thoughts.on.code

“if you are like most people, then like most people, you do not know you are like most people.”
- Daniel Gilbert, “Stumbling on Happiness“

…

So, Kyle turned me on to Pandora something like two months ago, and I was extremely impressed, but for some reason I had not gone back.

That is, until tonight. So, I decided to try it again. Man, I forgot what I was missing! Pandora is such a cool service… basically you feed it a key word or two (either a band name or a song title) and it will derive a station for you based off of that band or song’s acoustical genetic make-up. Pretty cool stuff.

So, I have added a section on the side with my Pandora stations. Currently there is only one: Blues, which is really Piano Blues, but I only put in Blues when I started the station. It is great stuff!

p.s.> “I hear weasels!” is screamed repeatedly at the end of “Take my to the Specialist” by The Dead Milkmen, which I happened to be listening to when I started typing this entry. And don’t worry, Blues is not the station I was listening to… That would be this one.

Almost every day I go through the spam filter for this blog. Invariably there are dozens if not hundreds of comments that I still need to at least skim (I once found a post from a colleague stuck in there, so I take the extra step just in case it happens again).

One thing I’ve been noticing is small messages that contain two or three sets of five to ten digits (which stand out from the C1Al1S - PR0N PR0N PR0N LINK LINK LINK type ads). These intrigue me, as there is a generated email address (typical for spam), usually without any, or at most one links, one of the big things that the spam filters check.

I have been speculating since I first started getting these comments that something a little more nefarious than typical spam was happening here. It seemed to me that those series of numbers were either a key to something or a pointer to something… but definitely not spam in the usual sense. So, after a while I started ignoring them, deleting them with all the other spam.

But for some reason today I started thinking about those messages again, and realized what an ingenious method of communication this could be. With many blogs having RSS feeds available for the comments, anyone could be watching any number of blogs for a post with the right series of digits in it, or right passage from the right nick. This makes me think about the spycraft stories about Solviet and US agents during the cold war. Things like putting a smudge of dirt on the lower left corner of a particular street sign to indicate if a meeting was necessary.

So, a simplistic protocol for this type of communication:

Pre-agreed upon items:

nick(s), blog(s), and key phrase(s) or digit series (could be progressive)

Initiating the communication:

One party writes a blog comment on one (or more) of the select blogs, using a preselected nick and keyphrase, then either putting some ciphered data into the message, or possibly a pointer or flag of some kind.

Receiving the communication:

The other party watches the blog for a message from the appropriate nick, with a correct keyphrase in it. When one is found it takes and deciphers the attached message.

This is form of communication could be used not only on blogs, but also in forums, though it is a little harder technically to do (but not conceptually), or any other open site on the web… Flickr and Steganography anyone?

I am sure that cryptographic researchers have been aware of this type of communication potential since the advent of the intarwebs, but it something I had not thought of before, and it fascinates me how open the communication pathways truly are. I am even more intrigued when I think about the NSA probably having technology available to detect this type of stuff, and the amount of work THAT would have to do.

Last night I was given the opportunity to come back to Des Moines (after being there just two weeks ago with NoFluff) and talk with the Central Iowa Java Users Group. My talk was entitled “Integrating AJAX into the Enterprise”, which was very well received. Thank you to everyone there last night, I really enjoyed talking with you! The slides will be up on my Presentations page sometime today.Update: slides are posted now… enjoy!

Last night was the last stop in “Secoske’s Summer Speaking Tour 2006″ (I just made that up) and I am very relieved. As I have posted before, I had a lot of talks (at least for me) in the last two months-and-some-days, and it was difficult to prepare for all of them, but I have had a blast! This has been an amazing year for me. Speaking at NoFluff and OSCON, CIJUG, Omaha’s Dynamic Languages User’s Group, and of course home sweet home OJUG, I have gotten the chance to meet and talk with so many amazing people, doing amazing things. I have learned a lot about the technologies I’ve talked about (Ruby/Rails, Java Performance tools, AJAX) and a lot about me.

I really enjoy speaking/teaching. I first started teaching while in Community College (they let me teach Intermediate DOS). At that point in my path I was definetly NOT ready for something of that magnitude. I knew the material, but was not nearly confident enough to talk in front of a class (or any group of people for that matter). And I did not do the best job because of that.

Times have changed quite a bit since then (a decade ago already!), and today I feel a lot stronger in my presentation skills. However, every time I get in front of a group of people I still feel like the consultant/mildly retarded person in today’s Dilbert:

And frankly, I wish I knew too!

Anyone can speak

I have started to take another view of all this speaking stuff: I may not - am most likely not in fact - be an expert in whatever it is I am talking about, but I do know something about the topic, and I have my own experience and background that provides color and context to the topic, and that is the value I can bring to the talk. And you know what the absolute greatest thing is about this veiw? It says that anybody who wants to talk can provide their color and context to the discussion. And we all grow from that. The trick seems to be getting people to want to.

That is one of the big reasons why I push so much at OJUG for new people to get up and talk. I feel that we are a unique, local platform for people who have not had the chance or willingness to speak in public to get up in front of a group familiar people and talk about something that interests them. To that end, we (the OJUG Leadership) have been trying to coax people to give 5,10,15 minute talks on a topic of their choice (I don’t even care if its Java related, as long as they are passionate about it). I don’t want to sound too much like Kathy Sierra (not that thats a bad thing at all!), but when people share what they are passionate about, then we all get something out of it… we all are a little smarter.

Zen and Conversations

While I am rambling, I thought I would throw one more thing out there. Last night was great for another reason. I felt like I had a conversation with the people at the JUG meeting. I was slightly disrobed (not quite naked). And for those of you who have absolutely no idea (or are afraid you do have an idea) what I am talking about, visit Presentation Zen. I did not use a podium (haven’t in a long time actually… man that feels good), and felt like it was much more “talking with friends” than a lecture. And that is so awesome. I feel like I was able to convey so much more than my dry, cliche bullet point slides could have ever done if I had just repeated what was on them. I am really looking forward to the day when I do not need slides at all (going fully naked). I tried that once, when I presented Test Driven Development to OJUG, with just an open, empty word document and Eclipse. That was uncomforable, but liberating at the same time (and obviously difficult for me to explain). I am still very much learning (aren’t we all still very much learning?), and I am happy to be on this path.

Good interview with interesting questions/answers. [link]

Brilliant if for no other reason that this quote:

Question: “What is an example of a company that is most willing to be criticized?”
Answer: I think we need to draw a distinction between being willing to be criticized as a way to engage customers and being criticized as a way to improve. Ann Coulter, who, in my opinion, is a dangerous idiot, has a huge willingness to be criticized and a complete inability to listen to the criticism.