Matt Brubeck: Planet Matt

Bookmarks: Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 09:59:46 +0000

"'Students have to be active in developing their knowledge,' he says. 'They can't passively assimilate it.' This is something many people have known intuitively for a long time — the physicists just came up with the hard data. Their work, along with research by cognitive scientists, provides a compelling case against lecturing"

Bookmarks: What If Middle-Class Jobs Disappear?

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 09:12:45 +0000

"These trends serve to limit the availability of well-defined jobs. If a job can be characterized by a precise set of instructions, then that job is a candidate to be automated or outsourced to modestly educated workers in developing countries."

Bookmarks: something went wrong

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 08:33:04 +0000

Bookmarks: Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 20:59:09 +0000

Bookmarks: The Kid Should See This.

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 05:14:35 +0000

"There's just so much science, nature, music, arts, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven't seen. It's most likely not stuff that was made for them... But we don't underestimate kids around here."

Bookmarks: MAKE | A Curriculum of Toys

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 23:09:56 +0000

"What are the fundamental things kids should know to help them understand and enjoy the complex physical world we live in, to modify or repair it in the future, to succeed as adults? How do we enable kids to be masters of their destiny? Can we do it with nothing but good toys and experiences?"

Bookmarks: The Architecture of Open Source Applications: LLVM

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 04:35:24 +0000

Very nice introduction to what LLVM does and how it works.

Bookmarks: Lauren Ipsum

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 04:44:45 +0000

A children's book about computer science.

Bookmarks: Rich Hickey: Simple Made Easy

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 04:10:56 +0000

Rich Hickey explains why "simple" is important and "easy" is not; what the difference is; and the ways he has learned to make software simple.

Weblog: Android app permissions and Firefox Beta

mbrubeck@limpet.net (Matt Brubeck) — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 17:00:00 +0000

As a non-profit organization, Mozilla has a strong commitment to personal privacy and empowerment. But after we released the last update to Firefox Beta for Android, many people started asking us why Firefox needed access to their phone numbers.

Firefox does not access users’ phone numbers, but it was clear that we needed to address this concern. Where did these questions come from? Here’s the first thing users saw when installing or updating Firefox Beta in the Android Market:

The “Phone Calls” permission was added in the last update to Firefox Beta (but has been since been removed, as I’ll explain below). When users installed that update and tapped on “Phone calls” for more information, they saw this:

Why did Firefox Beta ask for this permission? Firefox did not ever access phone numbers, serial numbers, or phone calls. But it did have code to detect the type of network connection: 2G, 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi, and so on. Firefox or add-ons could use this code to change settings automatically based on network type, for example to use less data on mobile networks.

Unfortunately, this required permission to READ_PHONE_STATE, which also grants access to very sensitive data. We knew this would worry some users, so we immediately started working on explaining how and why Firefox uses various permissions. We now have this information on our support site and will link to it from our Android Market page.

But the reaction to the new permission in Firefox Beta was so strong that we decided to remove that permission completely, along with the code that used it. Now when you go to the Android Market to install Firefox Beta, it will no longer ask to read “phone state and identity.”

Thoughts on Android Permissions

Permissions on Android and similar platforms are not perfect, but they do give users some useful tools to protect themselves. When an app requests only minimal permissions, users know it can do only limited damage if it is buggy or malicious. Recent versions of Android also have well-written explanations of each permission to help users make decisions.

But when an app requests lots of permissions, users have a tough choice. They can grant the permissions, or not use the app at all. This is especially bad for permissions like READ_PHONE_STATE that are needed for some reasonable features but also provide access to sensitive data. Eventually, most people probably get used to granting whatever permissions are requested, especially for apps like Facebook and Netflix that provide unique access to popular services.

Making permissions finer-grained might help (for example, separating “Read phone number” from “Read connection type”), but would also mean longer lists of permissions. That could make users even less likely to read and understand them. Explanations from developers can also help, but only if users trust them to tell the truth. Allowing users to grant or deny individual permissions (perhaps only at the time the app needs them) might help too, or it might just train users to always grant permissions so that apps will stop nagging them.

Aside from these overall design issues, there are also bugs in the developer documentation, and a bug that causes old permissions to stick around even after updating to a new version that doesn’t need them. These little bugs make it harder for developers to do the right thing. Some researchers at UC Berkeley have analyzed the Android source code to produce tools and documentation that fill in some of the gaps for developers.

The good news is that some users are paying attention, and those users make things better for everyone by pressuring developers (like us!) to remove invasive permissions. If you’re one of the Firefox fans who wrote to us about the new permissions in Firefox Beta, thank you! We appreciate it.

Bookmarks: Wood Tape

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 20:20:07 +0000

This story convinced me to remind my own four-year-old about the wooden table she'd been wanting to build and paint, but that I hadn't got around to helping with.

Photos: Seattle in the sun and rain

nobody@flickr.com (mbrubeck) — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 23:06:22 +0000

Photos: Ponies

nobody@flickr.com (mbrubeck) — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 23:06:20 +0000

Captive Chincoteague ponies outside the Refuge Inn on Chincoteague island.

Bookmarks: How I Learned To Play Guitar

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 18:10:00 +0000

"The lessons confused me, because though I enjoyed making progress, I didn’t see myself heading to that place of performing folk songs on the back porch, and I was completely unaware that there might be multiple valid approaches to an instrument. I just knew that what I was experiencing was not what I had envisioned."

Bookmarks: Lisa Bloom: How to Talk to Little Girls

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 23:56:58 +0000

"I always bite my tongue when I meet little girls, restraining myself from my first impulse, which is to tell them how darn cute/ pretty/ beautiful/ well-dressed/ well-manicured/ well-coiffed they are."

Bookmarks: http://www.ipuz.org/

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 21:25:17 +0000

An extensible JSON standard for representing crosswords and other puzzles.

Bookmarks: Android Developers Blog: Android Browser User-Agent Issues

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 22:06:51 +0000

"This posting describes some issues when browsing websites with mobile variants using large-form-factor Android devices."

Bookmarks: netpoetic.com > unicode

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:09:33 +0000

"i made video called 'unicode'. it shows all displayable characters in the unicode range 0 – 65536 (49571 characters). one character per frame."

Bookmarks: Halle Hula | MeFi Music

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 23:47:58 +0000

"When Elvis Met Leonard." ("What the hell is wrong with you?")

Bookmarks: Where to shop in Seattle - Page 3 - Style Forum

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 19:45:15 +0000

Includes a map of selected menswear stores downtown.

Photos: Chasing seagulls

nobody@flickr.com (mbrubeck) — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 02:33:24 +0000