An ambient display is a business status display that is usually on 24 hours a day and at a glance shows useful status and alerts for CRM, sales and IT staff from 10′ away.

Usually it’s a carefully formatted web link that is shown on a large flat-panel display.

A major advantage of an ambient display web app is that multiple locations can use the same link, for example both hq and offshore locations, unlike a control room.

The HTML meta refresh tag or AJAX can be used to periodically update the display page.

One way to write the meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache" />
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="Mon, 19 Apr 1999 08:21:57 GMT" />
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="900" />


An easy way to embed other web pages in your formatted link without programming is to use iframes, typically like this:

<iframe src ="/cgi-bin/status.cgi" width="500" height="270" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" align="top" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" name="status">

</iframe>


A green solution is a Mac Mini (85 to 120 watts) paired with a large LED flat-panel display (20 to 30 watts) with a resolution of 1920×1200 pixels or higher.

I currently use a Mac Mini and a classic Dell 2405FPW 24″ monitor to show nagios on the left-hand side and a custom webpage of iframes and Keynote’s Internet Health Report on the right-hand side.

The iframes use SOAP to fetch pingdom alerts and POST to fetch ISP bandwidth graphs.

Geckoboard and Leftronic also sell software to help create displays.

iLike’s Wonderful Facebook Problem
slashdot.org: Ideas For a Great Control Room?
villainsource.com: Lairs and Bases
techcrunch.com: Leftronic Dashboards Optimize Your Data Displays
The Panic Status Board
wikipedia: Ambient Display

They certainly have challenges:

• users with weak passwords
• application bugs
• advertising-supported, so cannot afford a lot of human-human account support
• user account lists circulating through partners and malicious users.

The physical world relies on either a guard who knows your face, or 2-factor authentication:

1. something you know (a passphrase) and
2. something you have (a token) or are (biometrics).

Web-sites usually get considerably less …

Being an Internet company that doesn’t issue X.509 certificates, on a good day Facebook can only get 1-factor authentication (a strong password), and on most days, 0-factor authentication (their users are re-using weak passwords from other accounts.)

I give them credit for adding login notifications and the “force logout” feature. Users can change their password and disconnect other users and bots from their accounts.

The next step would be enforcing strong passwords and displaying a captcha on every logon.

Beyond that, enforcing online security gets hard to tighten in a reliable manner.

I’m skeptical of their additional security attempts.

Cookies can be deleted, and IP addresses are shared in proxies or change over time. Doing SMS verification seems like a burder for a social media account user.

However when you’ve got 500 million accounts, any means of improving security or analyzing security issues saves on support costs.

Authentication: Something You Know, Have, or Are

Fortunately it’s also easy to solve that by understanding how to design HTML and site structure in advance to support those.

One of the most helpful things that can be done is to have well-defined URLs for HTML, images, CSS and JavaScript in the following scenarios:

• homepage content rooted under /, like ., images, css and js respectively
• admin site content rooted under /app, like ., images, css and js
• CDNs where you may store content in the future, such as a network-local proxy, Amazon, Akamai or Limelight. Generally a remote URL is overlaid onto the homepage or admin site structures listed above.

If you have localized content, each of the subdirectories above may be subdivided by ISO language code also.

Generally HTML and URLs intended for web browsers and email clients needs to be considered separately:

• web browsers handle relative URLs well
• email clients do not handle relative URLs as well as browsers, if at all. For example, not using an absolute URL or not specifying the scheme (ie. ://domain.tld) will cause problems in most email clients.
• in both cases, HTTP servers can use URL rewriting if necessary to make changes after the design is done.

Relative URLs not only help with HTTP to HTTPS transitions, but also in creating developer sandboxes, and test and QA servers.

Try to make as many links as possible relative in your HTML as possible if you’re planning on using SSL or test servers in the future. Fixing the links later can be expensive as it requires testing the entire site again for broken links.

By having reserved directory paths for images, css and html, it’s possible to set far-future expiry times to improve cacheability of those assets. However, the filename may not be reused, so new version of images need to receive a new filename or else caches will continue serving the old content.

And by having a URL available for items that could be served from a CDN, it’s possible to configure your CMS to be CDN-aware from Day One and avoid site changes and testing later. One of the first things I check when evaluating CMS programs these days is how I would easily be able to change serving images from a local web server to a remote CDN.

ZFS is the holy grail of filesystems. Many Database Administrators have switched from Linux to Solaris because ZFS has much better snapshot support than LLVM, as well as good SSD support.

phoronix.com: Native ZFS Is Coming To Linux Next Month (Aug. 27, 2010)
phoronix.com: Btrfs, EXT4 & ZFS On A Solid-State Drive (Aug. 9, 2010)
phoronix.com: Benchmarking ZFS On FreeBSD vs. EXT4 & Btrfs On Linux (July 27, 2010)
phoronix.com: Running ZFS With CAM-based ATA On FreeBSD 8.1 (July 26, 2010)
github: Native ZFS for Linux
FreeBSD Wiki: ZFS

Now a Free account holder is required to “log into your account or update your hostname monthly” or their account gets expired, resulting in the hassle of having to setup their dynamic address again.

Previously 5 free domains were allowed, now reduced to 2.

This summer the town had a major tornado (F1) tear through town at ground-level for miles that caused millions of dollars in damages.

Although many buildings and cars were damaged, most of the damage was done to trees torn from their roots and electrical poles snapped like twigs. Nearby Point Pelee National Park was closed due to fallen trees.

Millwood, Ohio was not so lucky, with some fatalities and a high school destroyed.

My folks are fine, with only about $500 in tree pruning and cleanup required.

cbc.ca: Leamington tornado damage in the millions
More Photos

Hmm … I’ve noticed a pattern of financial websites always taking the maintenance window, instead of architecting for 7×24 uptime. The web is still treated like a second-class citizen compared to the rest of the banking system.

Note: I used to work for a major bank, and the IT employees were smart enough to avoid this. Not sure what’s going on.

msnbc: BofA online banking down for 4 hours (August 27, 2010)

This was a fairly non-technical general talk on Google’s efforts to realize their mission statement.

What was most notable about the talk is that no mention was made of where their i18n staff came from. Google largely gained their deep Internet i18n knowledge from hiring former Netscape and IBM ICU staff. Currently the group hires based on referrals of experienced people.

It was decided to pick the 40 most natural languages as they represented 99.7% of web traffic. (To get to 100% would require 120 more languages.) Google search itself is in 113 languages, and GMail in 54, soon to be 58. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, is a strong supporter of this effort and quality of user experience is considered more important than cost of translation.

Lux-IQ: program to get feedback on international User experience and localization quality of various Google products from a network of in-market evaluators.

Example findings:

Issue type

Language/translation, interaction design, feature missing, feature bugs, visual design, data quality, other. Total.

Google translation toolkit used for ads. Machine translation. Some ad customers request translation into 50 languages for example.

Language Findits. 3 hour testing party for language-related products. Very successful.

Language console would help with finding already translated strings.

Globalization continuum

I18n prd, intl 1-stop, i18n checklist, country planningn legal, content, l10n checklist, translation, review and qa

I18n, planning, deployment

All is global, weekly pushes, 0.25 seconds for search query response

Quality is more important than cost.

High level advice alone – not effective
Deliver concrete solutions, hands-on
Adapt to product needs, constraints and priorities
Earn credibility
Success breeds success
Be persistent

Metrics: intl revenue, top10 problems
Graph of i18n api adoption

Challenges

Unicode redesign
Bidi in webapps
Broad range of environments
I18n technologies
Deep dives: android, chrome, gmail, youtube: to help critical area, new areas

40 language initiative

Take aways

I18n by design
Educate, evangelize, communicate
Design globally, implement locally
Build credibility. Success breeds success.
Retrofitting happens. C’ets la vie. Learn from it.
“Make it easy to do right, and hard to do wrong.”

3 engineers for 7 months to fix gmail

Thanks to Google for hosting.

Twitter: IMUG

# XIHA Connects Facebook and Twitter Friends with New Multilingual Translation http://tinyurl.com/2ankev2 #L10n about 3 hours ago via web

# Zynga Launches First Localized Game In China: Texas Poker. http://tinyurl.com/2fxp9tm #L10n about 3 hours ago via web

# @localization sorry didn’t see your Q (no hashtag) but their i18n team seems fairly centralized but serves all projects and offices. about 4 hours ago via web in reply to localization

# And the event is over! Thank you Manish, and thank you Andrew Swerdow & the Google i18n intergrouplet for hosting! #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# Question: is there a process for self-localization of smaller language? Yes, for example Search recently translated into Hawaiian. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# Question: why 40 languages? Those 40 can reach 99.7% of all internet users. Actually 42 now. ~100 more needed for remaining 0.03%. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# Many questions from audience. One was how well-integrated is bug-management system? Manish summarized end-to-end process for that. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# @renatobeninatto approximately 60 attended tonight’s Google #i18n event. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web in reply to renatobeninatto

# Manish now summing up: #i18n by Design and other take-aways for any organization. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# Google #i18n API adoption has grown 173% since start of the 40 language initiative. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# Google has a team dedicated to #Unicode “Redesign”. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# First two points on successful #i18n: not high-level advice alone; deliver concrete solutions or even hands-on help. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# How can an #i18n team make an impact on projects from the outside? Manish offers 6 points. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# Amazing how much the Web challenges but also offers opportunities in #i18n. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# Interesting timeline now of Google’s Globalization process from i18n thru Planning to L10n. But I’m not going to give it away. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# Apparently this internal Language FindIt program results in far less mischief than other firms’ community translation efforts. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# Manish now onto Language FindIts: Googlers identifying translation & #L10n issues to improve Google products in own languages. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# Interesting discussion going on with audience about MT vs. transcreation. And rule-based vs. statistical translation. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# @renatobeninatto Yes they do use Google Translator Toolkit internally for example in automated ad translation. User can then edit. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web in reply to renatobeninatto

# @renatobeninatto I found Petra, she says Hi, but she is still making me ask your question. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web in reply to renatobeninatto

# @ken_lunde yes similar to Wordware but the entrance fee was far less! Very good presentation, great interaction with audience. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web in reply to ken_lunde

# Google has a program called Lux-IQ to get feedback from local market-savvy non-technical users in all 40 language markets. #imug408 about 6 hours ago via web

# #i18n quality issues include not only basic encoding and locale issues, but also missing features important locally. #imug408 about 7 hours ago via web

# The presentation is now turning to quality issues in #i18n. #imug408 about 7 hours ago via web

# Manish is also presenting case studies, such as their experience with Google Video and Unicode (pre-YouTube). #imug408 about 7 hours ago via web

# And by the way Google is hiring #i18n engineers! #imug408 #jobs about 7 hours ago via web

# Manish has given us perspective on Google’s incredible global growth, and the start of Google’s 40-language initiative in 2007 #imug408 about 7 hours ago via web

# Manish Bhargava, Google #i18n Product Manager, is presenting. #imug408 about 7 hours ago via web

# Tonight’s IMUG event at Google kicked off 1/2 hour late, big crowd not enough badges. #imug408 about 7 hours ago via web

# Going to tonight’s IMUG event @ Google? Maps, directions and more: http://www.imug.org/google/ #imug408 about 10 hours ago via web

# Shirley_Rogers Twitter Unicode Hashtags – http://bit.ly/9ciNuu about 12 hours ago via web Retweeted by i18n_mug

# 57 yes, 5 maybe RSVPs: 8 left for tonight’s 70 chairs. Will it be SRO? Google’s Manish Bhargava is an #i18n star! #imug408 about 12 hours ago via web

# Localization Project Manager, Net-Translators, Sunnyvale, CA. Just posted to IMUG Jobs: http://www.imug.org/jobs/ #L10n #jobs about 13 hours ago via web

# Maps and directions to tonight’s 7 PM Google #i18n event in Mountain View, CA: http://www.imug.org/google/ #imug408 about 14 hours ago via web

# IMUG cannot do webcasts from Google yet. Hope to see you all there tonight! http://tinyurl.com/2f9esas Hashtag will be #imug408 about 14 hours ago via web

# RT @ken_lunde Two font- and CJKV-related Tech Notes now live. http://tinyurl.com/23ffulg & http://tinyurl.com/yzd3hjj <–Kazuraki font! about 16 hours ago via web

# Kazuraki: Adobe’s Groundbreaking New Japanese Typeface http://tinyurl.com/2by46nn Next month’s IMUG event, @ Adobe #imug408 about 16 hours ago via web

# TONIGHT 7 PM: The Google i18n Story http://tinyurl.com/2f9esas Hashtag for this IMUG event @ Google will be #imug408 about 16 hours ago via web

# cathywissink RT @TalkStandards Nascent Web Open Font Format is getting boost thanks to W3C’s new initiatives http://bit.ly/biE85M #typography about 16 hours ago via web Retweeted by i18n_mug

Some versions had “classpath exceptions”, like Standard Edition (SE), and some didn’t, like Mobile Edition (ME.)

So I stuck with C/C++ and Unix scripting languages like Perl, which don’t rely on any one company.

Oracle has clarified what those Java patents mean, with a lawsuit against Google for using Java, over 7 software patents originally granted to Sun. They even tossed in some copyright violation complaints.

(Oracle/Sun also has numerous restrictions on their downloadable Java binaries, including right of agreement termination at any time.)

The US Patent Office created a software and business method process minefield when it allowed patents on the most trivial of ideas reduced to practice.

One of the patents being litigated even involves the JAR format.

This is just the latest example of why software patents are of no benefit, except to monopolists who want to impede progress and openness.

allthingsd.com: Love, Larry: Here is the Oracle Statement and Final Complaint Versus Google
cnet.com: Sun settles Kodak’s Java suit for $92 million (2004)
cnet.com: Sun picks GPL license for Java code (2006)
cnet.com: Why Oracle, not Sun, sued Google over Java

Ted Stevens Crash

The small airplane crash in Alaska that killed Ted Stevens and others generated a lot of inaccurate quotes in the press.

Based on looking at the aerial photograph of the crash scene, it’s obvious from the relatively long tree damage path, resulting in gradual deceleration, and largely intact fuselage, that the accident was highly survivable. That’s contrary to the aerial observers’ quote.

Also, the press harped on the lack of a filed flight plan, which is not required for VFR flights. However, some kind of flight plan should be announced to either the FAA or family and friends when cross-country flights are involved so that somebody will notice you’re overdue. Doubly so when VIPs are involved – narrowing SAR down can save millions of dollars.

It looks like in this case a specific landing time was not relayed to the lodge, and they only realized the flight was overdue when making dinner reservations for their expected guests.

Certainly this crash is going to spotlight what an ex-senator, ex-NASA employees, lobbyists and GCI were doing out there.

cnn.com: Untamed Alaska challenges pilots

JetBlue FA Escape

Regarding the JetBlue flight attendant losing it and activating the emergency slide with a beer in hand … although entertaining to read about, this incident indicates a lack of training for dealing with unpleasant situations. The flight attendants are required crew members who are primarily there to maintain the safety and security of the cabin during flights – they can’t “just lose it.”

Perhaps flight attendants involved in an altercation with a passenger should call another FA and switch stations to depersonalize the incident.

Example: if a pax drops a bag on a FA’s head, the FA should take a second to ensure everybody’s ok and then automatically call another FA to switch stations.

I imagine this incident will result in much greater scrutiny of flight attendants and their actions, making the job even more difficult than it already is.

And tampering with an aircraft is not something professionals want to make light of. Activating the emergency slide temporarily disabled that aircraft for flight use, resulting in costs to repack the slide and possibly a missed revenue trip, as well as endangering people on the ground.

It also plants a bad idea in the minds of those passengers who suddenly want off the plane, and try to emulate him.

NBC.com: slide activation video

25th Anniversary of Japanese 747 Crash

Japan had its worst aviation crash August 12, 1985. A 747 with 520 people aboard crashed into a mountain. The relatives still climb the mountain each year to remember the victims.

FAI AFSS – Planning A Flight to Alaska
avweb.com: A Jet Blue FA Loses It
wikipedia: Flight Attendant
avweb.com: Ted Stevens Crash: A Nasty Reminder (of Alaska Bush Syndrome)