Scott Blomquist

Dick Hardt’s Identity 2.0 blog has a very interesting post that wonders if Facebook Connect might prevent OpenID adoption. I think he’s vastly oversimplifying the ecology of turning a good idea into a monopoly when it’s surrounded by interoperable alternatives.

I have no doubt at all that Facebook will get significant traction with this (Dick’s Digg scenario is a great one), but the reason this doesn’t doom OpenID is the same reason that many people have gmail but _everyone_ has email.

For any ecosystem where 90% adoption makes ~100% adoption an almost sure thing (phone, email, and now Identity 2.0), interoperation not only makes it easier, but is practically required to make it possible in the first place.

Facebook Connect might provide additional value above simply being any old identity provider (just like gmail ain’t just another email provider), but there are still holdouts who haven’t heard of Facebook, don’t care about Facebook, or are maybe even conscientious objectors to Facebook. I’m optimistic that some of these users might settle on something else that works fine for them before facebook manages to build a monopoly in online identity.

I’ve seen an interesting, and maybe alarming, trend of using a person’s twitter username prefixed with an ‘@’ to refer to a person almost everywhere on the web. Granted, this is only happening in the highly interconnected early adopter circles that both blog and are well-known tweeters. But that’s the sort of thing, and the sort of crowd, that spreads out to others over time.

Better get your favorite Twitter username while it’s still available, or you’re going to be @smileybob1992039…

A couple weekends ago, Jennifer and I went to Denver for the annual convention of the National Puzzlers’ League. I ended up enjoying it overall, but I got off to a difficult start mentally.

In retrospect, my mental journey through the extended weekend o’ puzzles & games has taught me a lot about managing mental energy, including some things about how to invest it and being able to assess the opportunity cost of such investments.

Let’s start with a quick peek at my mental state throughout the weekend. Looking forward to the convention, I was incredibly excited. After all, solving puzzles is one of my favorite things to do in the whole wide world. Memories of how much fun I had had at conventions past mixed with the anticipation of decompressing over the course of my first consecutive vacation days in a very long time.

I got to the convention and started off tense. I spent some time hanging out with my Seattle-area puzzle-friends, and said hello to a few others, but I was having trouble mustering the energy to bring myself to spend time chatting with or even to greet many of my acquaintances from prior conventions. The fact that no one seemed to be worth talking to began to make me wonder why I was even at the convention in the first place.

Later, when activities such as games and puzzles began, I discovered how woefully out of practice I was at that sort of thing. I was reminded that, like almost anything else, current practice is required to be at your best at any activity–physical, mental, or otherwise. My relative decline in ability over what I remembered added an additional layer of sadness and disappointment to my already depressed mood–I had lost my puzzle-solving mojo.

Eventually, despite that I stuck to interacting with my most favorite fellow puzzlers, I got a little more warmed up to the people around. And over the weekend as I did a few puzzles, my brain got back in the groove, as well. By the time we got back home, Jennifer and I had co-solved a particularly brilliant and satisfying cryptic crossword constructed by Mark Gottlieb (he gets bonus points for involving colored pencils), and I was once again convinced that puzzles were fun.

So what did living that story teach me about managing mental energy? Or maybe even before that, what do I mean by “mental energy” in the first place? It’s extremely hard to define, but you all know what it is. It’s that unquantifiable stubstance that gets spent when you’re doing something “taxing” or “draining” or “annoying”, and that you gain when you’re doing something “fun” or “energizing” or “recharging”.

The biggest thing my convention experience taught me about managing mental energy is that, like that well-known business aphorism about money, “you have to spend mental energy to make mental energy”. I had been spending nearly all of my time and mental energy throughout the preceding 20 months on Vidoop. And while that was fun and exciting, my other mental “areas of investment” were becoming atrophied through neglect.

I realized that it’s actually very important for me to spend some time on the non-work pursuits that are most important to me, because not doing them actually makes them less fun. And there being diminished funness to my most significant hobbies makes it harder to keep my mental batteries fully charged and functioning at peak efficiency.

I have begun spending more time on puzzle-related things since the convention, and I’m really glad I have.

Mathematicians are hackers, too. And by “hackers”, I don’t mean like the young Angelina Jolie movie. I mean much more like the Steven Levy book (which by the way is one of my favorites of all time–you really must read it). Or even as in the definition from The Hacker’s Dictionary: “One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.”

One of the best math hacks of all time was when Cambridge mathematicians Thomas Fink and Yong Mao teamed up to exhaustively consider 85 possible necktie knots. In their journal paper, they mathematically explore each knot’s size, shape, symmetry, balance, and ease of untying. By doing this work, they discovered 6 new necktie knots that have excellent aesthetic properties but were not previously in common use.

A second math hack which for some inexplicable reason I can still remember is someone doing the math to design a crochet project for the Lorenz manifold. I don’t really know what the Lorenz manifold is, or why you’d want to crochet it, but that is indisputably a mathematical hack.

Despite how obnoxious they make the airport security experience, I try extremely hard to give the Transportation Security Administration a fair shake–I remind myself they’re mostly normal people who get searched when they fly just like the rest of us, I read their well-written and mostly credible propaganda blog, and I sit on my rants for a couple of flights before I blog about them doing something completely ludicrous.

Well, this weekend I finally confirmed in multiple airports that their "Black Diamond" program is, in fact, the dumbest change I’ve ever seen them make. The program is aimed at speeding seasoned travelers through one set of security lines while giving "casual travelers" extra time and assistance in a different set of security lines.

They began piloting the program in February 2008 in Salt Lake City and Denver, and on their blog reported an incredible success and thus began a complete national rollout. I initially became suspicious about the quality of the program when I first encountered it in Tulsa in May. My wife and I both have frequent flier status on more than one airline because of our frequent trips to the West Coast. Therefore, the first time we encountered the TSA’s signs describing the program, we self-selected the "expert traveler" line. We noticed that despite there being at least 2 times as many screening lanes for casual travelers, there were only 50% people in that line. I picked someone in the "casual" line to watch go through it, and they edged us out for fastest trip through. Furthermore, in the "expert line" I noticed absolutely no difference in treatment from what I expect to normally get, or behavior of the people around me.

My next few trips were met with a few more trips through the line, and it was a common occurrence for one line to be insanely longer than the other or for people to block traffic at the entrance while solving the self-selection puzzle ("I wonder which line is better?" perhaps more often than "I wonder if I’m an expert?"). This struck me as less-than-ideal, but I managed to stay calm. I just reserved the right to pick whichever line looked subjectively "better" by whatever standards struck me–exactly how I’d handle any situation with multiple asymmetric lines.

Then by June, some things began to happen that caused me to flip the bozo bit associated with the Black Diamond Program in my mind. On one trip, I was traveling with some people from work who had never encountered the signs before, and so they were doing what any reasonable person would and reading the signs to choose their category when a gruff woman from the TSA walked up and tried vectoring our entire group toward the casual traveler line. I explained to her that I travel all the time, and that I preferred the expert line. She continued to attempt to divert me on the grounds that "families go to the right". I explained that I wasn’t traveling with my family, but was instead with a group from work and that we might all end up in different lines. By this point, a significant backlog had been generated at her sorting station.

On another trip a couple weeks later, my wife was flying out to visit her parents, and there was a different sorting specialist on duty. This sorting specialist tossed her mental coin and decided to ask Jennifer to go to the casual line, while bodily blocking the expert line. Jennifer wanted to make sure the lady understood that she wasn’t, in fact, a casual traveler and mentioned her frequent flier status. The lady then backpedaled ever-so-slightly and said that she was sending her that way because "she had so many bags". Ummm, she had a roll-aboard suitcase and a laptop bag, which would be exactly what the tall slender gray-haired Tulsa oilmen in suits would be carrying. The issue here isn’t that Jennifer was miscategorized for whatever reason, it’s that the TSA has now introduced process that provides an opportunity for people to be surprised or disappointed or confused. This can’t do anything but slow things down!

Or at least it slows things down in airports that actually bother to do anything whatsoever with the program. Remember way back at the beginning of this long rant where I mentioned that I confirmed the program’s dumbness in another airport? Well, this is actually a different kind of dumbness. In fact, it’s a better kind of dumbness.

When flying back from the National Puzzlers’ League convention in Denver last night, I kept alert for signs of the Black Diamond program. There was no agent on sorting duty, and not even a different line for the experts. There was the usual bypass for First Class passengers and 2nd-tier frequent fliers, but that existed well before the Black Diamond program began this year, and made no mention of self-selection or expertness.

I finally spotted the one-and-only indication that this was, in fact, an airport that was "with the program". They had a Black Diamond sign by one of the security lanes that was well above eye level, and a correspondingly invisible Green Circle line at the far opposite end. Presumably the other 10 or so lanes were Blue Square. (Or Purple Horseshoe–not quite sure.)

It wasn’t causing people to self-select at all. To everyone who didn’t already have a special awareness of the program, it was as if the program didn’t exist. Yet somehow it provides a 35% increase in throughput and a 20% increase in customer satisfaction.

So, yeah, the program slows things down when sorting is actually occurring, and in the "successful" airports, it isn’t even visible. Which makes this the dumbest change I’ve ever seen the TSA make.

At the NPL convention today, there was an experts panel that spoke about trivia: what makes a good question, how do you research questions, what about pub trivia, trivia in crosswords, and some stories from researching for Who Wants to be a Millionaire. I figured I’d post my notes for those who couldn’t be present to see, and for those who were here to refer back to. You can discuss the notes and ask questions of the panelists and attendees at the Puzzle Hunters forum.

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I first heard about the world of online competitive software development from an announcement on Slashdot back in 2003. It guided me over to TopCoder to sign up for the second annual Google Code Jam .

I think I missed (by mere minutes) the registration deadline for actually competing in Code Jam, but since that introduction, I spent a little time on TopCoder over the years. It was extremely cool to be able to hop online and develop solutions to competition-style algorithms problems against some of the most brilliant algorithms guys in the entire world. Sometime soon, I hope to have some time freed up to give it another go.

Since then, TopCoder has added many types of competitions other than algorithms, including Architecture, Assembly, Testing, Design, Development, and more. I haven’t tried any of the competition formats other than the original Algorithms competition, but many of them actually have a cash prize purse.

At any rate, back to Code Jam. Google ran the first six Code Jams on the TopCoder engine, but this year made the switch to running on their very own AppEngine. They’re going to allow you to download a dynamically-generated question in the style of the Google Treasure Hunt 2008, and you’re then on the clock to upload a correct set of answers back to their AppEngine app for scoring within the allotted time.

One of the biggest improvements that results from this switch is that you can now use any programming environment that you’d like. The only requirement is that it runs on your computer. Gone are the days of choosing one of TopCoder’s 4 languages (C#, C++, Java, or VB.net), Google Code Jam’s 5, or the 22 supported by the ICFP’s official LiveCD.

Jennifer and I arrived into Denver this afternoon for the annual convention of the National Puzzlers’ League. We missed a picnic hosted by Mike Selinker (or at least he provided the entertainment). I don’t know exactly what the entertainment consisted of, but I know that it was based loosely on a game of his, Link 26.

Once we got to the hotel, we saw most of the usual suspects lurking in the hotel lobby or elsewhere in or near the hotel. We wandered into the League’s hospitality suite, and Jennifer played a brilliant game that was designed by Darren Rigby called Lexagon. I’ll let those who have actually played it fill in the fine details, but the short version is that you’re given a set of hexagonal tiles that you sorta play onto the playing area domino style where instead of matching numbers, you have to name a word that matches all of the properties described by all of the tiles that are adjacent to your current play.

The last League-member invention that I saw this evening was a really slick laser-etched tile set for Roy Leban‘s Scrabble-ish game “WIM“.

After all of that, Jennifer and I and several other League members went downstairs to the Inverness Hotel‘s Spotted Dog pub for some food and drink.

[Finally, for any of you NPLers who know what Twitter is (or would like to know what Twitter is), go over to http://twitter.com/puzzlers, and follow it for convention dialog and announcements throughout the weekend. I'll start getting the word out on Thursday.]

One of my bosses at Microsoft told me about some advice that a Software Engineering professor of his gave him:

Once you’ve estimated how long a particular work item will take, you have to pick a fudge factor. Multiply by ‘e’ if you’re confident in your estimate, or ‘pi’ if you’re not.

Roy Leban blogs about stupid password policies over at his thisUser blog. I’ve got some good news for Roy and his readers: I’m currently making a living turning all of the things that he rants about into relics of the unenlightened past. And while I have to concede that it’s a slow uphill climb, there are some very exciting things that you can do today to start simplifying your online life.

The first one worth mentioning is a thing called OpenID, which is pretty much just single sign-on for the Internet. This is not a terribly new idea–Microsoft has been pushing for something very similar in the form of Microsoft Passport Windows Live ID for around a decade. OpenID has the added benefit that you can use it even if you’re not convinced you’d like to involve Microsoft in your online life.

In fact, you can even host your own OpenID. For example, I use the address of this very blog (http://scott.blomqui.st) as my personal OpenID. (You can see it in action in my previous comments on Roy’s blog such as here. Notice the shiny orange OpenID icon to the left of my nickname?)

If you want an OpenID, I’d suggest myVidoop. (Full disclosure: I’m the CTO of the company that built it.) We’re one of the better-known OpenID providers, and unlike the other OpenID providers, we actually have a way of making money.

The big problem with OpenID today is that there are much fewer than 20,000 sites that allow you to log in today using OpenID. Which brings us to the other neat thing about myVidoop–we provide a cross-platform browser plug-in that helps you by managing your usernames and passwords as you cruise around the web. This enables you to sign in once when you open your web browser, and then we take care of signing you in to the other sites that you visit, whether OpenID-enabled or not. (Oh, and we also use a fun alternative to passwords for signing you in to the myVidoop site, so it can literally make your life almost password-free.)

I’d be thrilled if you’d give myVidoop and our password management plug-in a try and give us your frankest feedback over on GetSatisfaction.

Finally, I’ll mention for the benefit of the web site owners in the audience, there’s an experimental Vidoop project called Email to ID. If you have a web site that would be using OpenID if only most users already had one, Email to ID is your solution. Email to ID gives every user an OpenID, and the authentication mechanism is their email. (As strange as that sounds, that’s the way things already work only less conveniently–you can reset pretty much any of your passwords by simply requesting an email, so we just made the security dependency on your email box explicit.) You can find some more detailed analysis of Email to ID at Silicon Florist.