Category Archives: Technology

MIT and Alpha Delta Phi and the Boston Globe

MIT is celebrating its 150th birthday this month.  For the last week, the Boston Globe and boston.com have been hyping up a special insert in today’s Globe, The 150 Ways MIT Has Made a Difference.

A few notes from the insert:

  • Colin Angle (#7) is a fraternity brother, as is Eran Egozy (#90), as is Jim Bellingham (#111), as is John Underkoffler (#147), as are the half-dozen mentioned in #140.
  • Not a single other fraternity was mentioned in the Globe – we got #140.
  • Re: #140, the “not Animal House” reference is both right and wrong.  The real Animal House was another chapter of Alpha Delta Phi, the Dartmouth chapter in the 60s.  That chapter has since gone local and is known simply as “AD”.
  • #140 left a couple notable VCs out, including Mark Siegel of Menlo Ventures and Sameer Ghandi of Accel.

What does it all mean?  That’s tough to say.  But I’m really proud of the fact that we’ve created a culture of entrepreneurship that spans more than 30 years.  I’m very proud of it.  We’ve built something special, and it’s very nice to have that recognized by an institution like the Globe.

I know that I did a lot of growing up in the fraternity.  I work pretty hard to keep that experience alive for incoming students.  Hopefully they can get the rewarding experience that I did.  And maybe I’ll appear in that list some day.

The relevant parts of the article:

  • Number 7: The new robots: When they started iRobot Corp. in 1990, MIT grads Helen Greiner and Colin Angle knew they wanted to build robots; they’d figure out their business model later. Did they ever. The Roomba vacuum arrived in 2002, the first truly functional robot to find its way into American households. Last year it earned iRobot more than $400 million in revenue. On a more serious note, iRobot developed a reconnaissance robot for the military. PackBot acts as eyes and ears for troops and neutralizes roadside bombs, screens vehicles and people for devices, and goes into caves. iRobot has built about 3,500 PackBots for US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • 90: Ticket to Ride: Why would somebody go to MIT for a bachelor’s degree in music?  Alex Rogopulos did, and, along with musician and engineering student Eran Egozy, the pair launced Harmonix Music Systems.  After a slow start, the Cambridge company in 2005 published Guitar Hero, which came with a plastic instrument and let anybody pretend to play lead guitar in a rock band.  It became one of the decade’s biggest game and the more advanced Rock Band game that followed helped Harmonix rack up $3 billion in sales . . .
  • 111: Underwater robots: Anyone who’s seen “Titanic” knows how undersea robots helped revolutionize exploration. Submersibles such as Alvin and Jason have helped discover everything from sunken treasure to species. None of this would have been possible were it not for the pioneering effort of the MIT Sea Grant Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Laboratory. In 1988 engineer Jim Bellingham created a 3-foot-long robot named Sea Squirt and sent it exploring the depths of the Charles River.
  • 140: Not “Animal House”: Only at MIT does a single fraternity, Alpha Delta Phi, produce venture capitalists (Brad Feld, founder of the TechStars program for aspiring entrepreneurs), videogame innovators (“Rock Band” developer Eran Egozy), public company CEOs (Colin Angle of iRobot), flying car invetors (Carl Dietrich of Terrafugia), and solar power innovators (Frank van Mierlo, CEO of 1366 Technologies).  Oracle recently paid $1 billion for ATG, a Cambridge e-commerce software company founded by, yes, two former brothers of the ADP fraternity house, Jeet Singh and Joe Chung.
  • 147: “Minority Report”: John Underkoffler graduated from MIT in 1988 and went on to become the science and technology adviser to a big Hollywood director named Steven Spielberg.  The dazzzling technology in “Minority Report’ was his team’s doing.

The Usefulness of Twitter

I started Twitter the way many people do: by mocking it.  “Why would anyone want to know what I’m having for breakfast?”  After enough positive reviews, I figured what’s the harm in giving it a try?  I tried. It moved from “try” to an interesting experiment to a real medium.  I have more regular Twitter readers than I do blog readers.  I have more Facebook readers, but they get my Twitter feed, so that point is kind of moot.  If I want to say something, and I want to be heard, Twitter is my biggest megaphone – and people listen.

Today was a new threshold – Twitter gave me information that no one else could.  

Over the weekend, my iPhone dropped off the net.  No text messages, no emails, no voicemail, no phone calls.  (Note the order there.  My “phone” is rarely used for phone calls.)  I was pretty sure the phone was fine, and confirmed that by traveling around.  I know my house wasn’t the problem because I’d been using it lots at home.  AT&T’s support was unavailable.  I entered a support request on an awful form, one that had a required field for “problems with your phone” even though my phone had no problems.  Still no response on that, 48 hours later.  At times I marvel that I willingly give a company $500/year for such crappy service.

I also tweeted: “Having all sorts of problems with my cell signal. AT&T appears to be having equipment problems in Arlington/Lexington.”  It was a message in a bottle.  I didn’t expect an answer.  Really, I was just posting to a few hundred friends in case they were wondering why I wasn’t returning their call.

Lo and behold, I got a reply.  I have no idea who this guy is.  Apparently he lives less than a mile away from me.  But he knew my problem, and he knew  why I was having the problem: “@dunster I saw your Arlington/AT&T related Tweet. The tower on Route 2 near Dow Ave is fuct. They’ve been working on it all weekend.”  Here’s this guy I don’t know, but he can see my problem and see the cause of the solution – and he can share the information in a meaningful way, and the world can see the answer.

This is a powerful network effect. 

Posting From the iPhone

At the same time the new iPhone was released, they made it possible to write apps fir the iPhone (every iPhone user knows this, but not all of my readers are techies). One of the apps is a WordPress app.

This post is written and published in my iPhone. It looks like I can’t do links. I presume that is because the iPhone lacks cut and paste. But I can put up pictures, like this one from Thursday’s Sox game.

I now have one less excuse for not posting.

MBTA Screws Up (Repeatedly)

It’s hard for me to characterize the MBTA’s most recent insanity: Are they in denial about their security problems? Or are they so disconnected from reality that they think they can hide their security problems? Let’s explore the question.

First, a review of recent events: Three MIT students study the MBTA’s security and prepare a presentation to DEFCON 16. (Their advisor is Professor Ron Rivest, the “R” in RSA.) Dr. Rivest contacts the MBTA about the research. The students, the professor, and the MBTA have a meeting. Later that week the MBTA seeks an injunction in federal court to prevent them from delivering the presentation. The injunction is granted and the presentation is canceled. The presentation is filed as a part of the request for injunction, making it a public record. The presentation had also already been distributed on a disc to all of the DEFCON attendees. The article is readily available on MIT’s student newspaper website, The Tech.

Did you click the article? You should. It’s a big file, almost 5 megs, but it’s chock full of great pictures and clear explanations.

So, let’s review option 1, that the MBTA is in denial that there are security problems:

  • Do you think MBTA General Manager Dan Grabauskas believes his own words when he says that he’s “confident” that the claims will be “dismissed or dealt with.”? I’m assuming he looked at the same presentation I just did. He really thinks the claims can be dismissed? It seems to me that he’s spouting a line of bull, and the people who can contradict him have an injunction preventing them from proving him wrong.
  • Did he see the same pictures that I did of open locks, exposed fiber cables, empty surveillance rooms, and unprotected keys?
  • Maybe the MBTA is confused by that presentation. Maybe they just don’t understand how data is encoded in magnetic stripes.

And option two, that the MBTA thought they could simply hide the problems?

  • They sought the injunction, right?  That argues that they thought they could hide the information. But if they’re trying to hide information, why did they file the information themselves as a public document? (ABC News: “But, not only had the presentation already been distributed at the Defcon convention, it was entered into public record when the MBTA filed its complaint.”)  It doesn’t add up.
  • Maybe they thought that the injunction wouldn’t get any attention.  It’s possible, I guess.  But is the MBTA’s PR department that clueless?  That’s a reach, even for Lydia Rivera.

I guess there is always option three, which is just incompetence. There’s an argument to be made here.

It doesn’t really matter which explanation is the right one.  The presentation speaks for itself.  The MBTA is a security disaster.

A final note: As a former editor of The Tech, I’m proud of their role in this.  Good for them for publishing the research.

Oh, Bloglines

Bloglines is down right now.  Has been for at least an hour.  I can’t read about the election, my friends, local news, professional info, humor, etc.  It’s turned into one of those “holy cow, I use this tool every day, WHAT WOULD I DO IF IT WAS REALLY GONE!” moments.  I hadn’t realized how much I depended on it.

RSS rocks.

Your Laptop Data Security

A few months ago I scanned some news article that talked about the vulnerability of reading memory chips even after the computer has been turned off. I thought it was an interesting idea, but didn’t look at it deeper.

Then I saw this YouTube video from CITP at Princeton. You don’t have to be a crypto-geek or a math major to understand this; the video explains it in plain English.

You know that when you turn your computer off, the RAM (memory) is wiped, right? Think again.

Visualizing Manny’s Dingers

Josh, a colleague from work, pointed out this totally cool interactive display of Manny’s chase for 500 home runs.

A significant portion of my job is dredging pools of data for insights that we can use to change our business. After I dredge it, it’s equally important that I share it. It’s one of those no-brainer points: if I can’t tell other people what I know, my knowledge is useless. I find data visualization to be interesting and challenging.  How can I quickly and effectively show other people what I’ve learned from the data?

The Globe graphic is more advanced than anything I do – I never try for an interactive display. I admire it’s richness. The more time you spend with it, the more you learn from it.

The Universal Hub (Blog, not City)

I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoy reading the Universal Hub every day.  I’ve also mentioned how I respect and admire the work that MassINC does on the Commonwealth magazine.  When Commonwealth writes about the Universal Hub, how could I not link to the excellent article?

Commonwealth hits some key points about UH.  It’s not just the big stories; it’s about the small things that aren’t necessarily newsworthy, but are the events that define our daily lives.  None of us experiences everything that the Boston area has to offer.  UH lets us see into other people’s lives, and gives us a new perspective on our own lives.

Look what I read on UH today.  A story that at least starts with pictures of flowers, but ends up somewhere else entirely (Read it to the end. You have to.)  A story for my friend Mike about his Red Line commute and fellow Quincy residents – be sure to notice the drive-by-but-totally-accurate critique of the Herald reportage.  And last but not least, a story about a guy being terrorized by a green dot.  Do you begin to see what UH does for us?  How many people have seen a random milk crate in the Fens and not given it a second thought?  How many people were delayed on the Red Line and wondered why?  How many thousands have driven past the sign in the lawn and wondered what the heck was going on?  The UH lets us see more, dive deeper, understand more about where we live.

On a more personal level, I think UH has linked to me once.  I saw the traffic spike and wondered what the heck happened.  And then there was the time I saw a link to a colleague’s wife’s blog.  When I mentioned it to him, Ned said “Oh, yeah, Adam links to her sometimes.”  I realized that I needed to be a better blogger, and work on my connections more.  And then there was the time that UH linked to the blog of a woman in Somerville.  Imagine my surprise and delight when I found that Margaret was blogging, and I didn’t even know it.  My point: UH isn’t about reading just a few websites.  UH manages to find the crannies of the community, and shares them for us all to enjoy.

If you don’t have UH in your RSS feed (or bookmarks, or whatever), I highly recommend you start.  And Adam, they say that flattery gets you everywhere; feel free to link here more often 😉

Rock Band (Guitar Hero)

Boston.com posted this video on its job site. The bit is about Harmonix. Harmonix’s famous because it created Guitar Hero I and II, and now Rock Band (Guitar Hero III is from Activision, which is a whole ‘nother story). Boston.com interviewed Eran Egozy. Eran is a co-founder of the company, a fraternity brother, and a friend. I think the interview, and the whole segment, is pretty good.

I particularly notice that they use scooters to get around the office, while HP forbids me to use them. REWS, are you listening?

I haven’t heard Eran play the clarinet in a decade. It was good to hear him again, but funny that it took this piece for me to hear it.