Leaving a Password Behind

Continuing the last couple of posts on online presence, here's one more thing to thing about - now that we're increasingly managing our lives and connections online, what happens to your online identity when you die? I personaly have a friend who is no longer alive, and yet his profile is still up on one of the social networks. It's quite a dilemma - do I remove him from the "friends list"? Can, or should, his profile be changed or removed from the site?

There was a post on Slashdot not long ago asking this question:

"In the past, when a family member died, you could look through their files and address books to find all the people and businesses that should be notified that the person is deceased. Now the hard-copy address book is becoming a thing of the past. I keep some contact information in a spreadsheet, but I have many online friends that I only have contact with through web sites such as Flickr. My email accounts have many more people listed than my address book spreadsheet. I have no interest in collecting real world info from all my online contacts. The sites where I have social contact with people from around the world (obviously) require user names and passwords. Two questions: 1. How do you intend to let the executors of your estate or family members know which online sites/people you'd like them to notify of your demise? 2. How are you going to give access to the passwords, etc. needed to access those sites in a way that doesn't cause a security concern while you're still alive?"

I'll touch the subject of managing passwords in some later posts, but in my case just sending a couple of passwords to my parents mostly solves this issue in case I get struck by a bus or something tomorrow. One of the responders on Slashdot was really taking it seriously:

"I keep a USB drive in my home safe with my death kit on it. I encrypt that, copy that to CD and send it to my lawyer every few months. My sealed Will (at a different attorneys office) has a copy of the decryption key in it, and the will includes instructions on accessing the data.

I include the following:

- Personal information

-- Passwords file with usernames and passwords to all of the websites I use, personal computers and other electronic devices

-- Accounts file with basic information to all of my financial accounts, morgtages, life insurance,

-- Utilities file with all of the information about my utility services

-- Export of my address book

-- Death threats and persons of interest file (my work takes me to interesting places...)

-- House book with things like the keycode for my house, and all of the other stuff related to my house that only exists in my head otherwise

-- Auto book with copies of titles, etc

-- Letters to send

-Work file

-- Current copies of all importiant work related papers

-- Copy of my current Quickbooks file

-- A write-up of what someone needs to do in my job, along with sugestions of who to assign.

-- A copy of my personal file, complete with life insurance info

-- A usernames file with all of the UID and Passwords for running my buisness

-- A TO SHRED document, containing a list of files to be shredded upon my death"

Here's an interesting CNET article (from about two years ago) that talks more of various legal issues over online accounts, and the policies of different service providers (such as Yahoo, Google, etc.) in such cases.

Everyone Has a Name

Oh the same subject of online presence as in the previous post, there's another consideration to think about - how unique is your name? If your name is something like "John Smith", anyone looking for you or information about you will have to pick through more than 4 million results.

As a result, there is an interesting trend developing over the years with parents who prepare for a birth of a child and wish to establish his/her prominence on the search pages - they are looking for names that are unique on Google, and even buy domains for their babies prior to birth. Here's a quote of the parents from the second article:

"One of the criteria was, if we liked the name, the domain had to be available"

How unique is your name?

I Google You

Here's a video of performance by Amanda Palmer I stumbled on recently (the lyrics):

(found via Google Blogoscoped)

Besides being rather funny, it raises the point that whatever you put online, stays there forever for everyone to see, even years later. In case of social networks, this may even be something written by your friends and not yourself (such as being tagged in a photo on Facebook), and people are known to have been fired over online photos.

On the same subject, there was a case last month where a bartender in New York was fired after she blogged about a drunk Belgian politician that visited the bar she worked in. The politician was dismayed, and called blogging a 'dangerous phenomenon'. This however will only get worse, as more of our lives is being recorded every day. Already almost every new mobile phone has GPS and a camera built in, and I guess only a few years from now we all will carry a device that will record 24/7 our location and everything we see and hear around us, transmitting this to some service that will store this and serve as our personal offline memory.

There's an interesting artice by Bruce Schneier about the effect this has on our lives - The Future of Ephemeral Conversation. Here's a passage from it:

Cardinal Richelieu famously said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." When all our ephemeral conversations can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply. Conversation is not the same thing as correspondence. Words uttered in haste over morning coffee, whether spoken in a coffee shop or thumbed on a Blackberry, are not official pronouncements. Discussions in a meeting, whether held in a boardroom or a chat room, are not the same as answers at a press conference. And privacy isn't just about having something to hide; it has enormous value to democracy, liberty, and our basic humanity.

So, do you know what Google has to say about you?

Tip - Terminate Programs Quickly

This is an old tip that I rediscovered recently. When a program becomes unresponsive, it is sometimes necessary to terminate the process from the Task Manager. However, after confirming that the process should be killed, there may be a long delay before it happens, especially on a busy computer.

Why is that? Because when a program crashes, Windows XP prepares an error report, using a program called dumprep:

The Dumprep.exe tool is a Windows XP fault logging program. If a serious error occurs, Dumprep.exe writes the error details to a text file. The Dumprep.exe tool then prompts you to send the error information to Microsoft. The Dumprep.exe tool is a non-essential system process that is installed for third-party use.

This is quite useless, and can be easily disabled:

1. Open "System Properties" dialog (My Computer => Properties)
2. Open "Advanced Tab"
3. Press the "Error Reporting" button
4. In the dialog, select the option "Disable Error Reporting" and press OK.

After this change, programs will be terminated without delay.

Teaching Programming To Kids

Kids are quite computer savvy these days, and my (10 years old) brother is no exception. He is used to growing with technology and the Internet all around him - he works with MS Office programs and Paintbrush all the time, uses Wikipedia and Google to do his homework and knows how to move music and photos between the computer and mobile phone using Bluetooth. His interest in the computer and trying new stuff was another reason for my interest in online backup, as well as various virtualisation and sandboxing solutions for programs (more on that in a future post).

So, today I've started teaching him a little about programming. And to those who know me and are wondering - I did NOT start with Perl and Regular expressions, but rather found a nice book about Python programming for kids. So far he liked it and was very enthusiastic to learn more. Since some visual feedback will have the most appeal for him, I'm looking for some ideas for simple programs to do with graphics and gaming. Any ideas?

In the meantime, I'm going to check that everything is truly backed-up, before my brother finds a creative way to blow up the computer...

Headphones For Walking Around

I've been walking around Tel-Aviv today, taking some pictures of the sunset. I like to listen to music (or audiobooks) when going somewhere, but on the street you mostly hear the the noises of the city and the traffic around you.

One solution is to increase the volume to block out the noise, but it doesn't help much and isn't too good for your hearing. Instead, I recently bought myself in-ear headphones. This type of headphones are inserted a little deeper into the ear, and are sealed with small rubber tips. They provide the best possible isolation of external sound, compared to all other types. Since buying them, I'm listening to music at half the volume, and hear much better. Furthermore, they have excellent, crystal-clear sound, right inside your head.

I would recommend the CX300 model by Sennheiser. They have very good sound quality as well as a reasonable price, compared to other headphones in this category. One word of caution however when walking outside - look around, since you won't hear much. With those headphones on me, I'm looking twice before crossing a street, and I'm walking close to the side of the sidewalk, so someone on a bicycle could drive by - I won't hear him approaching.

Filter Your Email With Plus Addressing

There's a little known feature supported by most email providers (Gmail included) - in the first part of the email address (before the @ sign), everything after a plus sign is ignored. So, for example, email sent to myname+news@gmail.com will be treated the same way (and received in the same inbox) as myname@gmail.com.

How is this useful?

When some site requests your email address, you can tag all the mail coming from this site by adding any string after the plus sign - this is called "Plus Addressing". You can then create filters to perform actions based on the tag of the incoming mail, such as moving it to a certain folder.

For example, here's an incoming mail marked with the +blog tag:
Now I can create a filter which will direct such mail to a certain folder (label):

Another possible use is to give each site a different address (such as myname+sitename@gmail.com). This way, if some site gives it away to spammers (or perhaps it was hacked and the email was stolen) - you know where it comes from, and can block all mail coming to this specific address.

Update On Choice Of Online Backup Service

A couple of comments on the previous post made me take another look at the existing online backup solutions. This is far form a comprehensive review (here's one if you want), but I do have some additional thoughs on the subject.

Most backup providers simplify matters for the user (which is generally good) - you sign-up once, and pay a fixed price, often starting as low as 5$ a month for unlimited storage. This is regardless of whether they manage their own storage, or just present a layer on top of Amazon Web Services - the user never knows (or cares).

JungleDisk on the other hand are very transparent regarding their reliance on Amazon. The user has to set up his own account with Amazon (in addition to JungleDisk account), and estimating the monthly costs is a little harder for a non technical person. This however provides a very important ability, unique to JungleDisk - I can access my own data on my own Amazon S3 account if I want. This gives me the assurance that even if JungleDisk dissapeared (even though they are doing quite well), I could still retrieve my data (they even provide a sample code for this very purpose).

So, if you don't mind an extra sign-up step, appreciate the variety of features, and want that extra assurance that you can always access your data - JungleDisk is a good choice. Yet when storing above 30 Gb (which costs 5$ a month on the S3 service), you may prefer some other service with a fixed price and unlimited storage.

I'm now considering a hybrid approach - storing 10-20Gb of critical documents and photos through JungleDisk, and 100Gb+ of music and video files elsewere.

Who's got your back(up)?

(The title was shamelessly stolen from ArsTechnica)

A topic that comes up ones in a while in conversations with friends is how to backup important files, if at all. About two years ago I lost my home hard drive, with family photos and documents. It took some time to go over old CDs, partial backups, disks given to friends and files sent by email. Lot's of effort, and still some files were not recovered.

So I looked for available backup solutions, with the a few requrements:

• Access to backup files from several computers. Web access is nice but optional.
• Reliability - The service must never loose any file I store there. As an individual, it doesn't affect me much if the service is down once in a while, but I must have the confidence that once it comes up again - all the files are there.
• Trust - I want to be sure the service will be there for a long time (unlike MediaMax, Omnidrive or AOL's XDrive), and trust the data is protected and secure.
• Ease of use - I have no problem to do some initial setup, but after that it should Just Work.
• Functionality - ability to do scheduled backups and to see past versions of modified or deleted files would be a big plus.
  
• Price - I currently have some 10+Gb of photos and documents, so I would consider up to 5$ a month a reasonable cost.

After looking at some alternatives, I came down to a two-tier solution: Amazons S3 service for storage, and JungleDisk for user interface.

After building a very succesfull online business, Amazon decided in 2006 to rent its reliable and scalable storage infrastructure to the world, as a service. This Hardware-As-A-Service model proved to be a success, and today there is a myriad of services - from computation to automation of on-demand human work, all on a pay-only-for-what-you-use basis. They are widely used, from startups to Oracle and the New York Times.

With that in mind, I know the S3 service will be there for a long time, and that I get exactly the same reliability and price as the big boys. And as storage gets cheaper every year - the prices get lower. And when the service is down? They are very open about it, and respond very quickly. A 99+ percent uptime is quite enough for me.


Since S3 has a programmer interface, there is a need of a program to serve as a front end to the user. Since the storage is a given, the company writing such a program must focus one thing - providing the most features and having the best user interface. Such competition is great for me as a consumer - if a program isn't good enough, I can simply switch to another.

The winner for me was JungleDisk. The storage service looks just like another drive on a computer, where you can copy your files for backup (or back to restore). This can be accessed from several computers (so it can be used for transferring files) or from a web site (as an additional service). The backups can be scheduled any way you want, and the old versions of the files that were changed or deleted are stored for as long as you wish. The program costs a one-time 20$, including all future updates, which isn't much over a long time.

There are other choices of course. Dropbox (check the video) is another new S3 based solution, that might compete with JungleDisk - it has seamless integration, and allows to share files and folders with friends and coworkers. Other popular standalone solutions are Mozy and Carbonite.

If you still don't have your files backed up, do it now. It takes a only few minutes, and the cost for this peace of mind is quite negligible.

(A side note for 2 of my 5 readers: considering the time it took me to write this post, on a subject I know very well, I conclude Jeff Atwood must give up either food or sleep to write so much...)

My Personal Internet

I've been thinking for some time about the idea that the Internet I see when I'm browsing is different from what other people do. By this I mean both the content I read and the actual experience of being online.

Of course, what people read or listen to reflects their personal interests, biases and their environment. Yet at first, the web was this collection of static pages that were presented to anyone who visited. A sort of "absolute truth" - we would read the same news from the same media sources, and would get the same results when searching something.

With time, the web adapted and "got to know me". Amazon would suggest you different books depending on what you bought and what you looked at. Google modified results based on your language, country and your own personal search history. But the biggest change was the "social" revolution - and by this I don't mean all sites like MySpace, Facebook, etc. I mean the ability of private people to publish their own ideas, and reach the entire world - at no cost.

I have many subscriptions in Google Reader (over 100), yet of those, only 4 are for "big news sites" such as Ynet or TheMarker. A few more are various social news aggregators (like Slashdot), about 10 for comics and fun stuff, and around 10 official blogs for specific companies (Jonathan Schwartz - Sun's CEO, Google Official Blog, John Nack from Adobe).
Most of the rest is for individuals whose opinions and writings I find interesting - I read Bruce Schneier to be up to date on security news and Michael Stal for his ideas on software architecture; Jeff Atwood for anything related to computers and Seth Godin for his great insights on marketing; Barry Ritholtz makes sense of the world of finance and Chase Jarvis has excellent videos about professional photography.

There is no need for the pretense of objectivity you see in the TV news - I subscribe to people because of their unique and personal view of the world. In 2003, during the US invasion to Iraq, there was nothing interesting or new on the subject on CNN or any other channel. So I was reading "Where is Raed?" by an Iraqi blogger from Baghdad, who was telling what was actually happening around him.

The are also some very useful tools that change the whole experience of being online. Since installing the "Adblock Plus" extension to Firefox, I no longer see any ad banners, annoying flash or pop-up - I don't even know they are there, and the sites load much faster. The "Better Gmail 2" add-on changes the interface I see on the Gmail site.
Yesterday, Moshe noticed one of the Google search experiments and I thought - "I know I've read about this a long time ago, how can I find it again?". No need to go through thousands of search results - I just searched the historic posts of the google related blogs I read in Google Reader.













Also, after my last post, I realized I need some software for working with screenshots. Well, I guessed I stumbled on such software some time in the past, yet didn't have a use for it then. I use delicious, which is like bookmarks, but with tags and online so it can be accessed from any computer I use. And of course - there's a Firefox extension. A short search - and I'm done.














Right now, Reader and delicious serve as a repository of the things I once read and found interesting online. It is the slice of the web that I like.

That is my personal internet.

What is yours?

Using Google Chrome Inspector to Analyze Page Load Times

I've been checking out Google's Chrome browser since it's release and I like it so far. The GUI is clean and it's very fast on complex sites with lots of javascript. The separation of tabs to different processes each prevents it from hogging the memory after some time since memory is completely recovered by the OS when a tab is closed.

The main thing lacking compared to Firefox is of course the support of extensions and a huge number of extensions already existing, some of which are critical to me now.

I did discover a cool feature today - the Inspector tool.
It can be accessed by right clicking a page and selecting "Inspect element":











The first screen allows you to see and edit the page content, it's style and offers a javascript console:






















Nice, but not much new compared to existing tools (such as Firebug extension for Firefox). The interesting bit is selecting the "Resources" button and reloading the page:



















We can see the entire sequence of loading the page on a timeline, from sending the request to receiving it (light blue) and then rendering the page (dark blue). As the page is being rendered, requests for additional resources are sent.

Selecting a line displays the resource that was loaded - whether it's html, css, javascript code or an image:















It gets more interesting when we look at a more complex page (amazon.com). The top bar seems to show the relative load time distribution between the various resource types - html (blue), css (green), images (purple) or javascript files (orange):



























I think this can be a very useful tool for understanding how a site works and perhaps optimizing it's load time.

Note length overflow

The note I wanted to share in Google Reader was too long, so this blog was born. Don't have much ideas what will come of it, but who knows...

For some time now I've been thinking (together with Leon) about the best way to analyze IIS logs so we can better understand and improve some web apps in our workplace. Today I stumbled on a cool program that should be perfect for this, and many other jobs - Log Parser by Microsoft.

It uses a SQL-like syntax to parse almost any type of input and can produce an output in a variety of formats. Also, there's Visual Log Parser that provides a nice GUI to the program. For more details - read Jeff Atwood's post about Log Parser, with examples and many useful links.

How I found this app was interesting in itself - I decided to finally check out StackOverflow (a great programming Q&A site created by two famous bloggers - Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky). I was browsing questions posted by Moshe, and one of the answers mentioned the program.

I also experienced the magic of logging into a site without creating a new user and password - StackOverflow supports OpenID, and Google announced a couple of weeks ago that Google Account can be used as an OpenID identity to sign-in.

I did have a minor problem with this however - the site didn't have any specific support for signing with Google Account, entering my email to log-in failed, and I didn't know what else to do. Luckily, I was on a technical Q&A site after all - a quick search and I had my answer. Extra reputation points for StackOverflow (now I have to earn some myself).

All in all, an interesting hour on the web.

Update: Actually, creating this blog is a better solution to the problem I had with OpenID - the URL of this blog can be used to sign-in into any site that supports OpenID.