Reddit has turned up The Case of the 500 Mile Email. Pretty bizarre and some nice detective work. [Thanks to Greg for the link.]

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All hail Ajax and Jesse James Garrett whose paper named it, laid it out, and kicked off the current excitement about it. As Jesse and Wikipedia acknowledge, as with most important ideas, it can be traced back to lots of beginnings.

The other day, one of those beginnings occurred to me. Jeez, I thought, this sounds like something Tim Bray was talking about about five years ago. He called it Taxi, and I thought I’d written it up in my newsletter, although now I can’t find it. But Tim did write about Taxi at xml.org in March of 2001. So, a tip of the hat to Tim… [Tags: ajax TimBray JesseJamesGarrett]

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No, not male enhancements. That’d be a different post. So to speak.

Not that anyone asked, but I’d like my mail client to let me use the autocomplete feature within the body of an email. This is important because I’m stupid. Sometimes when I need to refer to an email address, I will use the autocomplete function in the “To” field, and then copy and paste it into the body of the msg. But sometimes (here comes the stupid part) I forget to remove it from the “To” field, thus sending to someone a msg about that person. Much mighty D’oh-slapping then ensues. So, imagine I were able to use the autocomplete feature within the body itself…

Last night, my friend Steve Baum suggested a feature he’d like: Type in the name of a mailing list and be able to expand that to a list of everyone in the list. That way you could delete people you don’t want to get that mailing. Sounds useful to me.

(I actually think both of these could be within my amateur programming capabilities. What’s stopping me is the lack of good, newbie, dumbass documentation that explains exactly – exactly – how to write and integrate Thunderbird extensions.) [Tags: email SteveBaum thunderbird]

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I’ve gone through five (5) Epson CX5200 and CX5400s in the past 2.5 years or so. They just keep breaking. In a variety of ways. And I don’t do that much printing.

So, when my latest CX5400 printer died, I decided to switch, after decades of being an Epson customer, to Canon. I now have a Canon MP780 multifunction printer and scanner. (From NewEgg, btw.)

One problem so far: The software doesn’t recognize that the system has a sheet feeder for the scanner. That doesn’t much matter to me, but it’s a bad sign.

Does anyone have any reliable, cheap-ish suppliers of Canon-brand ink? And any experience with off-brand ink that didn’t result in your junking the printer or your walls being painted with unintentional CYMB spin art? [Tags: printers canon epson]

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[Note: This post is part of the Be Dumb in Public program, of which I am a lifetime member.]

There’s lots of good info on the Web about how to create a robots.txt file that will keep the major search engines from spidering your site. But I haven’t found instructions aimed at my precise level of ineptitutde. So, here goes…

Let’s say my “hideme.com”directory exists at root level. That is, my host won’t let me go any further down than that. I see hideme.com plus all the other directories I own. Let’s say I want to put in a robots.txt file to protect the contents of hideme.com, but I want to leave the rest of my directories open to search engines.

1. Is this the right robots.txt content:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /hideme.com/

I’m especially concerned about getting the slashes right.

2. Where exactly do I put the robots.txt file? At the same level as the hideme.com directory, where I can see all my directories? Or inside the hideme.com file? Or elsewhere? Thanks in advance. And have pity: I was a Humanities major.

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Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi, AT&T’s CTO, CIO and Fellow, and President of Global Networking Technology Servifces, is giving a talk at Harvard. Later, he’ll talk informally at the Berkman Center.

Some notes:

State of the telecom industry: Coming out of a period of: Overcapacity, fraud, regulatory uncertainty, pricing pressure, brankruptices, competitive technologies. In late 2001, AT&T faced a “perfect storm” or “nuclear winter.”

Top Ten Technology Trends

10. Ethernet everywhere. Home LANs proliferate. Bandwidth is the killer app. Just about everything will have Ethernet connectivity.

9. Knowledge mining will transform the way we do business — moving from information managing. [So long as I don’t have to ever hear the phrase “wisdom mining”?]

Vendor dependency > Open networks, architecture and API
8. Wireless and wired lines will converge. Accelerating virtualization. Wire line communication will be history by 2020. Already, the number of wireless lines exceeds the number of wire lines.

7. Broadband will be the death of locality. When you get an IP-based infrastructure, geography means nothing. Martha Stewart’s 212 number rang in her cell in Virginia.

6. e-Collaboration will dominate the workplace, enabled by speech recognition.

5. Sensor networks everywhere. We need lots more addresses. We need IPv6 which gives enough for every millimeter of the planet. E.g., cars will have IP addresses so you can have them tuned as you drive. (Hence, lots of sensors.)

4. “Wireless internet will be big.” Moore’s Law says that in 2010 we’ll have 40mb/second. In 2020 we get 1gb/sec. [That seems unoptimistic. Do we really have to wait that long? LATER: David Isenberg has explained to me that Dr. E was referring to average broadband speeds, not maximums. Sorry!] We’ll need quantum computing for this.

3. Convergence of communications and apps will be real: The network will be the computer. Most of the work will be done on the edges.

2. Security is critical. We need a better infrastructure [= not end-to-end?] or we’ll have a virus hitting our computer every 5 seconds.

1. IP will eat everything. In 15-20 years, it will be application-based routing. [I don’t understand that. Damn smart people!]

In 2010, we’ll have self-healing networks. They’ll have cognitive intelligence. [Smart networks.] We’ll have cognitive radio, eliminating the need for FCC to regulate spectrum. [Yay!] Speech-to-speech translation.

2015: Network moves from hardware based to software based: on-demand, reconfigurable.

202: Last phone number will be retired because we’ll all be wireless. Holographic storage. Tele-immersion. Holographic teleconferencing.

Future network direction

Now, we have pipes and ports. Once it’s all IP, we’ll have application-centric services.

Now we have individual networks > Then we’ll have “converged collaborative network.”

Users buy fixed capacites now > Buy it as an on-demand utility.

IPv4 > IPv6, multicast, unilink, VPLS [Over my head.]

Heterogeneity required > Heterogeneous by choice

Frame relay, ATM, IP > Converged IP-MPLS

Wired > Wireless, free space, wired

P2P > ebonding, network of things – Think about all the communities of interest you could pull together just looking at the attempts to place calls. [A little scary.]

“IP has eaten everything.” [Yup.]

Dr. E gives an example of converged services over IP that sounds like a Semantic Web app, but I think he sees this happening by making the ntework itself smarter, rather than adding layers of metadata.

He says we need to handle different types of data differently via packet routing, e.g., to avoid jitter in VOIP. [Wouldn’t increased bandwidth remove the need for this “optimization”?]

He likes Wimax as an alternative to T1/DSL/cable wireline access. It works up to 75mb/sec over 75 miles. By packing more bits per herz, we can get to 100mb/sec at home over the next 5-10 years. [I want 10 gigabits! Don’t bogart that bandwidth, Dr. E!]

Dr. E says: The “end to end bigots” missed that it’s impossible to scale that architeture when it comes to security. We need to build intelligence into the core of the network. Woiuld you rather have your firewall in one place or in billions of places? The center of the network has a global view. [Actually, I definitely don’t want a centralized firewall. Very very dangerous politically and, I’m guessing, actually less secure because there’s a single point of infection.]

He ends by saying he’s been fighting the forces of control and fighting for the forces of freedom.

From passive recipients to active participation

From newscasts to blogcasts and personal studios.

Proprietary solutions > Standards bodies

Proprietary sw > Open Source for greater reliability

Closed control > Open control [Say more!]

Licensed spectrum > Unlicensed spectrum. either more unlicensed and/or cognitive radios

Regulated access > open access [Say more!]

Ending joke. Some say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” At AT&T Labs we say, “If it ain’t broke, it ain’t got enough features.”

Q&A

Q: What about RBOCs and VOIP?
A: The future is IP. But Skype is like a toy. About 6.25% of traffic will be voip to voip [assuming – if I got this right – we assume that 25% of calls start with voip and 25% end with voip, leaving 50% going over the plain old phone network].

Q: How about the weaknessdes and vulnerabilities of non-end-to-end architectures? What will that do to innovation?
A: We need both. E.g., intruder detection systems are only 95% accurate. Firewalls at the edge of the network haven’t worked sufficiently and hackers will target your particular weaknesses. So you have to catch this stuff in the network. You need a lot of sensors to be able to catch it, and that has to be done in the center. We have 150 terabytes of traffic (a day?) and we can scan it in 15 seconds. Yes, this may impede SSL handshakes. That’s why we need to rethink the network. We could collaborate with Harvard to redesign it.

Q: What data can you keep? You seem to be equating traffic with data…
A: Look at just the voice traffic. About 400M call attempts/day. We don’t record the voice data, just who you called. From this we build community of interests. Now, take that model to an IP basis. If you 2.6 petabytes per day, it’s too much. So we have a unique sampling algorithm that looks at the header. (We can’t look at the content for privacy reasons.) We save the voice data as long as 6 months; I won’t go through the detail because of security. Some data we store as much as 7 years.

[Fascinating talk. He’s laid out the vision of what a smart network could do, and he’s aiming at openness more than we could have imagined AT&T might have even just a few years ago. But who owns and controls the smart network? What do we give up if we compromise the end-to-end principle?]

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Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi, AT&T’s CTO and holder of 700 patents, is coming to Harvard to give a talk this Wednesday, at 11-12, in the Maxwell Dworkin Building (map), Lessin Auditorium (G115). At 1:45-2:30 (not 2:30 as I’d previously posted and not at 2:15 as I’d changed – airplane rescheduling has caused these changes), he’s going to come to the Berkman Center (map) for an informal discussion. I’m moderating it and I plan on asking him about his critique of the End to End architecture of the Internet. Both events are open to the public.

See you there!

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Tellme provides speech-recognition services to large apps like AT&T’s 411 service. While riding down to a conference with Don Jackson, Tellme’s VP of Advanced Telephony, yesterday, I asked him about today’s joint Skype-Tellme announcement. (Of course, the current rumor that eBay is buying Skype — presumably for its customer base since it could get VOIP technology for $1.50 at this point — is over-shadowing the Skype-Tellme announcement.)

Q: What’s the deal?

A: Today we’re announcing a deal with Skype where independent software developers will be able to publish their speech applications onto the Skype network, either free to end users or for pay.

Q: The free calls will be free to whom?

A: Free to the caller. The developers will pay for the free-to-the-caller calls themselves. In the for-pay apps, the developer will split the revenues with Skype and Tellme.

Q: So, if a developer wants to write an app that uses voice recognition, she can use your stuff…

A: Tellme Studio, is a free developer resource for developing Voice XML applications. It’s been up and running for about 5 years. With the Skype deal, you can call it from Skype now (callto:tellme-studio , Skype ID: tellme-studio or 800 555 VXML via a regular phone). It’s a version of the Tellme platform where developers can get an account and have their applications executed over the telephone. They get debugging information, syntax checks, grammar-checkers, and so on. The typical use scenario: You’re a developer in front of your computer, your using your favorite XML editor to create your voice XML app, you have your browser open to Studio Tellme, and you’re picking up the telephone to actually test your application. Now, with the Skype deal, instead of picking up your phone, you can click the button on your Skype softphone.

Q: If I’ve developed an app using your service, my users now can communicate with my application via voice over Skype. How does that work?

A: When your app is deployed on the Skype network, it will be assigned what looks like a phone number, although it doesn’t correspond to a phone number in the real world — They’re taking a country code; they’re basically making up a Skype country. This announcement is leveraging the Skype-Out mechanism [that lets users pay Skype to make phone calls to regular old phones]. The Skype-Out gateways send that phone call over to Tellme servers. If you’re a developer who’s elected Tellme to be your voice app, you’ll have configured with us what URL to fetch to get your voice application. We’ll fetch that application from any web server on the Internet, and it will beging to render the voice XML application to the caller.

Q: So, as a developer, it’s relatively easy for me to integrate voice recognition.

A: Yes.

Q: What sorts of apps do you envision being the most obvious to arise?

A: Part of the motivation of this program is that Tellme and Skype do not have to create the applications that get deployed on the network. We want third party developers to come up with their own ideas. I’m a great believer in Bill Joy’s law that not all smart people work at your company. We’re building an open platform…

Q: But which apps do you think are the most obvious?

A: Voice XML is very well suited to creating speech and telephone interfaces to any information on the web, so information access via speech is the most obvious. We’ve had a number of entertainment-oriented applications developed. We’ve had an application called Graffiti, a non-real-time chat room; when you go into the chat room, you hear the last 20 msgs that were left, and you can add your own to the queue. We deployed that on the Tellme network back in 2000 and it was so popular that it swamped our systems and we had to turn it off. We’ll see applications like that generated.

Q; What data does voice XML encode?

A: A voice XML app is XML data that describes the user interaction state diagram of your application. Typically, the first state is a greeting and launching pad. That part of the application will list the WAV files to play to the caller. Then there will be a reference to a speech recognition grammar that describes what the user can say and what the application recognizes.

Q: Currently, either the user or the developer pays for your service. Tellme has actual costs per call?

A: Yes.

Q: There are applications imaginable where even small costs might get in the way of a socially desirable use. For example, developing world cellphone-to-Internet, or emergency response systems such as were developed rapidly on the Internet. Any chance Tellme would consider making its service free all the way through in some instances?

A: Like every American, we’re very concerned about the Katrina crisis and we’ve be very interested in finding ways to use our platform and technology to aid its victims. Tellme runs the toll-free directory assistance application for AT&T, 1800.555.1212, and in the early hours of the crisis , we were able to make very rapid changes to help people get emergency numbers for FEMA and other resources. Because all of this is based on Internet technology, we were able to make those changes in a very small number of hours and get people access they needed as fast as possible. So, I’d encourage people who have proposals for aid-related speech applications to contact me and we’ll see if we can make that happen.

Q: Tell me about DialTone 2.0.

A: Tellme was created with the mission to revolutionize how people interact with the telephone. We think telephone interactions should be far more powerful and more personalized. For example when you go off hook [i.e., pick up the phone], why do you get that dumb dialtone sound? Tellme has this vision called DialTone 2.0. When you go off hook it’s “Hi, Don. You have three new voice messages. Who do you want to call?” The dial tone becomes your gateway to voice services that you’re accessing over the telephone.

Q: Any takers?

A: A number of carriers are excited about the vision. The business model is still getting worked out. The upstarts are a lot more excited about not creating another me-too phone service. So, hopefully over the next couple of years we’ll see an initial deployment of this vision. [Technorati tags: tellme skype]

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CAIDA has a map of two weeks of Internet traffic, explained here.

The graph reflects 926,201 IP addresses and 2,000,796 IP links (immediately adjacent addresses in a traceroute-like path) of topology data gathered from 22 monitors probing approximately 865,000 destinations spread across 77,678 (50% of the total) globally routable network prefixes.

We then aggregate this view of the network into a topology of Autonomous Systems (ASes), each of which approximately maps to an Internet Service Provider (ISP).

I don’t really understand it, but it sure is purty. [Technorati tags: internet]

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I switched hosts today (thanks, Bill!). As we try to get POP3 working — I know MAPI is better, but the last time I tried it, my client got confused about what was local and what was on the server, and then I got confused, and my client and I ended up eating a whole tub of cookie dough ice cream — it seems like an obvious time to consider switching from Thunderbird to gmail. (I would retain my current email address.)

My reasons for preferring Thunderbird are not necessarily invincible:

I’m familiar with it

I have rules set up for foldering incoming email

Nice people write cool extensions for Thunderbird

I have a greater illusion of privacy having my email archive on my hard drive and not on that of some large corporation, even if the corporation is Google

Any thoughts?

[The next day:] Ok, Bill just explained it to me. We’re going to route my mail from Bill’s server gmail and I’ll point Thunderbird at gmail’s pop server. Got it.

And, yes, when I said IMAP, I meant MAPI, or possible PAMI, IMPA, AMPI, AMIP, MAIP, PAIM or IAMP.

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