Robert W. Rose

Interview with Dr. Dre

Dr. Dre is the man that made me appreciate rap. Before Dre, rap to me was just a poet with a beat. I enjoyed listening to it, but I didn’t take it that seriously.

Dre’s music is different. I think it was his Chronic 2001 album that was a turning point for me in my appreciation of hip hop. There are a couple tracks on that album that even today I’ll listen to 2-3 times in a row, trying to disect the individual rhythms and melodies. He is truly a master of the art.

This interview has elevated my admiration of Dr. Dre even more. Sometimes, when you experience someone’s art, you just get a sense about what kind of person they are. Before I read this interview I had already built a mental image of Dre as a very smart, articulate person that is passionate and meticulous about what he does. This article confirms that image, and even more so.

Interviewer: What’s your legacy? What do you want to be remembered by?

Dre: I don’t really think about that. My thing is just coming in here and making records, and hopefully people will go out and buy it and bump it. I’m just trying to come in and better myself when I’m in [the studio]. If I had to give an answer to that I’d say that I’d like to be remembered as a person who really cared about his music, and really entertained people with my talent. I just want to be remembered as being the shit.

Passionate people usually all have the same response: When they die, they want to be remembered as being passionate about what they did.

X-Sig for Postfix

I implemented my X-Sig email signature protocol in Postfix. If you’re into this sorta thing, check it out!

Tips for Mastering E-mail Overload.

We all need to be reminded of good email skills every now and then.

BAD E-MAIL:

To: Billy Franklin
From: Robert Payne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Please bring contributions to the charity drive

Yes, apples are definitely the answer.

GOOD E-MAIL:

To: Billy Franklin
From: Robert Payne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Please bring contributions to the charity drive.

You asked if we want apple pie. Yes, apples are definitely the answer. 

Context is a big thing for me. I get probably 15-30 emails a week from HP corporate or site mailing lists that I just delete without even reading if the subject line doesn’t make sense to me, or if they don’t grab me in the first 1-2 sentances. It’s not worth my time. Like the author of the article states, “if it’s important, they’ll email you about it again.” My take on this is, “if it’s important, my manager will bug me about it.”

There was one time a few years ago where I received an email from some corporate spam list that was so cryptic I actually took the time to follow up with the person and inform them that I had no idea what the email was about. That was a mistake. I guess my tone was off, or they were having a bad day, as the person seemed to take offense that I didn’t know what the “URGENT: TPR 2003 Process Integration Plan” was (or whatever, I made that up). I tried helping the person: “I have no idea what this email is about.. It contains no action items.. I read it 3 times and still don’t understand it. What does this email have to do with me?” The person replied to me twice with equally cryptic emails so I finally just let it drop. Sigh… I was only trying to help.

One tip I’d like to add to the article is RE-READ your email before you send it. Read it in the tone of the person(s) receiving it. Read it 4, 5, 6 times. Pretend you are them and ask yourself, “does this make sense?” “this relates to me… how?” One thing I like to do when I’m proofing a big important email is to re-read it in a gruff tone, like I’m really pissed off from something that happened earlier in the day. Does the email come off offenseive if read in a different tone? You might be surprised how a little innocuous remark can sound offensive if read in a bad tone of voice.

Email your blog

I figured out how to set up an email address so you can post to your Blogger API compatible blog via email. This has probably been done before, but I couldn’t find any references for it.

What’s a Blogger API compatible blog? Any blog that supports the Blogger API like Moveable Type, Roller, etc.

My little email to blog bridge runs on Python using the PyBlogger software. To get my code running you’ll need to download PyBlogger and have Python installed. Oh yeah… And you’ll need to be running your own mail server. 🙂 I’m running sendmail on linux.

In the same directory as PyBlogger create a file “post.py” (or whatever):

import sys
import getopt
import Blog

def main():
   argv = sys.argv
   username = argv[1]
   password = argv[2]

   line = sys.stdin.readline()
   lines = ''
   while line != '':
      lines = lines + line
      line = sys.stdin.readline()

   header, body = lines.split('\n\n', 1)

   body = body.strip()
   body = body.replace('\n\n', '<br><br>')

   user = Blog.User(username, password)
   blogs = user.blogs

   blog = blogs[0]
   posts = blog.posts
   posts.append(body)

if __name__ == "__main__":
   main()

This could probably be made 50x more elegant… Once you get this code in place, test it out on the command line:

prompt> python post.py username password
To: roseblog@email..com
From: rose@email....com
Subject: blog entry

Hello, this is a blog entry I would like to put in my blog.

To enable the email to blog linkage, go into your .forward file (or in /etc/aliases if you’re clever) and put the following:

roseblog, "|/usr/bin/python /private/pyblogger/post.py rose password"

Replace the parameters with the values that make sense for your environment.

If you want to not post to blogger.com–you want to post to your own blog server–edit the file blogger.py in the PyBlogger source and change “xmlrpcService” to point to the XMLRPC interface for your blog server.

If sendmail is not configured to trust python, add a symbolic link to python from the /etc/smrsh directory:

ln -s /usr/bin/python /etc/smrsh/python

If you have any issues be sure to look in /var/log/maillog for errors.

How does Google Suggest work?

With the help of this tool: JavaScript Code Improver, I was able to figure this out…

http://www.google.com/complete/search?js=true&qu=foo

The result here is run through JavaScript’s eval function.

Hmmm…

SHA-1 broken

I noticed reading this article, and the one on Bruce Schneier’s blog, that the only source backing up Bruce Schneier on this SHA-1 crack is Bruce Schneier. Bruce, Bruce. Is that responsible security? Here’s a guy that preaches responsibility about security, and all this SHA-1 crack talk with no backup source is just stirring up FUD.

I believe him, but it makes me wonder what would happen if someone believed me.

OK, here’s my big announcement of the day: I broke 2048 bit RSA. I discovered a technique to factor very large primes using my quantum computer. Oh yeah, it’s all detailed in my upcoming paper.. which you can’t get.

I’m in the Barometer

Pretty exciting!

How did this happen? I contacted some guys at KBVR-FM (the campus radio station) about genielab.com a while back. Turns out one of them, Andrew Nealon, is also a wordsmith for the school newspaper and he liked the site so much he offered to do an article in addition to spreading the word at the radio station. So today the Barometer ran his article on genielab.

I’m pleased with the article, I think it turned out great. But I gotta make one minor correction so I can save face amoung my computer science cohorts. The article says “GenieLab.com [is] one of the first active recommendation systems on the Internet.” While I guess that statement is true (based on your definition of “one of the first”), it still makes me sound a little presumptuous. What I think the author was trying to get at was a part of our conversation where we were talking about active vs. passive recommender systems. I was explaining that GenieLab was active, and that the popular music recommendation systems today (audioscrobbler, musicmobs, etc) are all passive. With GenieLab, you just tell it what you like. With a passive system, it watches and tries to learn what you like. There are other active music recommendation systems out there today, but I think GenieLab is pretty far ahead of them in terms of usability and the quality of recommendations. Ooops, I still sound presumptuous. My bad. ;-p

Corporations Sue Google over Results for Competitors

From NPR, via Slashdot…

Internet search engine Google says it is deciding whether to appeal a decision by a French court that has implications for its lucrative advertising model. The court ordered Google to stop displaying ads for competitors of Louis Vuitton when users searched for the luxury goods maker. There are similar cases being brought in the United States.

What if the customer was specifically searching for Louis Vuitton knock-offs? Google is an independent search engine, and I would think “ad searches” should be encompassed by that definition. If Google helps someone find a Louis Vuitton knock-off purse and that’s what they were after it doesn’t seem fair for LV to sue Google over that.

If you buy that argument then I think it boils down to this: What was the intent of the customer when they entered their search terms? Obviously, Google can’t know the intent of the customer.

Is there a trademark issue in here? Can you prevent competitors from using your trademark? Can you place an ad in a newspaper that says, “Knock-off Louis Vuitton Purses for Cheap”? What Google does is kind of like placing an ad like that in a newspaper right next to a series of articles about Louis Vuitton.

Placing an ad for a competitor next to an article about a particular company isn’t illegal; it happens all the time. The only reason it doesn’t happen more often is newspapers and magazines generally consider it a poor practice: it hurts the reputation of the newspaper. Using the trademark name of a competitor isn’t illegal either: if you use it correctly. You can’t use the trademark in any way that diminishes their brand or confuses/misleads the customer.

For example, you couldn’t use the “LV” logo in an add for Knock-off LV purses, that clearly diminishes their brand. Advertising “Knock-off Lousis Vuitton” purses… I’m not sure about that. That’s kind of like advertising “Immitation Pepsi at low prices” instead of “Coke: It’s better than Pepsi.” But this is still very different from what Google is doing: they are trigging a competitors ad based on a keyword search that may contains a trademark. The ad doesn’t necessarily contain any reference to LV.

Can you imagine the fallout from this? If everyone started suing Google over this then they would need to maintain a database of trademarks and start red-flagging ads that appear on trademark searches. Google might even need to go so far as to investigate every AdWords customer to find out what trademarks they are competitors of. Could Google just offload this onto their AdWords customers? What if you signed a waiver that said that you wouldn’t write AdWords that trigger on keyword searches for your competitor? Oh my, what a mess that would be.

I don’t think what Google is doing should be illegal. Just like the newspaper/magazine example above, it should be considered poor taste. Triggering ads based on competitor keyword searches hurts Google’s relationship with the primary trademark holder. Google won’t be getting any discounts on $200 LV bags for now, they’ll just have to go into downtown SF and pick up the knock-offs for $10. 🙂

Passive vs. Active Recommendation Systems

I had an email exchange with Chris Anderson a couple of days ago, author of the Long Tail blog (and of Wired Magazine fame) about recommendation systems. After sending Chris a pointer to my music recommendation system, he had this to say:

Thanks for the pointer. A quick bit of feedback: I’ve argued that the only recommendation services that will really scale are passive ones, that watch what people do rather than make them actively rate titles. Basically, I’m lazy and there are plenty of music recommendation services that don’t make me lift a finger. Is there any way you can make it zero-effort?

To which I replied:

I think you live too far in the future. One day all of our devices will play digital music and keep track of how many times we play song, songs we tend to skip over, your ratings for songs, etc. Until then, the only tools that really do that (well) are the iPod and iTunes.

Passive systems require you to already have your “profile” built, or at least “in the works.” A passive music recommendation system will work with all of your digital music players, collate everything they know about you, and then make recommendations. Today, I think very few people listen to music exclusively on their iPod or in iTunes. Even with the people who do use these players exclusively I still don’t believe their players have a very good idea of their listening tastes. You alluded to something like this in your “case against the shuffle” posting: what about the ghosts of “good” tastes past? The songs you forgot you liked? The songs that you hear on the radio, on TV, on CD, or at a friends house?

Until we live in a perfectly digital world I believe there will still be a need for active recommendations.

The problem with today’s passive recommender systems (I’m referring to MusicMobs and AudioScrobbler) is that, for most folks, they are totally worthless until you spend a month or two listening to all of your music on your iPod/iTunes. For most folks, it’s zero-effort => extremely slow gratification. Active recommenders are marginal effort => instant gratification. Have you played with MusicMobs/AudioScrobbler? You can’t get new recommendations until you’ve listened to at least ~50 more songs in iTunes. With GenieLab, you can sit there and go, “Well what if I rated Bob Marley a 3.5? Then what happens?” I think it’s a richer, more interactive experience.

I think Amazon is a perfect example of passive recommendations gone totally wrong. I mean, it’s good today–they’re light years ahead of everyone else–but their recommendations are based on an extremely limited view of your tastes. They only recommend books based on books you’ve bought or browsed at Amazon. (Plus they only recommend books that they have in stock, but that’s another debate)… What about all the classics sitting on your bookshelf that you’ve read a half dozen times? What about all those great books your friends loan you? Amazon has no idea who you are, they’re just firing shots in the dark. I don’t believe their “long tail” success has anything to do with their recommender system, I think it has a lot more to do with just the size of their online collection. There’s no cleverness in what Amazon is doing, it’s just volume.

I’m wondering if our little email exchange served as motivation for a recent post on Chris’ blog, where he writes:

…any service that tries to condense all of your different planes of influence into a single dimension is going to fail, at least as far as useful recommendations go. The filters that work best for me typically earned my trust by liking some of the same things I did, then turning me on to new stuff that I liked even more. 

Chris is referring here to “friendship” networks that provide recommendations, and he’s arguing that they don’t work. Yet the recommendations he trusts are the ones that he sought out: he invested the time to discover who was recommending what, and decide if their tastes coincided with his. Isn’t this a sort of “active” system?

Even my Dad gets DRM

My Dad recently got an iPod. After buying two “CDs” on iTunes Music Store, he had this to say:

oh, one thing I’ve learned already. I may be better off buying the CD for these albums so I can store the music and put it on anythng I want. Why buy from them, then be highly restricted in where I can use it.

Apple: *cough*