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When I was about seven years old, I took the National Cycling Proficiency Course. It was a six-week program which taught you how to ride your bike safely on the road, offered through my primary school. On the third or fourth week, once we had demonstrated that we could stop, start, and turn left and right around cones arranged in the playground, the instructors led us out in groups of two or three onto the road to let us practice hand signals and turning on a real street. Our route took us in a short loop around the school, which involved turning right across oncoming traffic (remember, this was the UK) from the moderately-busy street that ran through the village. Of course, this involves stopping toward the center of the road and waiting for a gap in traffic big enough to make the turn safely. When it came to be my turn, I dutifully stopped to make the appointed right turn, right hand stuck out to indicate my action. As I was waiting there, a fire engine with lights and sirens blazing crested the hill just in front of me, and came tearing by at full tilt, inches from my outstretched hand. Somehow I managed to pull myself together enough to make the turn before I wilted into a quivering mass on the curb.

At the conclusion of the course, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents award me a handsome enamel pin and an official-looking certificate which would entitle me, should I choose, to ride my bicycle to school and back.

Similar experiences are to be had daily, I’ve found, on the streets of Manhattan. Except nobody gives you a pin for your troubles. With much gratitude to Pat, I’ve recently acquired a used but quite-functional mountain bike, and I’ve been commuting to work on it for about a month now. Though I’m far from a seasoned veteran at New York bike commuting, here are a few thoughts for anyone who’s thinking about giving it a shot:

1) Wear a bloody helmet, and install some flashy lights for the evenings.

Even if you’re only riding on bike paths or bike lanes. In my relatively short time riding around the city I’ve had some close calls and seen even closer ones. Sure, you get helmet hair, but it’s better than the alternative. Also, nobody can see you in the dark unless you have lights. Install some; I found some on eBay for $7. This should be intuitive.

2) Assume all other road users are on a mission to knock you off your bike, and act accordingly.

This includes police cars, buses, little old ladies crossing the street, parents pushing strollers, and other bicyclists. For some reason, nobody thinks to look for a bicycle at a crosswalk, when changing lanes, making a turn, et cetera. Assume you can’t be seen, or if you have, assume the driver/pedestrian/hipster-in-crosswalk doesn’t care. Look behind you, on both sides, before changing lanes. Ring your bell, shout, scream, and make a fuss if someone’s about to pull out or walk in front of you. Pull over if you have to. Be ready to stop quickly at all times. And for god’s sake don’t listen to your iPod on your bike.

3) Obey traffic laws

This dovetails nicely into #2. It makes you a much harder target to hit, and should you be obeying traffic laws, feel free to occupy the moral high ground when other road users attempt to kill you. Or yell, swear and/or flash dirty looks at other said road user. Your choice. Oh, and don’t wuss out and ride on the sidewalk. It’s illegal, and signifantly more dangerous given the amount of pedestrians milling about (who, don’t forget, are out to kill you).

4) Don’t get doored

I refer you again to #2. The danger from drivers does not end when the driver has taken the keys from the ignition. In fact, the oblivious driver is still unlikely to check for oncoming bicycles when he opens his car door into the bike lane. Give parked cars at least four feet lest you find out what it’s like to wear a car door internally. Be particularly wary of stopped taxis, as their passengers don’t even have to pay for the door if you break it, and don’t even have a mirror to look into before stepping out.

5) Bring a change of clothes to work

Or at least a clean shirt. Your colleagues will thank you.

6) Rock the 1980s pant-leg-rolled up look

It keeps your pant leg out of your bike chain. This will not only keep your trousers clean, it will prevent the dangerous scenario of pulling your chain off the chainwheel mid-ride because your errant pant leg got snarled up in it. You could also find a pant clip if you’re that sort of person. Or wear shorts. But if you wear bike shorts to work, please don’t come to my office. I don’t need to see that.

7) Buy a decent lock

I suggest a beefy chain and/or a beefy U-Lock. The Kryptonite brand seems to the the gold standard. An $80 lock is much cheaper than a new bike. If you have quick-release components, lock them up or take them with you. There are pages and pages on locking technique. For an good, yet irreverent video on the topic, I suggest this one by Streetsblog.

8) Enjoy yourself

I’ve found that commuting by bike makes the 30 minutes between home and work something other than dead time where I zone out and sip coffee on the train. I like that sometimes, but I always feel much more ready to actually do work when I arrive by bike. If you’re finding yourself exhausted and sweaty when you arrive, slow down. Take in the view. What’s the rush?

Last Friday, Alex and I went to the keynote speech and alumni reception of “Blowing up the Brand“, a conference put on by our old department at NYU, partially to say hello to some old professors and bum a few free drinks from the University. The keynote, given by Rob Walker of The New York Times Magazine’s “Consumed” column, focused on how one can, and whether one should, think of oneself as a brand. The genesis of Mr. Walker’s remarks was a question posed to him at a conference some months ago, wherein he suggested, off-handedly, that one ought to think of oneself as a brand in order to market oneself in–I think–the employment marketplace. His speech delved into the consequences of this for personal life and, to some degree, civil society in general.

However, what struck me most about the talk, was how often–especially during Q&A–the topic turned to Twitter, the social network and online communication tool du jour. Questions went something like “What do you think of x marketing campaign on Twitter?” “Can you think of any company using Twitter effectively?” “Marketing consultants say you have to be on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, is this true?”

The questions, and their answers, indicated a greater truth than the effectiveness of any given usage of Twitter: Nobody knows how to use Twitter. Absolutely nobody. Sure, there might be interesting individual usages of Twitter that integrate with a billboard in Times Square, or through which customer service representatives respond to complaints. But nobody has a very good idea of how one ought to use this new tool. It got me wondering: what’s different about Twitter when compared with the last big online hit, say, Facebook. My thoughts go something like this:

Twitter is searchable

This is a pretty big deal. Facebook is only searchable insofar as individual users allow you to search their names or selected metadata. Twitter is full-text indexed for all its users’ content (except those users who have closed their updates to the world). What’s more, it’s not natively categorized. Sure, there are a few attempts to get users to include metadata in their posts, like hashtags, but when posts are only 160 characters long, there’s not much space for anything other than the most distilled content you can cram into one. Twitter does make arbitrary-text searching easy and fast, though, so a given company can easy find the latest instances of “Comcast” or “Skittles”, and use that data in some other application.

Twitter is conversational

Twitter engenders public discourse in 160-byte chunks. Find a post you agree with/disagree with/love/want to roundly excoriate? Reply @to_the_user and you can, instantly, in public. The only thing is that there are no conversation threads, like on a message board, no “Reply All” as in email, just your own voice added to the multitude. Combined with searching, this is a new way to get an idea of the general zeitgeist on a particular topic.

Twitter encourages integration

Twitter feeds and searches can be exported in XML and integrated into any application you like, from the simple (witness the twitter feed on this page), to the complicated (a billboard in Times Square that responds to tweets). Facebook and MySpace don’t allow for such fast data export and re-use over their global populations of users.

Yet, with all that, there is no specific, canonical usage of Twitter. Twitter is somewhat unique in that it is simply a tool for moving data around and searching and slicing it in interesting ways, then shipping it off to be used elsewhere. On the small, user-scale, that could be a few friends talking about where they’re going for drinks via text message. On a global scale, it could be used to pin down a global conversation about a product, service, company, politician, and so on. There are no rules, just a loose framework. Every company with a marketing budget is, apparently, trying to figure out how to use the tool to its best effect, but, to date, don’t seem to have come up with a consensus. This shouldn’t be surprising; it’s like asking “how do I use the Postal Service?” You use it however it’s useful–do you want to send a package, a letter, do direct mail, register with the Selective Service, or contact a pen pal? The postal service does all of that. Twitter is just a mechanism for moving data — it can be used as effectively as one wishes. The sooner marketing consultants realize this, the better.

Hey, cool, a picture I took this weekend was featured on sfist.com:
http://sfist.com/2009/04/06/photo_du_jour_380.php

I’m probably the last person in the Universe to hack their Wii to install the Homebrew channel. Nonetheless, I did it this weekend, and while the documentation on the process is generally complete via resources like WiiBrew, I did run into a few bumps along the way. Below are my notes from the process, for others who might run into the same issues as I.

• The Wii only supports SD cards. MMC (MultiMedia) cards, while having the same form-factor and looking deceptively like SD cards, will result in getting a mysterious “There is nothing inserted in the SD slot” error. This was unfortunate for me, as I had an old MMC lying about which would have served this purpose extremely well. I had to steal the SD card from my trusty Nikon D50 to make this project go at all.
• You can back up your existing Zelda save game. Just copy the ‘/private’ directory form the SD card once you’ve copied your save game onto it.
• When running the Twilight Hack I noticed that once I backed out from the Wii System Settings to the Wii System Menu and ran the game, the Twilight hack had disappeared and Zelda prompted to create a new savegame. The problem, it turns out, was pressing the “Home” button on the Wiimote and clicking “Wii Menu” there, rather than repeatedly pressing the on-screen “Back” button. The Wii System Settings is itself part of the Wii System Menu. v 3.4 of the Wii System Menu software deletes the unauthorized savegame when it’s started, and pressing the “Home” button and clicking “Wii Menu” there causes the Wii System Menu to actually relaunch, rather than just go up a couple of layers in the menu structure.
• It’s possible to keep the Twilight hack and all the rest of your homebrew stuff on the same card; just keep other stuff out of the private/ directory to keep things separate. You can also only have one boot.dol file on there at a time, but if you install the Homebrew channel and the Browser, hopefully you won’t need to re-run the Twilight Hack very often.
• Once I had the Homebrew channel installed, my first order of business was to install Homebrew Browser. I quickly realized that there’s not much intelligence built into the Browser, and it will allow you to download and run tools which don’t work with your System Version. For example, there are separate versions of DVDX in the Browser, one for v 3.4, and another for all previous releases. I erroneously attempted to install the DVDX for all previous, which, naturally, errored out. The two versions aren’t particularly clearly marked. Look closely before you download and install.
• DVD playback works, but is far from smooth. It looks like the DVD is being transcoded, on-the-fly into another codec. Either that, or the CPU can’t keep up with decoding the DVD. In my short test, I noticed extreme encoding artifacts. I’m not sure how the DVDX architecture works, but it doesn’t seem to just be decoding the DVD’s MPEG format, but rather making it into something else. Clearly, more research is needed here.

Overall, I’ve been very impressed with the Wii Homebrew scene so far, and the software I’ve played with has been entertaining, if not incredibly polished. I’ll keep this post updated with more notes and pitfalls as I go along.

Last weekend I attended ShmooCon 2009 in Washington, DC with my colleagues Brian and Mike. For my years in, around, and studying the computer underground, I’d rather embarrassingly never actually attended a hacker conference before. This, then, was an excellent opportunity to go to a local one with a reputation for openness and friendliness–and on someone else’s dime to boot. Some highlights:

• Matt Blaze’s keynote around arcitecture, secrecy, and telecommunications was excellent. Mr. Blaze didn’t provide deep technical analysis, but rather told a series of loosely-connected anecdotes under the theme “system design matters more than most people think”. To give an example: CALEA is a policy that layers a set of specific technical requirements on top of a system architecture that has grown organically and provided natural security controls. Prior to CALEA, law-enforcement had to request a phone tap, which was placed close to the subscriber’s line using a loop extender, and then that loop was manually recorded at the requesting police station. CALEA mandated a convenient, instant, standard interface for tapping telephones, which sounds lovely, but is expensive, and gives an easily exploitable view into phone switches. When that hole was exploited, hackers got to say “I told you so”.
• ShmooCon gives attendees the ability to dispense what it likes to term “instant feedback”. Sure, you can go to the conference website and fill out a feedback form, but that’s boring. If, during a talk, you feel that the speaker isn’t being entirely truthful, you can hurl a conference-sanctioned ShmooBall at the hapless presenter. The organizers do provide speakers with perspex shields, however. Some attendees build pneumatic, fully-automatic launchers to ShmooBall their friends into oblivion, which really takes heckling to a whole new level in my view.
• Meeting some heavy hitters in the InfoSec field. RenderMan even commented on my hat.
• 

  An anonymous friend, Brian, myself, and Mike's arm and leg

  Getting the latest beta version of BackTrack 4, then using it to great effect to score second place in the “Hack or Halo” challenge on Saturday evening. Brian, Mike and I formed Team NYU and popped some boxes, somehow managing to score 14/17 points in under two hours. When Brian and I sat down, we decided that since we were unlikely to place very high in the contest, we should kick back, hang out, grab a beer, and see how many puzzles we could solve. Twenty minutes in, we glanced at the scoreboard, saw we were tied for second, and hit the afterburners. Mike joined us, scoring key points cracking a WEP key, and, most famously, calculating the Fibonacci sequence on his phone, and summing the sequence on his calculator for an epic win in the binary analysis category.

• Attending Jay “MF” Beale’s talk and witnessing the long-awaited release of Middler, then meeting Jay the following day.

Many thanks to the Shmoo Group for hosting a fantastic conference. All things being equal, I’ll be returning next year.

EDIT: Thanks also to foobar42 for graciously allowing me to use a couple of his photos; I was too busy hacking to take any.