Yesterday, Bike Snob NYC made fun of the Portland-area Michael Jackson memorial ride documented at Bike Portland. Obviously, Jonathan Maus over at BikePortland and Bike Snob NYC should become arch-nemeses: They are both bloggers and both cyclists. One in Portland, one in New York (opposite cities on opposite sides of the country). One is super sincere, positive, and helpful, the other is sarcastic and hilarious. Jonathan even "challenged" the snob to "a super-kitchy BikeSnobNYC-themed ride."

In other news, I'm very excited because Demetry at Veloce Bicycles worked with Torelli to replace my cracked steel Torelli cross bike. I really wasn't expecting anyone to be so helpful, and Demetry really went to bat for me. Thanks, @Veloce! I ended up with a really good deal on this bike, a single-speed Tipo Uno.

Also, I raced on Mt. Tabor again last week, and got my butt kicked again, but it was fun. I was thinking that my Lemond cyclocross bike isn't ideal for racing Tabor, but then I saw a guy in the Sr. Men's with exactly the same bike! Sweet. Here's the Tipo Uno:

This New York Times article is almost surreal. Apparently, teenagers are much more inclined to hug each-other than ever before. Parents and teachers have no clue why, and are freaked out:

• "Touching and physical contact is very dangerous territory," said Noreen Hajinlian, the principal of George G. White School.
• "No hi, no smile, no wave, no high-five — just the hug. Witnessing this interaction always makes me feel like I am a tourist in a country where I do not know the customs and cannot speak the language."
• "'Maybe it’s because all these kids do is text and go on Facebook so they don’t even have human contact anymore,' said Dona Eichner, the mother of freshman and junior girls at the high school in Montvale.

But the article finally wraps up with:

"But Carrie Osbourne, a sixth-grade teacher at Claire Lilienthal Alternative School, said hugging was a powerful and positive sign that children are inclined to nurture one another, breaking down barriers. 'And it gets to that core that every person wants to feel cared for, regardless of your age or how cool you are or how cool you think you are,' she said."

It's as though suddenly peace broke out all over earth, humanity became enlightened, and an entire generation of people grew up to show kind affection for one-another. Perhaps it won't surprise everyone that schools want to ban hugging. Thanks, Carrie Osbourne, for believing in humanity :)

On Thursday, February 19, 2009, I gave a talk for Ignite Portland about the Android G1 phone (video and slides). What is Ignite? It's about sparking ideas in one-another. Each presenter gets 5 minutes to speak, exactly 20 slides must be used, and the slides auto-advance every 15 seconds.

It was an exciting experience! I was very nervous, but I was happy with the outcome and the audience reaction. I think there were over 600 people in the audience, so it's the biggest crowed I've addressed. I definitely recommend giving Ignite a try if you like to share your ideas. There are Ignite events in many, many cities. The other speakers were absolutely incredible. If you weren't there, you should watch the video of the entire event.

Android is a Linux-based open source operating system by Google that can be used to power smart phones like TMobile's G1. It's a very open platform, and easy to develop software for. In this talk, I give an overview of the development environment and highlight some key features of the operating system with a focus on what makes the open nature of the Android so powerful.

For programmers, this talk will aim to be an effective introduction to Android so that you can go home, install the development tools, and start hacking even if you don't have a phone. For non-programmers, this talk will aim to give you a taste of how open-source principles will soon affect a cell phone near you.

I like giving talks, so if you want to hear more about Android, let me know. For information about the projects I'm working on, see the pages on Meditation Words a well as Crypto Intents.

The Ignite volunteers were awesome, and there are official photos and official video of the event, including video of my Android talk. The video has very nice production quality, with good cuts back & forth with the slides, but you can't hear the audience reacting very well:

If you get a chance, check out the OpenIntents project, and if you're in Portland, the Android meetup is the 2nd Monday of every month at the SE Hawthorn Lucky Lab at 6PM.

As I mention in the talk, a portion of the proceeds for Meditation Words goes to Kiva, the world's first person-to-person micro-lending website. Microcredit is the extension of very small loans (e.g. $25) to the unemployed, to poor entrepreneurs and to others living in poverty.

P.S. Here's the exact same talk from another angle: This version from @linuxaid doesn't integrate the slides as nicely, but I kinda like it better since I can hear the audience laughing at my jokes ;)

A few weeks back, I released a beta version of a simple guided meditation program, Meditation Words to the Android Market. Android is a Linux-based smart-phone platform by Google. Currently everything in the Market is free, but my understanding is that Google will start allowing paid applications Real Soon Now.

Besides the simple breathing exercise, I have updated Meditation Words with a lot more features, and I'm looking for more texts to extend it with, so drop me a line if you have an idea. I plan to release MeditationWords as a paid application, but with a twist!

A portion of the proceeds for Meditation Words (I don't know how much yet) will go to Kiva, "the world's first person-to-person micro-lending website". Microcredit is the extension of very small loans (e.g. $25) to the unemployed, to poor entrepreneurs and to others living in poverty.

I have no idea how this will work out, but I think it will be really fun to try! You don't have to wait for the application, or own an Android phone, to join our Meditation Words team and lend on our behalf :)

About Meditation Words Beta 0.2.0

This simple Android application walks the user through a short breathing exercise which can be used for meditation. Meditation Words shows words or phrases on the top and bottom of the screen. The top is for your in-breath, and the bottom is for your out-breath.

The words fade in and out at a breathing pace, and the animation slows after a few breaths.

There is a built-in exercise that is based on a variety of works by Thich Nhat Hanh, but you can choose your own mediation or prayer using OI Notepad, if installed.

Download the application from your G1 phone. For more information, visit syntaxpolice.org.

A group of us in collaboration between the Android Password Safe project and the Openintents project have implemented a cryptography service and a keystore service which other Android applications can use to keep data and passwords safe, in a way that's convenient for the end user.

Read all about about it on the wiki! Discussion, source code, pretty pictures are available.

Our system allows a single password, and periodic single sign-on so that all applications can encrypt, decrypt, and store keys using the same master password that the user enters once.

We hope other Android developers will read this and get excited and offer to help with implementation details, modify their applications to use our Intents, and help verify our cryptography implementation. We also want feedback on user experience, security permissions, and other such items :)

All the major features are implemented, but we do not yet have a release plan; we want to be sure that early adopters won't have any data that they'll never be able to decrypt :)

Read more.

Chess is a battle; Go is a war.

In the first presidential debate last night, I think Obama made an excellent point about the difference between a strategy and a tactic. Perhaps it's sometimes hard to tell the difference; it's a matter of scope.

If you compare: invading Iraq verses the troop surge, then the invasion is the strategy and the troop surge is the tactic.

If you compare the troop surge verses force dispersal then the troop surge is a strategy and the force dispersal is a tactic.

Some might say that if you compare the games of chess and checkers, that checkers is the tactical game and chess is the strategic game.

Then again if you compare chess with the game of Go, you might think, as has been said many times, that "Chess is a battle and Go is a war."

Near the end of the debate, Obama made a huge point about strategy verses tactics, that the strength of our military is dependent on the strength of our economy.

Here's a very paraphrased version of what he said. I've trimmed for coherence in writing verses speaking I've cut out things that aren't relevant to my point. Since I've changed it so much, I won't even put quotes around it. See the transcript for exactly what Obama said:

China is active in regions like Latin America, and Asia, and Africa. The conspicuousness of their presence is only matched by our absence, because we've been focused on Iraq.

There has never been a country on Earth that saw its economy decline and yet maintained its military superiority.

The troop surge might have turned out to be a fine tactic in the context of a bad strategy. It's penny wise, pound foolish. So it's not a matter of making the right moves, it's the game you choose to play. Obama is right about the strategy, and Obama is right about which table we're sitting at, who we are sitting across from, and about the size of the board and the shape of the pieces.

Google's new web browser, Chrome sounds like it's been nicely designed with security in mind, but their announcement and cute comic book don't say anything about mashups security. There are some interesting browser-side approaches to making javascript mashups less scary. I hope they've considered mashups in the design of their separation system.

If anyone has pointers to this topic, let me know.

I've been pretty impressed with Ubiquity, a Firefox extension that combines web APIs with the command-line and some natural language processing, so you can compose together applications using javascript in a very unix-y way.

As an experiment and a weekend hack, I wanted to create an interface to Drupal, the awesome software that I run my blog on. I have something pretty cool working, but sadly, I can't really recommend using it, because the REST API that I integrated with has some serious problems. Maybe I'll get around to re-implementing this with the Services API system, but it's late Sunday and I haven't gotten around to that yet, so I thought I'd post. Anyone is welcome to pick this up and make it work for real :)

Read on for a screenshot and the source code.