Former Virginia Governor's Comment On Science At Convention Lights Up Twitter

Reposted from Wired

It didn't ignite the crowd at the Pepsi Center in Denver Tuesday night in the same way as Hillary Clinton's speech did, but the 2008 Democratic National Convention keynoter of former Virginia Governor Mark Warner lit up the micro-blogging service Twitter as its geek community celebrated a throwaway line in Warner's speech.

Warner, a former Capitol Hill staffer for senator Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut) and telecommunications entrepreneur, focused his speech on creating an environment that keeps America competitive in the global economy.

In a one-liner, he quipped: "Just think about this: In four months, we will have an administration that actually believes in science!"

It was as if Warner were acknowledging a constituency that feels as if the Bush administration had thrown a Harry Potter invisible cloak over it for the past eight years. Many members of that online constituency poked their heads out from under the cloak on Twitter.

"In four months, we'll have an administration that actually believes in science. lol, but YEAH!" tweeted kmcg.

"My fav from 2nite: 'Just think about this: in six months we will have an administration that actually believes in science'-Mark Warner; YES!" agreed tujaded.

Those were just two of a slew of comments on Twitter reacting to Warner's remark. Here's a quick summary:

• jlangenbeck: "Warner's speech was fantastic. We have to fund and tech to save this nation and remain competitive,"


• epolitics: "Diggin' me some Mark Warner.  Science! (poetry in motion)"


• dagsalot: "I'm a big fan of former Gov. Mark Warner right now. 'Think, in 4 months, we could have a presidency that believes in science!' It'd be nice!"


• twitterdoug: "Best line of Warner's speech so far -- In four months we will have an administration that believes in science."

During his talk, Warner also pointed to the importance of broadband rollout, education and job training to keep jobs from migrating to India, referring to his own efforts as governor to revive small towns in Virginia.

"We delivered broadband to the most remote areas of our state, because if you can send a job to Bangalore, India, you can sure as heck send one to Danville, Virginia, and to Flint, Michigan, and to Scranton, Pennsylvania, and to Peoria, Illinois," he said. "In a global economy, you shouldn't have to leave your hometown to find a world-class job."

The Democrats have made broadband rollout part of their party platform, and both Obama and Warner have expressed support for net neutrality.

Mozilla Labs' Ubiquity: Firefox becomes Quicksilver

Lots of talk today across the web about Mozilla Labs' new project, Ubiquity.

If You Want To Create a Mashup, Just Ask Your Browser. Mozilla Labs Launches Ubiquity

Ubiquity prototype lets users take command of Firefox

Ubiquity: Firefox Gets its Quicksilver On

This blog has a nice writeup: Ubiquity In Depth

Quoted from Ars Technica:

Mozilla Labs has released the first working prototype of Ubiquity, a natural-language command-based shell for the Firefox web browser. Although the Ubiquity project is still in early stages of development and the software still has some serious bugs, it already offers some useful functionality and exudes an enormous amount of potential.

The Ubiquity prototype, which is implemented as a Firefox extension, offers an unobtrusive and extensible command interface that enables users to interact with the browser and a number of remote web services. The user can launch the Ubiquity command interface with a configurable keyboard shortcut and then type in an instruction. The command interface has an autocompletion mechanism which attempts to guess the rest of the user's command string and then displays available results.

The command interface is conceptually similar to desktop launcher tools like Enso, Quicksilver, and GNOME-Do. Unlike those tools, it places a strong emphasis on web content manipulation and web services. In many ways, it's like an interactive mash-up system. Ubiquity can respond to user instructions in several different ways. It can directly alter the contents of a web page, it can manipulate the browser interface, it can load a page in a new tab, and it can display output in a notification pop-up.

New commands can be implemented natively in JavaScript, so it is trivially easy to extend the system and bring it new capabilities. The developers have even created a simple Ubiquity command editor that allows users to input new command implementations directly into the browser. Mozilla provides a detailed tutorial that explains how some of default Ubiquity commands were implemented. It is even possible to use popular third-party JavaScript libraries like JQuery to simplify development of new commands. The Ubiquity developers aim to eventually create a tool that can automatically convert Ubiquity commands into full Firefox extensions.

One of the commands that particularly impressed me performs in-place translation of selected text blocks. The user selects a bit of text, initiates the Ubiquity command system, and then begins typing the word "translate" to select the translation command. Ubiquity will use a remote translation web service to automatically detect the language of the selected text, translate it into English, and display a preview of the English translation in the Ubiquity results listing. When the user hits enter to complete the command, the foreign text in the page itself will be replaced inline with the English translation.

Ubiquity offers some very compelling functionality in its current state, but it still has a lot of limitations. The biggest weakness is its lack of support for pipelines. Modularity and support for combinatorial command chains are the greatest strengths of the conventional Linux command-line shells. Ubiquity would be far more powerful if it provided a way to supply the output of one command as the input to a subsequent command.

Ubiquity is largely an experiment in user interaction, but it is likely that some of its functionality will eventually be streamlined directly into the Firefox browser itself. One potential integration vector is the Firefox AwesomeBar, a rich autocompletion system that matches user input against fragments of URLs and page titles and offers the best results based on how frequently a page is visited and how long ago it was last viewed. Many enthusiastic fans of the AwesomeBar have speculated that the system could be expanded to encapsulate more functionality and potentially even a full command system. Perhaps the AwesomeBar could converge with the search box and the Ubiquity command system to form a next-generation Firefox UberBar.

One of the principal developers of the Ubiquity extension is Aza Raskin, the founder of Humanized and son of the celebrated Macintosh luminary Jef Raskin. Aza and several of his colleagues from Humanized were hired by Mozilla earlier this year to work on experimental projects that could shape the future of the web. I've had the pleasure of meeting Aza at several open-source software community events and I've always been immensely impressed by his excellent presentations on software usability. He has bold ideas and very intriguing solutions to seemingly intractable usability problems.

Aza advocates creating software that conforms to the Taoist notion of Wu Wei, which is to "act without doing." The Ubiquity extension, which clearly builds on the experiences that the Humanized developers cultivated while creating Enso, is a profoundly elegant articulation of that Taoist concept.

Update: Loopt Responds To Privacy Concerns (Kinda)

Yesterday I made a post about how the new iPhone application, Loopt, was causing a lot of angst amongst some top bloggers, and people I admire, about their completely idiotic way in which they handle user invites. The main issue dealt with privacy concerns stemming people getting invites from people they didn't know - people who they hadn't given their phone number out to. The invites were sent, unsolicited, via SMS (a big no-no). Loopt has responded on their company blog, first making a small post that seemed to brush off the concerns without addressing the actual question. Later, when the uproar of complaints grew louder & more numerous, they attempted to quell the anger in more depth. iJustine's intitial post about the problem has now made Techmeme, which should accelerate awareness. This seems to be working already as InfoWeek has just written an article chronicaling the details of the problem.

Microsoft Lowered Vista Requirements To Help Intel Sell Incompatible Chipsets

So now that the "Vista Capable" lawsuit is a full-blown class action, the judge has unsealed all 158 pages of emails between Microsoft execs trying to sort out what went wrong with the sticker program. While bits and pieces have been blacked out, what remains is still fairly incredible -- although Intel's 915 chipset was initially rejected as compatible with Vista, MS execs flatly admit that "In the end, we lowered the requirements to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with the 915 graphics embedded" and "We are caving to Intel. We worked the last 18 months to drive the UI experience and we are giving this up." On top of that, it seems that the company was getting direct feedback from retailers that the stickers were confusing, with Wal-Mart appealing directly to HP to pull Vista Capable stickers from low end machines, and an MS exec saying that "I was in Best Buy listening to people and can tell you this did not come clear to customers. We set ourselves up." That's pretty damning, if you ask me -- and the complete emails, linked below, are full of similar bombshells. Looks like this case may have some serious legs after all.

Read - Seattle Post-Intelligencer coverage of the case
Read - PDF of all the emails

Nachi Virus

This morning, the SANS Internet Storm Center posted a note about an increase in ICMP traffic, including a quick initial analysis. As it turns out, yet another worm, this time the W32/Nachi.worm|W32/Welchia.worm, is going around taking advantage of the RPC DCOM vulnerability. The twist this time: the worm will actually clean up machines. It tries to download the correct patches from Windows Update and remove the Blaster worm."

Welchia/Nachi Security Bulletin

Sepia in Photoshop: How-to

How to make a photo Sepia in Photoshop: Change the Image Mode of a B&W to RGB Color. Go to image-Adjust-Hue/Saturation. Check the colorize box, move the Hue slider to about 40, the saturation to 25, and the Lightness in the middle, or to your liking. You could use this adjustment to completely desaturate your color image, then set as above. As is everything else in PS, there are 25 plus ways to do anything.

Justin Frankel leaves Nullsoft over spat with AOL

Justin Frankel, the creator of Winamp, has announced to leave Nullsoft in his .plan yesterday.

This seems to be the result of a possible dispute with his employer AOL over the P2P-software "WASTE", which was released by Justin a few days ago on the Nullsoft website and then taken down one day later. All that is left on the former download page is a notice that the software was posted without authorization. WASTE allowed encrypted instant messaging, group chats and file-sharing and was published with complete source code. Justin explains in his .plan that his freedom of expression -- which he claims to do best through coding -- is being constrained by his employer and that it is time to do something different.

Good. Maybe he an turn out some good software without being constrained. Meanwhile - I've got a copy of the Waste sourcecode MUahahaha.