites and some rethinking among lawmakers.
  • The action by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) on the Stop Online Piracy Act came a couple of hours after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said that he would delay a cloture vote on a similar Senate bill, the Protect IP (Intellectual Property) Act.
  • The bills are intended to narrowly address the problem of piracy on foreign Web sites. They differ slightly, but both measures grant the Justice Department the power to order Web sites to remove links to sites that are suspected of pirating copyrighted materials.
  • Proponents of the legislation, including movie studios and recording companies, say that the bill safeguards American intellectual property and protects consumers against counterfeit goods.
  • But opponents argue that the legislation gives the federal government too much power to take control of Web sites and amounts to a form of Internet censorship.
  • The decisions came just two days after prominent Web sites such as Wikipedia and Reddit darkened their sites for 24 hours in protest and, along with others, such as Google, encouraged visitors to urge their Congress members not to support the bill.
  • The sites collected signatures from millions of users opposed to the measures, and several co-sponsors of the measures withdrew their support of the online piracy legislation.
  • Sen. Ron Wyden called the delays a major victory for grassroots advocacy groups.
  • Anonymous has vowed to bring down the sites of any company the support SOPA.