Firefox IE-tab extension

(Second part of an earlier post)

Firefox 2.0 makes a great contender against IE to become the default web browser for Internet scenarios. Full disclosure: this blogger was an Internet Explorer developer in a former lifetime. But it is still not mature enough for enterprise market, which understandably is not glamorous enough for Mozilla foundation to target. This is almost the reverse of the IIS-Apache split: IIS/Sharepoint is very well optimized for corporate intranet use, while Apache continues to dominate the market for Internet facing websites as evidenced by over a decade of Netcraft surveys.

Firefox’s main limitations include handling Kerberos authentication transparently and running ActiveX controls, both of which can be significant for large enterprises using AD and custom line-of-business applications. Firefox does have the equivalent of the Negotiate package but it is not integrated as well: it prompts the user, while IE going through the SSP simply picks up the credentials already registered with the logon session. (This could have been easily fixed by using the SSPI itself, at the cost of portability. The interface is generic and not bound to any articular user experience.) ActiveX may be the greatest challenge because implementing that may  require wasting years of developer time in the depths of COM and OLE.

IE-tab extension provides an easier way out. By clicking on the Firefox icon on the status bar, the extension allows switching to use IE for rendering. That means all IE components come into play, including wininet for network downloads, urlmon for binding, mshtml/Trident for HTML rendering, the Windows javascript engine for active content etc. The only pieces missing are the so-called “chrome” associated with IE: toolbars, IE status bar, window menus. (Right-click inside the page will still bring up the context sensitive menu from Internet Explorer.) No more error messages about needing to view the page in IE. In fact the operation is transparent because websites for the most part can’t peek outside the IE control to see if it is being hosted. Windows Update just works and so does Genuine Advantage validation if the operating system was licensed appropriately.

That means Firefox can for the first time become a full-time IE replacement in all scenarios– but only by hosting IE components inside the Firefox user interface. If that sounds like the embrace-and-extend strategy employed by Microsoft in its battle against Netscape, the irony is well deserved. For all its faults and awful security track record, one of the things IE designers did get right is an architecture that allows easy embedding in other applications. This feature apparently cuts both ways: during the browser wars it helped a great deal by pushing IE into every other application, but in the hands of Firefox developers it can help a competitor  supplant IE as the default browser of choice.

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Blodget on socially responsible investing

Another great issue from the Atlantic Monthly for October 2007. Subtitled “The Values Issue,” the journal contains a trio of articles on the subject of philantropy and altruism. One of these is The Conscientious Investor, by Henry Blodget, focusing on the emerging field of socially responsible investing or SRI for short. In case the name rings familiar: Blodget made his name during he dot-com era with the unlikely prediction that Amazon stock price would hit $400. It did but his resultant status as celebrity financial analyst for Merill-Lynch ended amidst revelations that he’d long been expressing doubts in private about the companies he was raving about publicy in order to drum up banking business for Merill.  The irony of Blodget writing about SRI is inescapable. What is next– Britney Spears on good parenting? Luckily the author has a good sense of irony as well and acknowledge this strange twist in a parenthetical remark alluding to his own run-in with the SEC.

Blodget is no doubt very knowledgeable and in a great place to write an engaging article. It begins by comparing two hypothetical portfolios: both invest in the S&P 500 index from 1957-2003 except that one of them leaves out Philip Morris, since tobacco companies are verboten by most screening criteria used for SRI. Sadly for the second investor, it turns out that PM was in fact the equity appreciating the most during that time– a staggering 19.75% compared to a mild 10.85% for the broader stock index. The net result of leaving out just this one stock out of a group of five-hundred is 5% over the five-decade span. Even more poignantly, investing in just PM instead of the diversified portfolio would have multiplied the returns by a factor of 36.

The article is full of these hard data points. For example we learn that SRI investing accounts for almost a tenth of all professionally managed assets but most of this is institutional investors. The 200+ mutual funds make up a small fraction overall of the sum and for that matter, of all the assets invested in equity funds. The punch-line still remains the qualitative argument around the conceptual hand-waving surrounding the definition of “socially responsible.” Screening criteria used by different SRI funds is all over the map and full of internal contradictions, easy targets for picking. Not all the criteria makes sense: while shunning tobacco or coal-fired power generation is understandable, the jury is out on whether nuclear energy is good on balance for the short-term until carbon emissions are under control. Similarly, some criteria can already find expression in everyday decision without being elevated to investment strategy. Consumers have little choice about the local utility building a coal-powered plant or dumping waste into the river. In these cases, voting with the portfolio may be the only response because individuals can’t influence the outcome and the collective bargaining process through politics is inefficient. But individuals can opt out of gambling, drinking and tobacco, so it’s not clear that investment decisions need to be tweaked. Even the question of alcohol is ambiguous: PAX’s decision to divest Starbucks for lending its brand-name to a Godiva liquor is the reduction-to-absurdity of the criteria. (By all definitions, SBUX has one of the more socially responsible operations.) The article raises a more disturbing question about market response to SRI. If the approach goes mainstream, and by all indications it may be on the verge, companies will  mount PR campaigns to create the appearance of satisfying SRI criteria while conducting business-as-usual. This will confuse the screening criteria further, since the model does not yet include companies trying to game the system.

[continued]

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Putting the Gap into “security gap”

From Money/CNN:

“Gap Inc. announced Friday that a laptop containing the personal information of about 800,000 job applicants was stolen from the offices of one of its vendors that manages data for the company.”

The laptop was not encrypted. Way to go. Part of the reason for the impressive total is Gap also owns Old Navy and Banana Republic. (The latter brand may inspire a few cracks about the information security approach used by the retailer.) Invariably adding insult to injury in these cases is the PR response:

“Gap (Charts, Fortune 500) said it has no reason to believe the data contained on the computer was the target of the theft or that the personal information has been accessed or used improperly.”

The data on the laptop may not have been the motivation (unless there was a big sticker exclaiming “Danger! Confidential data, property of Gap Inc.”) but that does not help because: Either the criminals is 1. clueless and will simply resell the machine without peeking, in which case it is up to the next person to see what he/she just inherited, OR 2. is a professional and will try to sanitize the drive prior to resale, in order to hide the fact that it is stolen merchandise. It’s not a stretch to say that prior to wiping out the drive he/she may take a peek. In any case, how does the Gap conclude there has not been accessed or used improperly? Is there a new, alien technology in their possession to monitor ongoing access to a stolen drive? Did they run credit checks on all 800K applicants to check for signs of new -account fraud using the compromised identities?

Another fine addition to the excellent Hall of Shame maintained by PrivacyRights,  the Chronology of Data Breaches going back to ChoicePoint in 2005. Current count stands at 166M– half the population of the US, including every child if there had been no overlaps.  That web page could well serve as mandatory web-browser start page for CISOs and other influential officers of any organization tasked with protecting large amounts of user data.

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Reversing the flow– when cars power houses

“You don’t have to plug it in” Toyota keeps insisting in their commercials about the Prius. A conservative company confronted with the problem of marketing a disruptive technology  to a conservative audience, opted for doing the exact opposite of what every other automobile manufacturer is doing: convincing you that their product is just like any other car. While every one is spinning tales of personal liberation and spiritual enlightenment, Toyota says this is just another car. You drive it like any other car, never mind this “hybrid” mumbo-jumbo and there is no fussing with a power cord.

The problem is owners want to mess with power cords. Toyota management may want to brush up on their copy of Crossing the Chasm, because the people buying into the technology are still early-adopters at this stage and they are interested in pushing the limits of the technology. Already CalCars demonstrated plug-in conversions and Google has a fleet of converted Priuses drawing power from the solar panels lining the roof of the parking lot for buildings 45-46 in Mountain View campus.

The capability goes both ways: they can either draw power from the grid (or off the grid from renewable sources, in the case of Google) or they can supply the grid. The economic viability rests on a type of “price arbitrage”– charge at night when electricity is cheaper due to lower demand, then supply the grid during the day when it is more expensive with all those air-conditioning units whirring away.

But that vision is a few years out for a vehicle rolling off the assembly line in bone-stock condition. Without voiding the warranty or paying for a conversion that costs more than the car itself, there is no easy way to tap into this resource. Undeterred, a community of tinkerers continue to push the limits while holding on to the warranty. One of the more interesting projects is PriUPS, a pun on UPS for Uninterrupted Power Supply.

The standard answer to unreliable utilities and hurricane-prone regions is a portable generator. But a car is effectively a portable generator. When the engine is running, the alternator supplies current. (Nevermind the battery commercials showing sports cars equipped with their brand shredding rubber: the battery starts the engine but is largely out of the picture under normal driving.) Tapping into this with an off-the shelf inverter is standard. Up to ~200W can be drawn directly from the cigarette-lighter adapter– is that an anachronism now that few people use it for that purpose?– and upwards of 2000W by hooking up to the battery itself. This means that in an emergency or power-loss, a car could power basic house-hold appliances.

In principle the Prius is great for this application. First it is equipped with a large bank of batteries distinct from the ordinary one (called “traction battery” in Toyota language) that can supply more juice. More importantly, it has automatic power management to sense when the battery is running low and run the engine to recharge. This is a big improvement over running the engine constantly or manually stopping/starting. Ordinary car batteries are not designed for deep-cycles so they can’t handle being nearly discharged completely and come back to life. The Prius traction battery has no such problem.

But the engineering department had other ideas and drawing power from the traction battery was not high on their list of priorities for the car. (Besides– what would happen if potential buyers got wind of that capability? It’s no longer “just another car” and they would run away screaming, intimated by all this technological complexity, according to Toyota thinking.) PriUPS project details all the hoops to jump through to get this working. Detailed descriptions makes for good reading in their own right, but the short version is this gentleman managed to get 2400W while the engine was running 40% of the time in burts of 3 minutes. 5-6KW is the upper limit extrapolated from there, more than enough to keep a residence fully functional, minus air conditioning.

Interesting enough Honda, Toyota’s biggest competitor at home, has a healthy business in small, portable generators from home back-up power. Exactly the type that could be replaced with a Prius in the garage.

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So dark the con of baseball: home run #756

The fans have spoken. In restoring a measure of respectability to the blemished game, they voted to get the #756 home-run ball branded with an asterisk before its ultimate journey to Cooperstown. Creating a PR spectacle around the fate of an infamous ball is not original, (Chi-town residents can indignantly point to the decision by online vote to destroy the Bartman ball after the Cubs’ ill-fated 2003 post season run) and the accuracy of the election about as reliable as Diebold touch-screen voting devices, it appeals to an abstract sense of justice.

This is far from compensating for the failures of “Bud-Lite” Selig to keep steroid use in check during the late 90s. Outside the city limits of San Francisco, there were few who were seriously in doubt that this record is not tainted. As for the Giants front office, it was a good move because the inevitable run-up to the record and the many milestones on the way (500, 600, then passing Willie Mays and Babe Ruth) made for great drama, packing the seats at a stadium better known for its Bay views than the quality of baseball on the field.

The good news is 2007 will also be remembered as the season Alex Rodriguez reached the 500 home-run mark, the youngest for any player to reach that total. He has easily another decade of playing time. Assuming he can hit at least thirty HR every year during the rest of his career– easy enough, he averaged over 40HR for the past ten seasons– Rodriguez will eclipse the current record and erase a disgraceful chapter from the history of the favorite pastime. Until then, the most pithy description for the state of baseball comes from the Onion: “Destruction Of National Pastime Given Two-Minute Standing Ovation”

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Upcoming conference: She’s Geeky

An unconference that my colleague Kaliya, aka the Identity Woman, is helping organize:

She’s Geeky (http://www.shesgeeky.org)

A Women’s Tech (un)conference

October 22-23 in Mountain View, CA.

 

This event is designed to bring together women from a range of technology-focused disciplines who self identify as geeky. Our goal is to support skill exchange and learning between women working in diverse fields and to create a space for networking and to talk about issues faced by women in technology.

 

Not coincidentally perhaps, She’s So Geeky is the title of a collection of essays my friend Annalee Newitz edited. Here is the video of her appearance at Google’s Mountain View campus in July.

 

On another tangent and speaking of identity, Digital ID World 2007 is going on right now.

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R.I.P. Marcel Marceau

Marcel Marceau passed away at the age of 84 on September 22nd.

This blogger had the incredible opportunity to watch Marceau performing the character “Bip” as well as the signatures routines the mask-maker and ages-of-man at Moore Theater in Seattle in 2000. The image of the man stuck with the smiling-face mask on his  head, struggling to desperately to remove it, all the while emoting only that silly grin is not one you will soon forget. From the Wikipedia article:

Of his summation of the ages of man in the famous Youth, Maturity, Old Age and Death, one critic said, “He accomplishes in less than two minutes what most novelists cannot do in volumes.”

Google video search has movies about his life and news reports.

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Auto manufacturers discover “vaporware”

“Some day soon our new software will enable you to…” <insert marketing fantasy>

This has been a consistent tagline in the software business: product announcements couched in the vocabulary of insurgent revolutionaries, extravagant promises and lofty ideals. What follows after several years and multiple apologetic post-scripts to the original press release, is a shadow of the original vision or more likely: nothing.

Recently in the grip of a bad case of the environmentalist fever (finding its way into lame advertising slogans along the lines of “most efficient V8 in its class“) automobile manufacturers are taking up this ancient art and perfecting it for mainstream appeal For example, there is the Chevy Volt from General Motor, an electric concept car with 40 mile range that promises to eliminate fuel consumption for majority of commuters. While still boasting two engines, the Volt improves on the hybrid concept: instead of having both engines drive the power-train, only the electric motor is hooked up to the wheels and the internal combustion engine is run only to charge the batteries. On the website it is described in glowing terms:

“Off-the-line torque is instantaneous, giving you responsive acceleration. Plus, this four- to five-passenger sport sedan still maintains the passenger and cargo capacities of a production car.(2) You’ll also enjoy the benefits of features you’ve grown to expect — driver and front passenger air bags(3) and the StabiliTrak Stability Control System, for instance — as well as new convenience features allowing you to charge certain small electronic devices without plugging them in.”

There is only one problem with the car: it does not exist in production. There is no way to walk into a show-room and experience that much vaunted low-end torque.

Volt represents another fantasy taking flight for GM, an attempt to recast an old-school traditional company heavily dependent on trucks and SUVs as some type of environmental pioneer. It is in the same vein as the yellow-washed ethanol campaign ads bragging about the number of E85-compatible vehicles GM has sold. (And how many of them are actually running on E85 outside the Midwest? Never mind questions about the long-term viability of a biofuel program that takes away more farmland to grow crops.)

Not to be outdone, BMW joins the fray with its own hydrogen vehicle. TV commercials featuring CGI animation show the car dissolving into water, to emphasize that the only output of burning water is pure water. Fair enough and at least this one can be seen on the roads because it’s based on a production model, a conversion of the 7 series to run on both regular gasoline and hydrogen. But as the German Spiegel magazine points out, the car is not particularly efficient in either mode. Currently being leased to celebrities, it remains at best a test platform for developing the necessary infrastructure for hydrogen refueling. As it turns out, the BMW 745h is true “vaporware” in a different sense of the word: due to challenges of  confining liquid hydrogen long term, its massive 45 gallon tank is slowly but continuously leaking hydrogen vapor.

No reason to let these details ruin a good PR campaign.
Next up: Lexus as the worst offender for exploiting “hybrid” technology for marketting.

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On the fence with nuclear energy

There is a strain of schizophrenia running through the environmentalist movement. Long the favorite whipping boy for green-blood tree-huggers, nuclear energy is enjoying a resurgence thanks to global warming concerns. Along with solar, wind, geothermal and  tidal energy sources, fission is also free of carbon emissions– and unlike the others, already has a proven track record for providing significant fraction of energy in many regions.

The British scientist James Lovelock is no stranger to controversy with his Gaia hypothesis, but in his recent book The revenge of Gaia, he has also “gone nuclear” and came out swinging in favor of nuclear energy. First it paints a very optimistic view of fusion and calls for greater investment even though not a single controlled fusion reaction on Earth has yet been self-sustaining. (Controlled is the operative keyword, since weapons do not qualify as “renewable energy sources”) There is an interesting parallel with the fuel-cell mania taking place in the automative world here. Aside from the fact that both use hydrogen as fuel, they are both long-term, high-risk, reach-for-the-moon investments which amount to business-as-usual in the short term until some undefined magic development arrives.

More perplexing is his argument for increasing the share of conventional nuclear energy based on fision. At the heart of the issue is a very complex risk management problem involving industrial systems on large scale.  Unlike deciding between an SUV and small-car, this one is greatly complicated by the apples-to-oranges nature of the comparison, weighing the risks from dramatic accident in a reactor that unfolds within seconds to the slow, gradual build-up of climate altering chemicals in the atmosphere that leads to irreversible climate change over decades.

No room for such fine points in the book. Lambasting the critics of nuclear energy as misguided urban romantics operating out of fear, Lovelock issues a dramatic personal challenge on the subject of waste disposal:

“I have offered in public to accept all of the high-level waste produced in a year from a nuclear power station for deposit on my small plot of land; it would occupy a space about a cubic metre in size and it safely in a concrete pit, and I would use the heat from its decaying radioactive elements to heat my home.”

Not-in-my-backyard residents of Nevada can take comfort here. If only more people were willing to offer their own backyard for storing radioactive waste, the ongoing debacle of Yucca mountain could be finally put to rest.

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Walt Mossberg on Ubuntu

This is not exactly new but Wall Street Journal’s influential columnist reviewed Ubuntu in a Personal Technology column last week. Regardless of what the review says (and it is not very harsh in assessing the weaknesses) this is another important milestone for open-source software, right up there with Dell’s decision to ship machines pre-loaded with Ubuntu out of the box. Mossberg after all has made a name in writing about technology for non-technophiles. So begins this particular review:

This column is written for mainstream, nontechie users of digital technology. […] So, I have steered away from recommending Linux, the free computer operating system that is the darling of many techies and IT managers, and a challenger to Microsoft’s dominant Windows and Apple’s resurgent Macintosh operating system, OS X.

Notwithstanding that caveat and inspired by his own readers to give Ubuntu a shot, Mossberg takes out a factory Dell machine loaded with Ubuntu for a spin.  Even this most user friendly version of the alternative OS is not enough to change his opinion:

My verdict: Even in the relatively slick Ubuntu variation, Linux is still too rough around the edges for the vast majority of computer users. While Ubuntu looks a lot like Windows or Mac OS X, it is full of little complications and hassles that will quickly frustrate most people who just want to use their computers, not maintain or tweak them. 

For good reason, because the Dell laptop had significant problems including faulty/missing drivers. But in all fairness a laptop is also a more capricious device compared to a desktop unit. Internally Google has a Ubuntu variant dubbed “Goobuntu” but it is only intended for desktop machines. (Read: tech support will have no mercy for users who install it on a laptop and then show up at the door for trouble-shooting.) For example, one problem cited was lack of sensitivity control on the track pad. This is the same problem that confronted this blogger when he upgraded a Dell 710M to Vista. Without the specific device driver for the track-pad, Windows will assign it a generic trackpad driver which has no control over pressure sensitivity. That means any contact with the area, even so much as a thumb glancing the surface while typing away will be interpreted as a mouse click. End result of clicking on random buttons or having the cursor jump around while typing is extreme frustration. By contrast, the typical desktop set up would have an ordinary USB mouse and the generic driver will do just fine. At worst some of the fancy functionality such as wheel-scrolling will not work, but none of the downsides of phantom mouse clicks.

This was not the only device-compatibility issue. Apparently the machine also struggled with recognizing a digital camera and an iPod. (Sync never worked.) Device drivers are a tricky subject because their presence/absence often entrenches market share and enforces lock-in. It’s difficult for the vendor to justify investing in writing drivers for an operating system with small market share. That means it is up to volunteers, assuming the vendor made necessary documentation available, to enble support. As a result fewer devices work on Linux and *BSD variants, which reinforces the marginalization because rational buyers will take into account device availability when making their choice.

Other challenges Mossberg encountered had to do with half-baked software. For example, the built-in media player can handle MP3s but the codec is not present out of the box. This has long been cited as one of the caveat emptors in defining what is possible with Linux or OpenBSD.  It is always possible to say that X is possible in Linux because chances are there is some graduate student somewhere in the world who hacked together a piece of code that does X– approximately. (That stands in contrast to say what is possible in Windows being tied much closer to MSFT’s pace of innovation.)  Putting aside the question of quality, this means that what is “possible” vastly exceeds what is ready out of the box. The article also cites the lack of commercial DVD playing software– open source advocates would point to DeCSS and its manifold descendants but as with Ikea furniture, “some assembly required.”

Most surprising part is the cost difference: the same laptop installed with Vista costs only about $100 or 8% over the open-source variant. Long-term pricing trends were supposed to favor open-source.  There will be greater pressure to adopt free software as hardware prices drop, the argument runs, because the operating system and applications will become the lion’s share of the cost. 8% is hardly that and considering that Ubuntu can be installed dual-boot with Vista (or better yet inside a virtual machine using VMware or Virtual Server) the savings may not justify the productivity hit for many users.

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