s/Blockchain/Beyoncé/g
Better than replacing Cloud with Butt.
https://
Blockchain...
7 Years at Google today
*
Hired to work on web protocols. Immediately detoured to the needful work of building a social network. Learned a lot along the way.
I don't have a lot of sage wisdom to offer other than be humble, humane, and empathic. That goes a long way.
That and banjo. Always have banjo.
Looking forward to 7 more years of causing trouble with you.
Mario Kart - Bay Area
Maps and GBUS work pretty well split-screen, especially useful to know if you're going to get to the stop on time.
Google Assistant (circa 1973)
Google Assistant as envisioned from 1973's "Designing Freedom"
https://
Much of what we implement today was predicted then. We also forget that people once derided and feared "The Computer".
This work is quite accessible and reading it gave me a better understanding of complex dynamic systems, relaxation time, variety, Ashby's Law and the nature of bureaucracy. Also originally broadcast on the CBC as a lecture series:
http://
Only Variety can absorb Variety
It's such a simple concept that makes sense.
_...for every factor outside of your own control that can have a positive or negative influence on your ability to meet your goals, you need to put a compensatory control in place to allow you to respond._
Gaia service bits, D3 policies, gSuite vs Identity only -- the number of states for an account is dizzying. But by Ashby's law if we don't have mechanisms to absorb that variety bad things will befall the control software and we'll be unable to achieve homeostatis or even viability.
http://
ess see ohhh
World's worst SEO choice for a band name. Second only to the musician named dash-M-dash -M- which g+ cannot even render.
I guess I'm supposed to use Archie to find this...
User Trust Research
Found some research around measuring User-Trust.
• First, developers can learn that trust concepts can be operationalized into specific attributes or questions that can be examined in research and designs.
• Second, one of the key findings is that trust seems to be related to beliefs about another’s ability, integrity, and benevolence.
• Third, trust and risk are related concepts, and factors that reduce risk perceptions, such as reducing uncertainty, can be beneficial for increasing trust or decreasing the need for trust.
• Fourth, ease-of-use characteristics, such as the ease of finding information and completing transactions, can affect trust.
• Fifth, external factors or context that may seem to be unrelated to the situation can affect trust, such as the characteristics of the truster and the type of risk involved in the transaction.
• Finally, trust probably develops in stages. In the first stage, superficial interface properties, such as colors and designs, can have a large effect on initial trust decisions. Later, users may make trust decisions based on more reasoned analysis of information. Eventually, long-term trust decisions are based on direct experience and personal service.
Google at the Edge of Chaos
Looks like we once had an Ethnographer on staff. This is the only notable mention of Complex Adaptive Systems I found. But it is interesting reading back from 2011....
https://
VSM
Doing Perf and listening to some lectures on VSM and it finally all starts to make sense.
I can see organizational patterns now in ways I could not before. Still grappling with the math though.
Google Forever
Greetings Area 120. Google Forever has also made it to the final pitch round.
We have plenty of opportunities for people to pitch in on sustainable bizdev models, decentralized engineering and more. But one role we'd love to fill is a UX/Design/Frontend leader. Here's our job listing. Please reach out if you're interested!
https://
Are you interested in building user experiences and critical user journeys that work for generations? Do you want to help people preserve their most important digital memories?
Consider joining the Google Forever Project. We're a proposed Area 120 project that's already made it to the final pitch round and we need you!
Our project is creating the software that will power a business and ecosystem that will last for decades and centuries. We're starting with a way to preserve the world's most valued Photos in an easy, simple sustainable way.
As a lead/founding frontend member of the team you will have considerably freedom to set the direction and tech stack while working with our passionate engineering and business teams. You will also be able to explore experimental user interfaces and user experiences that might be used in the far future.
If accepted to Area 120 you will have the chance to work on this full time. We also will accept any and all people who want to help us achieve our vision!
See http://
Circle
Public profile, private profile actually map pretty well to human psychology, at least to non-millenials...
https://
Mastodon Enterprise Edition
Federated social networking is relatable to dasher...
Seems like it might be interesting to provision following for new users.
_5. To improve the experience of brand new users, we’ve added something in the old tradition of MySpace Tom — except instead of following some central Tom, new accounts will start off following their local admins (this can be adjusted by the administrator). That way, on your first login you are greeted with a populated home timeline instead of an empty one._
https://
Proud Code
GoogleCloud asks: *What was the first program you wrote that you were proud of?*
_Please include what language it was written in and a brief description. Feel free to go out of bounds if you have a creative answer!_
My response:
At age 17 I was published in Compute!'s Gazette. The small utility, named ML Runner, is tool written in Commodore 64 Basic and 6502 Assembly. It converted machine language binaries into easy to use BASIC programs. The result was a better, easier way for users to execute code.
You can see the actual short code on page 98 in the June 1987 Issue here:
https://
Crashplan to home customers: bye bye
60 days isn't a long time for people with lots of data. I have a feeling it's going to take legislation to get companies to do the right thing here (and that includes us too, Google Drive notice is 60 days as well...)
Also facepalm on the earnest CEO video at:
https://
Justice and Closure
The memo damage has been done and now we're left with the mess. Here are some ideas on how to make amends:
- Everyone ever interviewed by Damore is offered an onsite interview.
- Everyone peer-reviewed for promo is given an automatic appeal.
- Everyone peer-reviewed gets their previous calibrations revisited, and comp retroactively adjusted.
Friday Night Dance Party
_Just move on up_
_Toward your destination_
_Though you may find, from time to time, complication_
Complicated week eh? Just remember we have each other and when we work together we can make the world a better place!
And thanks to the brave souls that communicate wisdom. (especially since I've been a bit absent from these discussions)
Kill all Normies
So decided to finish "Kill all Normies" to get my head around "what hath the internet wrought" and how technology has affected society.
The book is a little shallow, especially if you were paying attention during gamergate. Read on if you want a sickening tour of the worst that's out there.
Given Techs great power I believe it behooves us to expand our concern to the outsized level of influence we have. We all built this platform. Behold. (Including what may be the weirdest set of recommended books from Play.)
Missile Mail
tired: drone delivery
wired: missile delivery
If you look back you'll see the parallels between Google and the Postal Service....
Jungle Gym
Question for Jungle Gym -- how does it stack up against the Q&A feature in Groups? It seems that there's some overlap here that needs to be shaken loose. Maybe something for Daniel when he returns from his travels..
Now if only I could go back in time and reshoot my high school photos...
_“We’ve had high school students take their senior pictures with it and we even had someone take wedding photographs in front of it,” Horn said. “A lot of people contact me through its Facebook page (The Tardis) for scheduled photo shoots. I built it to make people happy, so we don’t charge for photographs with it.”_
http://
Battle for the Net
I read that we were going to participate in Net Neutrality protests today. I loaded up google.com to see if we were doing a home page promo. I didn't see the logo load and thought that this was a very sublime way of calling attention to content blocking. So I waited for a spinner and call to action...
haha; no. Instead it was this super heavy doodle that took forever to load over GBUS wifi.
Ah well. Looks like we're sending an "email" to our "listserve" (itsthe90s.gif) of committed diehards, and posting a video playlist hidden somewhere on youtube (couldn't find it, can you?)
Greetings Plussers!
Paul here from the Superfund Squad, where we're getting rid of the infrastructure you love to hate and paying off unfunded mandates with technical debt. And digging up the History of Google's Social Efforts in the attached collection.
I've been cranking at this social thing for almost 7 years at Google on Google+ and a long time before that at places Six Apart (home of Typepad and Livejournal), hi5 and LinkedIn. I did a lot of work on OpenSocial and other standards back then which is a big reason I'm here today.
Oh and this enterprise thing isn't my first rodeo. Way back at Critical Path we provided hosted email, calendar and tasks for Italian Telecoms, Major Universities *and* the Kiss Army. And at Red Hat we sold shrink wrap and services to all sales channels.
But I'm most proud of the work I did at the UN on telecom standards, relief efforts and publishing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 500 languages. (And the site is still standing to this day!)
http://
And finally before that was the Internet Gopher.. Me, with Heavy Metal hair:
https://
Beyond all this tech I enjoy life in Oakland with my fabulous wife Julie and our Great Pyrenees Gus. You'll find us exploring the parks of the East Bay, checking out obscure music or cruising the rapidly gentrifying Valencia street in the Mission. I'm also heavily interested in building software and systems that last the long term. I'm a member of the Long Now (https://
Happy to be here with y'all and looking forward to our next adventures!
Plusones to Pinboard.in
A reminder that +1s *for web sites* are going away. You *can* export them to other places. I chose to move mine to Pinboard. One nice thing Pinboard does is archive the pages you bookmark, so now the content I +1'd is more stable long term.
In the process I found and fixed a bug where the timestamps on the plusones takeout export were wrong. It was broken for about 5 years and no one noticed :(
If you want a proper export file you can use https://
Subject: My Final Attempt - Uber
Never send a bill collector to do a recruiters job...
_Paul,_
_I wanted to follow up on two emails I sent over the past couple months, this will be my final attempt to connect in the best interest of our time. I came across your background and wanted to see if you'd be open to confidentially explore opportunities at Uber._
_Best,_
_Daniel_
_Director, Payments_
Google+ vs Facebook GIFs - 2011
So I hear that body slam GIFs are all the rage now. Of course back in 2011...
Many more cringe-worthy things here:
https://
Rack and Stack
SVL-MP5 has a stack of hardware in the lobby. Scary how many of these I've racked...
PowerEdge 2850, 2950
Sun Ultra 1, T1000,
Sun Storage Array
HP DL360, Procurve
Dell Powerconnect
Yikes!
Fingerprints
Something to keep in mind: fingerprints can be ephemeral too..
Latest _Healthy Stuff_ update: Julie only got 6 months off Pfizer's 0k/month wonder drug before progression. So we'll see if Xeloda will work next. Crazy side effects though.
Luckily there's a half dozen other treatments available and more coming.
As always props to my supportive coworkers and to our flexibility policies that make it possible to balance caregiver obligations with work obligations. And if anyone finds themselves in a similar situation I'm here for you too.
http://
PHOTO PRESERVATION DRAWING!
I have a mechanism that has enough crypto-theater to make me happier than just drawing numbers out of a hat and having someone pinky-swear that the process is legit
.
It uses a Random Beacon to seed a random number generator, which then chooses 5 winners from the 73 entrants. It's a silly perl script (might rewrite it in go if I
have time...)
https://
------------------------------------------------
5 winners will be chosen on June 15th at noon Pacific Standard Time.
Read on to find out how winners will be chosen.
- Each of the 73 entrants is given a 'lot number', which is emailed to them.
- The file lot_to_username.txt maps the number to a hashed version of your username.
- You can verify that your lot is listed correctly. For example:
# Verify if your lot number is 12
sudo apt-get install apache2-tools
htpasswd -v -b /google/data/rw/users/pl/plindner/www/survey-drawing 12 lindner
- The http://
- The random seed will be generated by the NIST random beacon on June 15th Noon Pacific Standard time. Results will be visible here:
https://
- The seed value will be written to seed.xml at that point and winners will be
chosen!
TECHNICAL DETAILS FOLLOW
- The original names are stored one username-per-line in names.txt
- The lot_to_username.txt file containing bcrypt hashed usernames was generated using this command:
cat -n /tmp/names.txt | xargs -n 2 htpasswd -b -B -C 20 ~/contest.file
- Note that you could brute-force the usernames with moderate compute capacity. Please be polite and don't do that.
TAMPER VERIFICATION
You can verify that the usernames, script, and contest draw date have not been modified by verifying the PGP signature of the date and sums.
You can verify this message by using keybase https://
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256
sha256sum lot_to_username.txt http://
6a86aadf90310cb83b2cadcf820d3b3a0ea0bfbd175822ebcfb44a55a1fc1e0f lot_to_username.txt
bf45ed9e504d51934261610bf69153c0f0646dfbe0b58c1fe044803a90dd3ff3 http://
Contest Seed: https://
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
wkYEAREIABAFAllBLkYJEPhZKFJz9YBUAADv9gCgkHEiWKjs7RlfM3G5U4NsYNmK
rqUAoBpiZrhGAy/SMPUqzX+Wl/6AuQdD
=XjMK
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Heirloom
"Heirloom" [1] - you keep using that word, I don't think you know what that means.
The sad thing is these folks are pivoting to an Alexa Task product. It tries to create a spoken story based on a set of photographs. Least compelling product ever...
At some point we're going to need to find a way to allow people to use new products without losing data.
Help me award some contest winners! -- securely
Okay, I have 72 submissions to my photo backup survey. And I promised prizes, so I need to give out prizes. But you shouldn't trust me since I might be evil. Of course I'd like to preserve the privacy of individuals, yet allow anyone to verify that I didn't give someone a prize. Help!
Some things I've thought of:
- Create 1-72 buckets.
- Use the NIST random beacon to pick random bits at a specified, agreed upon time in the future. https://
- Use reservoir sampling to use those random bits to pick 5 items from the 72 total. https://
Now the question is can we mask the participants in the survey yet have everyone know with accuracy that the above is on the up-and-up.
- I could just publish a signed document with the number->ldap mappings, but that reveals everyone who participated.
- I could send each participant their participant number. However then how would anyone know that I had awarded the prizes?
Might need to read up on secure election protocols to make this happen.
Suggestions welcome!
Sound Search
I didn't find my sound search within Google Play Music, but it appears that my 91 year old future self is still using GPM..
Digital Vellum Photos
Digital Vellum is working on a project to help people store Photos for 100+ years.
That means I'm thinking about how to build a long-term, stable, resilient systems and business. I'd also love to see this applied to Google so it too can be a very very long term entity.
So I'm not an expert in this area but it seems that there are some ways that we can focus the business on long term value. Some are structural, others based on rethinking existing systems. I'm not an economist or an MBA by any stretch, but here goes:
- Sell annuities that pay out in storage/access "dividends" spread out over a long time.
- Create a wholly owned Mutual Society to manage storage and serving. Google can then become a Lloyds of London-stye "Name". [This entity could sell long-term/perpetual bonds that also have storage dividends]
- Create a customer-owned collective to manage long-term assets. Think of it as "Vanguard for Storage".
- We already store Photos for iPhone users, why not have each company back each other up and come up with coordinated storage systems with rights of survivorship.
- For the crytpocurrency angle use something like Streem (http://
And also remember to take our Photo Preservation Survey if you haven't already:
https://
Kanban
We have what, three or more internal Kanban tools? go/kanban, go/plananizer, and now go/scrumboard
None of them really do everything I want.. Trello or Jira+Grasshopper both worked better in the past, and I'm sure they're even better now.
I wish we could merge all three internal projects and then add the UI from this simple opensource sandstorm app WeKan.
Mosh to cloudtop from laptop
Assumes:
- you have a jump host (existing ubiquity works fine)
- beyondcorp is disabled on laptop/jumphost
On jumphost
sudo apt-get install dtach
On laptop
ssh cloudtophost
echo
# copy the value of that environment variable
# create a new shell on your laptop and continue:
mosh --port=60000 jumphost
export SSH_AUTH_SOCK={pasted filename}
dtach -Ez -r winch -c ~/.cloudtop-session ssh cloudtophost
tmx # or screen or whatever you prefer
This setup leaves your mosh session active when putting the laptop to sleep, network changes, etc.
Every morning you will need to use go/auth-refresh to get fresh tokens.
If you have to reboot your laptop you can get back to your previous state by executing:
mosh --port=60000 jumphost
dtach -a ~/.cloudtop-session
Cloudtop!
Finally can use GCP instances to replace Ubiquity.
Also so very happy that I put my dotfiles in git so I can get this rig the way I like it quickly...
Daycare
The new Moffet Place campus is guilty here too... No Daycare to be found.
Daycare seems like such a no-brainer *investment*. Every parent that never comes back after maternity/paternity leave is another one we have to spend money hiring...
Google+ Buttons...
*The +1 button for web sites is now the G+ button*
Hey Googlers - get ready to dogfood the new G+ button! It's an evolution of the existing +1 and +Share buttons you see across the web. It's leaner, faster and much less expensive to operate. Instead the world's most costly-click-counter you'll share directly to G+, which is what most users wanted anyway.
You can see the G+ button at various places such as:
- Blogspot blogs like http://
- The Chrome Web store https://
- And sites from a-to-z http://
Want to give feedback? There's a handy link in the pop-up sharebox to do so.
Big kudos to +106053902024703312631 / +110610523830483756510 / +104802479551695111660 and the cast of characters that have helped us get this far.
Whose Global Village?
*Whose Global Village?* added to reading list.
I do know one thing -- the Global Village as envisioned decades ago by Marshall McLuhan sure isn't what we have today.
https://
Unreachable!
Unsearchable and Daily Inspiration for a TGIF..
The following *delightful* Google Play Playlist is a comprehensive collection of music from Watch Dogs 2:
Digdug doesn't know anything about it.
And yes, that's a base-64 encoded proto you're seeing! [and Let's hope that adding a new message to that proto doesn't rewrite all the permalinks....]
I was able to find the link to this in some disqus comments with a bit of search tweaking, but I couldn't get an actual link surfaced for a playlist in our own product. The original Spotify playlist does show up.
https://
Checking out SAFe
Looks like there was an internal presentation that I missed:
https://
It gives names to processes that I recognize, so it seems like it might be a useful model..
Slick as Vic
*SocialExperienceLevel.SLICK_AS_VIC* -- some documentation may be out of date...
http://
cc @ebarn
Emerald Sea Protocols
*Emerald Sea Protocols* - October 2010
_Make open protocols the "default choice" and the "easy choice"_ -- me
And 6 years later some of this stuff is finally taking off....