Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.

Sign that I have a broken brain. When I head about Intel acquiring McAfee and security being the "third pillar of technology" this ran through my brain

Paul Otellini: Nobody Expects the McAfee Acquisition! The chief pillar of technology is internet access... Internet access and energy efficient computing.... energy efficient computing and internet access. The TWO pillars of technology are energy efficient computing, internet access ... and security.... The Three pillars of technology are energy efficient computing, internet access and security .... and kitten videos. The Four... no... amongst the pillars are things such as access, security, cats... I'll come in again...

Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.

I know I haven't blogged in a while someday I'll get back to it.

This is my attempt to create a decent Ragù in a little over an hour. There are some short cuts, but for someone looking for a sauce recipe that's better then what comes out of a jar and is quicker then a full blown sunday gravy this is rather good. This is the first time I've attempted to measure everything as I go, but I hope it's enjoyable to you.

It serves 8-10.

It freezes well. I tend to put half in the fridge and the rest in 4 small containers in the freezer.

Ingredients:

2 Lb. Chuck Chopped
1 lb. Ground Pork
1 Lb. Italian Sausage (Sweet or Hot depending on taste)

3 tbs. EVOO

1 Garlic Clove
1 Medium Sized Spanish onion or yellow onion
1 Green Pepper
1 Large Carrot
1 Celery Stalk
2 Cups Peas

1 Tbs Rosemary
1 Tbs Oregano
1 Tbs Basil

Salt and Fresh Ground Pepper to taste

4 16oz Cans Stewed Tomatoes
2 16oz Cans Tomato Sauce (Plain Tomato Sauce, Not Spaghetti Sauce)

How To Make it:

1) Dice the soffritto (Garlic, Onion, Green Pepper, Carrot and Celery). I prefer to leave it chunky but chop it as fine as you want. (Yes, I know that Green Pepper doesn't belong in a soffritto, blame it on my German / Irish ancestry)
2) Put a heavy pot on the stove, Add 2 tbs. of EVOO coating the bottom of the pot, heat over high-medium heat
3) Brown the sausage and remove. It's OK if the Sausage is not cooked all the way through yet. Slice the sausage.
4) Reduce pan to medium heat, add the rest of the EVOO
5) Add the soffritto stir for a couple of minutes until the onions begin to turn pale gold.
6) Return pan to medium-high heat.
7) Add and Brown the other meats.
8) Drain some of the grease.
9) Re-add sliced sausage to pot.
10) Sprinkle with Rosemary, Oregano & Basil & Salt and Pepper.
11) Add Peas.
12) Add Stewed Tomatoes & Tomato Sauce to Pot, Bring Mixture to a boil.
13) Lower heat and Simmer for an hour, stirring occasionally.
14) Sauce should be "thick" with meat and vegetables.
15) Serve over pasta. Share and Enjoy.

Variations:

If you don't have a well stocked spice rack, I have found that about 4 Tbs. of Mrs. Dash Italian Medley is a good substitute.

Of course, if you have the time stewing your own tomatoes is preferable but the goal is to knock this out in under an hour and a half.

Be bold with vegetables. I've used snap peas, string beans, mushrooms, zucchini, summer squash.

For a healthier option replace the Beef, Pork and Sausage w/ ground turkey, chicken and turkey sausage.

Also veal, lamb and porkchops are options for the meat.

Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.

Since the supreme court ruled on Kelso vs. The City of New London allowing the use of eminent domain to transfer real property from one private owner to another to increase tax receipts and jobs, many cities have begun projects to build sports arenas, corporate parks, factories and bus stations. They have taken advantage of eminent domain to assist developers in acquiring the land they require to execute. Gone are the days of pesky home owners holding onto their land until they get a "fair price", now if a developer wants a piece of land the government can intercede and condemn the property and transfer it to the developer. My question is, why doesn't this apply to intellectual property as well?

World famous internet balladeer Jonathan Coulton makes a fair living writing, selling and performing music but let's face it Mr. Coulton is a small operation. If SonyBMG can prove to the City of New York that they could make more money off of Mr. Coulton's music, shouldn't his music be transferred to them? Sony would require more personnel to market, promote, and produce Mr Coulton's music and could produce more tax receipts then Mr. Coulton does out of his Brooklyn apartment. The same can be said for open source projects such as Linux, Firefox, and Drupal. If tax receipts and job creation can be used as rationale for using eminent domain, shouldn't any intellectual property just be transferred to the company who can make the most off of it since that would create income and jobs?

All this satire leads to my real question... Why should real property be less protected intellectual property?

Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.

I'm going to try and revive the blog in the new year... here's the first post...

Recently in some reading I came across a Patrick Henry quote "The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests" which made me think of a story. Those who know me know I have a metal copy of the US Bill of Rights in my wallet. I carry it to set off metal detectors and make a point that we are giving up our 4th amendment rights. When asked what it is I'll say something like "Oh, it's the Bill of Rights, I guess you have a problem with that here".

For a while I was traveling to Washington DC for business. While I was there I'd take advantage of the museums and national monuments that DC has to offer. On one such trip I was visiting the National Archive where there is a metal detector. There's a delicious level of irony when one has to be searched to see the document that protects you from illegal search. When I set off the detector I made my flippant comment about the Bill of Rights. The guard's response surprised me, "It's my job to protect the Bill of Rights from people like you".

I must've been in a snarky mood, and considering that I had an audience fueled my desire to drive my point home, I responded, "No, it's the job of the Bill of Right to protect me from government thugs like you". I'm not sure this was what he was looking for as an answer as he grimaced before letting me past. I do find it sad that this man has no appreciation for what he's guarding, because he is doing more to destroy the Bill of Rights then I could do.

I suspect that this is in my mind recently in the wake of the "crotch bomber" incident. Since the attempted bombing every day there has been one story or another about the "millimeter wave full body scanners" which essentially give security personnel the ability to see under someone's clothes so they can look for weapons and other contraband. A side effect of this is that the security guard gets to see the person being scanned essentially naked. In the past people have criticized my civil disobedience around metal detectors reminding me that the amendment protects us from an "unreasonable search". I think we can all agree that being strip searched to get on an airplane is unreasonable.

I'm also concerned about how this spreads out in the world. In 2001 most people were only subjected to metal detectors at airports. 8 years later we find them in government buildings, office buildings, sports venues, and at some public gatherings like Times Square on New Years Eve. We are subjected to "random" bag searches when getting on the NYC subways. We have all been conditioned to believe that this is the way it has to be. Once body scanning becomes common in airports, and it's part of the culture I believe to will begin to find it's way into the world as metal detectors have.

At the end of the day, the only real security is an alert citizenry. If both the shoe bomber and crotch bomber cases have taught us anything, it is that we, the people, are the last line of defense, not the TSA, not some piece of technology. No matter what defenses we put in place, someone will work out a way around them. The real legacy of 9/11 is not ungraded security, it's that people are willing to stand up to these attackers.

Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.

I can tell you my first "political memory", it was January 21, 1981, I was 11 years old. When was came to school that day TV sets were in the classroom. By mid day we were watching Ronald Reagan's Inauguration. I remember the Pomp and Circumstance around the event. As it was a Catholic school we prayed for the President, and for the Hostages released from Iran that day. Where President Reagan wasn't addressing the students directly, I do feel I learned a lot that day. I also learned a lot about the meaning of the Presidency some from Reagan's speech, some from the teacher afterwards.

To be honest, I suspect my belief that the government is not the solution to problems may have come directly from that speech. Now, I don't believe in everything Reagan represented but that one thing stays with me to this day. It occurs to me that from the people I've stayed in touch with there's a pretty even split between conservatives and liberals but the majority of them are politically active or at least aware. I think any interest I have in politics today can be traced back to that day and I suspect that other people in that class would feel the same.

So, I have to ask a question, in the last 28 years how did we get from a point where people would believe that a President addressing the youth of the nation might be the worst thing to happen to humanity? As I read tweets and blog entries there is a lot of "OMG! Obama is coming for the children. Lock them in the cellar for their own good!" out there and quite frankly it scares me. I didn't come out of the Reagan Inauguration an Alex P Keaton ultra-conservative clone, and I don't believe that children will come out of the school that day as full fledged socialists. I would like to believe that they will come out of school more politically aware as I and my classmates did.

Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.

So, I had some disturbing news this weekend, my MacBook Pro, Zen, had his hard drive die on me and unlike most folks who have had a drive crash, I'm not panicked, once I figure out how I am going to work over the next few days until Apple can replace the drive I've been doing what I need to get an old machine up and running.

What Happened

So I was doing general decrufting to prepare for the snow leopard upgrade things started feeling wanky. Emptying caches took longer then it should've. Repairing permissions and scanning the disk were throwing errors. I dropped out to single user mode and ran fsck on the drive. Then it happened the drive start throwing I/O errors and I knew it was on it's last legs. I couldn't get the machine to boot after that. Like his namesake I think I heard Zen say "I have failed you. I am sorry. I ...", and yes it was the first time I heard Zen refer to itself as I.

Initially I was panicked, then I thought for a minute. I had just done a full system backup to prepare for the upgrade. All my critical data is stored on dropbox so I didn't need to worry about losing data. The IT gods were looking out for me, I have all my data, the AppleCare on that machine expires Next month, so the repair would is free now but would cost me money by the end of next month. To quote a baseball legend, "today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth".

The Pleasure In Dealing With The Apple Store

This is third time since I bought this machine that I've had to go to the apple store for a repair. The first involved the keyboard (probably caused by me eating one too many lunches over the keybaord) the second was the power supply shorting out. In ever case dealing with them has been a pleasure.

The one thing that surprises me geniuses is that they always seem to trust my technical skills, unlike other technical support folks. For example when I got to the apple store without an appointment last night their first reaction was that I'd need to make an appointment, however once I explained the triage I had done, they were aware that all I'd need to do is drop off the machine since I had already done as much as the genius would do before tagging it for a repair.

The other thing that surprises me was how willing the geniuses are to take your word. A genius called this morning to confirm that it will take a couple of days to do the repair and he talked about what happened. After I explained that I was prepping for the Snow Leopard upgrade the genius said they'd install Snow Leopard and iLife '09 on the machine. He didn't ask for proof I bought Snow Leopard or iLife '09 he just told me that they would install it since I said my plan was to do the install. This really impressed me, I expected that the machine would come back to me in its original state (tiger, iLife original, etc) instead of with the software I said I'm running on it. It might be that geniuses are trained to be very careful with folks who's machines are being reparied, it might be the classic pre-mac Apple ][ plate on outside of the MBP. Either way it was refreshing.

How Will I Survive Until The Laptop Is Fixed

Like I said before, I'm lucky. A while back I gave a friend of mine, Helen, my old MacBook when I upgraded to the Pro (I upgraded because the machine was a little underpowered for my needs) as part of a plan to get her to join the dark side and become a switcher. Something that worked she loves the computer and it has become her person non-work machine. WHen I told her about my predicament she gladly loaned me the old MacBook so I could work for a few days until I can get Zen back in his Snow Leopard form. The interested thing is that this Mac is still running Tiger so little things are driving me crazy (no spaces, a couple of 10.5 apps that I miss, etc) But at the end of the day I'm grateful that this went down the way it did.

Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.

Just got done listening to the latest FFundercats "emergency chat podcast" discussing the Facebook / FriendFeed merger. Of course there's a lot of fear around this from the community. Will they merge the 2 systems? If I'm only a friendfeed user, will I have to get a facebook account in order to retain all the things I've posted in friendfeed? If they merge the 2 systems will my contacts be merged? Will my Facebook friends be able to see my FriendFeed activity or vice versa? Will I have to become Steven Perez's bunneh vampire? Actually we all know that DYSP's bunneh vampires will take over the world but I digress.

First off, I'd like to say that I don't they that the FF guys owe us a thing. They built a service, let us play there and now they've found their way to make money, good for them. Let me let you in on a secret, that's why they started FriendFeed, that wanted to profit. Other then the fact that they should've let Scoble break the story, I don't think anyone else was "screwed". It's funny, we never learn. This happens with communities all the time on the net: 6apart, blogger, flickr and youtube all leap to mind. And everytime it happens people are outraged and yell and scream "You Owe Me". Well, in the case of a free service, especially one that doesn't have any advertising, we're owed nothing. We got to play in a playground, they got to prove something has value and that's that. If can't handle that level of disappointment, don't play in their sandbox.

If you're not backing up your activity on these services you haven't been paying attention web startups there past 15 years. I plan that if I'm not capturing some I post and put it into a DB that I control and backup, it's going to be gone. It's a risk we take with every web service we use. So if you want to keep your tweets, your facebook statuses, comments you make on other blogs, your own blog posts make sure you have an extra copy. Part of the reason I'm running a lifestream at play with keyboard is to backup my activity into a separate database that I control (I'm still importing older content that I have stored on my homebox).

Now, I do have some concerns about cross contamination of the groups. I really work hard at siloing my friends. Where there is cross contamination, I really reserve facebook for people I actually know and linkedIN for people I've worked with but I liberally add "interesting people" or just people who post interesting things on friendfeed and twitter. It's funny I share the same information on most of these networks, it's just a matter of siloing what's coming in to me. If I have only a few minutes I'm more likely to scan facebook statuses then FF or tweets. Ironically you are more likely to be my friend if you're a facebook connection then a friendfeed friend (I'll rail on using the word friend for any of this some other day).

This might be the number one reason why a decentralized network is important. But that's a discussion for another day.

Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.

Last week I attended Dave Winer's roadshow for bootstrapping the RSSCloud. It was an interesting meeting lots of discussion and I think that RSSCloud has some potential. It's always fun being in a room with seasoned pros, young turks and other folks some smarter then you and feeling the energy as these things are discussed.

It's funny to know that as the discussion lately has been around making the web real time (or more appropriately "real-ish time" as someone said in the meeting). RSS has been declared dead because it's not "real time". Solutions from XMPP to SubHubPubDubFlubClubMudBlood has been proposed. Dave is sitting in the corner basically saying I solved the realtime problem in 2002, see the Cloud element, let's use it! On the way back to the train after the meeting I was asked why

Dave's real interest is building a "loosely coupled 140 character messaging network", something that needs a shorter name. He's not looking to create a twitter killer, but to open open up some of twitter functionality. Also as it's entirely published in RSS links and media enclosures can be put into appropriate item elements instead of as links in the message: freeing up some space, and making it easy to embed such things in a client. Also, getting the link out of the message solves the link shortening problem.

During the meeting I pointed out that Twitter today is AOL in 1992. I posted a description of this in a post on Evo's Blog:

Back in the early 90’s there were a number of competing networks floating around AOL, CompuServe, MSN, GEnie, Prodigy, etc. Like twitter today the solutions were rather closed, and didn’t interoperate well with each other. An AOL user couldn’t send an email to someone on GEnie, participate in CIS’s CB or take part in a message area on Prodigy. Over the next couple of years companies moved their support to either newsgroups or web based forums, people abandoned CB for IRC on the internet and email in these services because gateways to traditional internet mail. This is (slowly) happening in the IM space now as jabber (and gtalk) has been interoperating with a number of different services.

There have been a few attempts to build a twitter killer, and they’ve failed, bigger is not the solution. I think that a small network of servers based on RSS Cloud will show up (probably an identica implementation) and interoperate. It will be initially small and rag tag much like the net in 92… mostly tech heads and we won’t be abandoning twitter while we play in that space. Once this starts happening there will be pressure on twitter to interoperate with this network but they will refuse as their business model depends on them owning the data and parsing it out.

Eventually a movie studio or celeb, maybe @AplusK, will say “wait, I can run my own server, own my network, run advertising and build my brand instead of twitter’s and I have enough pull that I can pull some my fans with me”. Much like email before it twitter will eventually break down the wall and federate with the outside network.

At the end of the day closed systems are proof of concept for the ‘net once they become popular we route around them they have to open or perish.

So, why is all this important? Anil Dash writes in this (excellent post)[http://dashes.com/anil/2009/07/the-pushbutton-web-realtime-becomes-real.html]:

Pushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook. The pieces of this platform have just come together to enable a whole set of new features and applications that would have been nearly impossible for an average web developer to build in the past.

Of course this is bigger then twitter and facebook. Imagine being able to have real time financial data delivered to a spread sheet automatically and it re-rating the a financial portfolio. This can extend to order systems, inventory control, or anything else where getting and calculating from real time data is critical. No longer are you tied into proprietary solutions. The possibilities are endless.

So, what does all this mean for me? Well, I've always wanted to have a system that aggregates and stores and delivers my activity across the web. Where I've loved friendfeed for this (and FF is a great community), this is really trading one group holding my data for another. Now that I've aggregated the data in one place, I figure that it makes sense to cloud enable that feed which I'm currently working on. Over on Play With Keyboard I'll be setting it up the RPC calls and hacking the RSS feed in the next couple of days.

Stay tuned for more....

Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.

At Dave Winer's meeting about bootstrapping the Rss Cloud someone (I don't remember who, sorry) asked about the possibility of using the cloud as an opensource peer to peer IM network to replace Jabber/XMPP (there was a little discussion around how difficult it is to implement XMPP securely and correctly). As I'm working on my cloud I've gotten to thinking about how to implement IM. I have no time to lead this for real, so this may be just a mental exercise. But if someone does have to the time to implement it I'd love to help.

The Initial Handshake

Here's the initial handshake flow as I see it:

• John Decides he'd like to Start IMing Mary
• John's CloudIM client sends a message to his CloudIM Server which creates John2Mary.rss and makes a call to Mary's CloudIM Server sending the URL to the RSS file and a URL to John's Public PGP Key
• Mary gets the invitation sent to her client, she decides to accept and her CloudIM Server sends URLs for Mary2John.rss and mary.pgp back to John
• Now John and Mary can use the RSS Cloud to IM back and forth.
• John and Mary date for a few years, get married and have a bitter divorce, but that's a story for another day.

I'm pretty sure that the initial handshake would require a separate procedure, we would need different parameters passed back and forth and at the end of the day, this is entirely the opposite of the cloud element instead of "I want to follow this", you're sending "I'd like you to follow this and tell me what to follow". However once that initial handshake is made you are open to use the cloud as a communications platform

Security Thoughts

As I hinted above PGP could be used to encrypt the items, allowing you to have a publicly accessible RSS file that anyone an subscribe to but only can be read by the people involved in the communication. Minimally, I think all of items sub-elements should be encrypted with the possible exception of the GUID. Assuming the GUID is clock based and not URL based, I see no data leaking with the GUID and, as a benefit, if you already have a message, there will be no overhead in decrypting it.

Part of me is thinking it might be preferable to have the PGP keys available in the feed which seems more graceful than needing some sort of key expiration in the process. This either requires either specially keyed items with the PGP keys as enclosures that the client can filter out or defining PGPKeys and Fingerprints at the channel level in a namespace.

The Client

There would be some differences between a standard RSS Cloud subscriber and the client required for IM

• As one would expect in IM, the conversations would show threaded and have separate windows for different converstaions.
• The client would be responsible for decrypting the message
• The client would be responsible for notifying the user when keys change to prevent man in the middle attacks.
• The client should interface with PGP or GNU PG, if installed and take advantage of all the security goodness inside.

Is That It

This is the ramblings of a man at 3:30 AM. I'm probably missing a lot. I'm thinking it's just a conversations starter. Feel free to rip me a new one, if I'm oversimplfying things.

Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.

Very rarely do I say this but I've found a film you must see, Jerome Bixby's The Man from Earth. I came across the film innocently enough, it was being discussed with William Katt on the Slice of Sci Fi so I acquired myself a copy and sat down this evening to watch it. I was surprised by what I found ... simply the best hour and a half of sci-fi I've seen put to film. Without giving too much away the premise is simple, a college professor, John Oldman, who appears to be in his mid-30s, is leaving his tenured position at a college. His colleagues gather at his home to discuss why he's leaving and his future plans. He reveals to them that he's a 14,000 year old Cro-Magnon man. The film is centered around these academics trying to disprove that assertion. The film discusses fantasy, faith, myth and morality.

Let me start by saying this isn't some explosion filled, mansquito filled space opera. There's not a space ship, laser gun or time travel device in sight. Like all good drama, it's much simpler yet much more complex. And it's all driven by one question. Is this possible? Before the SciFi channel gave up on being SciFi the heart of their ad campaigns was "What If?", because that is the heart of all good science fiction, the one question, "What If?".

In many respects it's structured more like a play then a film. It's a small cast, as the story goes on, the set gets claustrophobic. Much like "12 Angry Men" or "Glenn Gary Glenn Ross" the interaction of the characters drive the film which is what makes this special. I would highly recommend watching it.