Whatever reservations you may have about Wiki-reality and consensual knowledge, you have to admit it’s a resounding success in terms of participation.

I just want to find the guy who dumbed down my article on the Nor’easter of 1978.

If I buy a pair of sunglasses from a man who has set up a table on a street corner, I do not need to know the man’s name, or even the provenance of the sunnies. I can try on the sunglasses, assess the fit and judge for myself if the lenses are adequate. Then, if I am satisfied with the sunglasses, I hand the man $5 and the transaction is complete.

That exchange would not happen on the net. If I wanted a pair of discount sunnies, I’d check established retailers first — companies that had been in business a few years and had built a reputation for fair dealing. If I wanted a better discount I might go to ebay, but I’d take a close look at the sunglass vendor’s trust ratings and the number of transactions he had done. Likewise, the seller would require assurance that I was paying with real currency. That identity check would be performed by a credit clearinghouse like PayPal or Visa. Without a mutual verification of identity and reputation, that transaction would not happen.

The distinction that needs to be made here is between voluntary and involuntary identification. In arguing for better identification technology I am advocating a safer marketplace where transactions flow more easily — a space where I choose to yield some of my information in order to participate in certain transactions. However, better identification technology also increases the chances that my identity will be taken from me involuntarily.

Last week I had some business in a Midtown office building. In addition to the usual security checks that have become so common in post-911 New York, I was asked for my photograph. The digital photo that the security guard took was printed on a sticky-backed paper ID badge along with my name, which became my day pass to the building. I submitted to that rigamarole because I had business transact there. Although, one has to wonder how long that information will stay in the building’s database or if it will migrate to other information repositories (the persistence of information will have to be a topic for another post).

Not everyone is so compliant. Three years ago Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben famously declined to come to the United States to lecture because he refused to submit to the identity checks performed at our borders. Similarly, Michel Foucault made a career railing against bio-politics and surveillance, most notably in the Discipline and Punish. The notion that our personal information is no longer our own has even filtered into the popular culture with movies like Minority Report, which had the chilling tagline “You can’t hide. Get ready to run.”

These are legitimate concerns and they should not be overlooked. By the same token, it’s foolish to wish away technology that already exists. The tools themselves — retinal scans, biometrics, integrated databases — are value-neutral; they either work or they don’t. It is the application of the information these tools gather that posits moral questions.

As a member of modern society, working in information design, I can’t realistically opt out of the networked marketplace. I can, however, demand control over the information that pertains to me, especially ambient information that is not strictly transaction-based. This would entail a revision and expansion of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which has been patched many times since its first passage in 1970.

Legislation is famously slow to catch up with technology, especially in the information space realized by the net. A better safeguard of our liberty is an awareness of how information is gathered and used and a constant assessment of its value in transactions.

In the spirit of new beginnings and progress, I submit this short list of tools and technologies that should be discarded in the New Year. The list is roughly ordered in terms of cost; the most egregious money-wasters are at the top.

1. Fossil-fuel burning automobiles. This is an obvious choice and yet this centuries-old technology lingers on. Apart from the enormous social costs of automobiles, pollution and danger associated with cars, there are real and substantial individual costs. But, in an economy predicated on the automobile, good alternatives have been slow to emerge. Fortunately, there is a simple solution: move closer to where you work and sell your car. Take public transport to work — or ride a bike — and you will find that you have more money and more time.

2. Television. Who has the time for broadcast TV or cable? Who can afford to waste an hour of their life to get 18 minutes of dubious content? Use TIVO if you must, or better still; select your content online according to a schedule that suits you.

3. Incandescent light bulbs. Yesterday Australia’s government recognized just how dead this tech is by mandating a phase-out of incandescent bulbs by 2010. The shift to compact fluorescent bulbs is expected to save Australia 800,000 tons of carbon emissions annually. LEDs are even more efficient, as much as 60% more light for the money than fluorescents, according to industry estimates.

4. Fax machines. Don’t even get me started. What seemed like a miracle in 1980 is merely a nuisance today. What possible excuse can there be for maintaining this pterodactyl tech in offices now? Need a signature on a piece of paper? Sign it, scan it and attach the PDF to an e-mail. As an added bonus, you don’t have to call to make sure someone picked up your fax at the other end.

5. Phone Books. When was the last time you looked up a number in a paper phone book? Arguably, phone books are still useful to senior citizens and in places where internet service is not available, but the cost of printing and shipping these doorstops means their days are numbered.

6. Newspapers. As with phone books, this method of information dissemination has been superseded by far cheaper solutions. At the same time, the advertising model that supported the dailies has changed. Classifieds have migrated to the net and display ads look likely to follow. While newspapers may persist for a few more decades, publishers would do well to curtail their print runs and concentrate on publishing to the net.

7. IM. Instant Messaging can spell Insistent Migraine for people who are trying to work through a complex problem or follow a train of thought. Part of the beauty of e-mail it that it is asynchronous. You read it when you’re ready; not when your over-caffeinated colleague is bored and wants to chat. Persistent communication is not necessarily better communication.

8. Anonymous E-mail. The days of unverified e-mail identity are over. Now that majority of all e-mail is SPAM (see Akismet or MSNBC ) and the annual cost of handling/filtering SPAM is in the billions, the net should move to a verified identity system. In the next year or so, clearinghouses will emerge for identity management and verification. Systems like Shibboleth, which is used in academe to identify students, will vouch for the identity of senders. Savvy recipients and sysadmins will block any mail that does not have the imprimatur of a recognized clearinghouse.

9. Hard Disc Drives. Spinning HDDs all fail eventually. Flash memory looks to be more durable. Right now cost and capacity have prevented a mass flight to flash memory, but that equation is changing.

10. Signatures. I don’t know about you, but my signature is more of a graphic spasm than a valid identity verification device. Given that signatures are a voluntary form of identification and easily forged, their anachronistic persistence is a mystery. In the near future, I expect to retire my John Hancock in favor of retinal scans or some form of hand/finger scanning and verification.

Many of these systems and technologies are already out of my life. I’m hoping to be free of the rest by this time next year. What about you?

After a bit of research I found Xitami, which was easy to setup and use. For the stuff I was building at the time it worked just fine.

By the middle of 2003, however, I started looking for a full-featured server setup. IIS was out and so was NT. I needed something that was free, flexible and robust. More research led me to LAMP, or more precisely WAMP, a Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP bundle that I could install and run on my PC.

Apache ran alright, but getting it configured properly was tough. I never mastered the httpd.conf file. Nor could I make the components play well together. Multiple tries, a week of frustration and cursing, and I was back with Xitami.

Then I found XAMPP. I got the bundle from the Apache Friends site in June of 2004 and had it up and running in about an hour. Configuration and security was a snap.

XAMPP stands for Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl. The X is for multiple operating systems — it runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris.

The XAMPP project was begun in 2002 by Kai Seidler and Kay Vogelgesang. The Apache Friends core team now numbers about five with an international crew of volunteers helping out. The developers estimate the XAMPP bundle has been downloaded over three million times in the last four years.

This morning I downloaded the latest version of XAMPP with Apache 2 and MySQL 5. The whole project, from download to security lock took just 45 minutes. All in all, XAMPP is a great tool and the platform of choice for lazy open source developers who never aspired to become sysadmins.

Microsoft issued an IE7 Beta 2 “Preview” release March 20, which I downloaded from the MS Site. It installs the IE7 core components easily, after conducting a sweep for malicious software, in a relatively compact 6.8MB. However, it only runs on XP SP2, so don’t bother if you have a different version of the Windows op system.

IE7 sports a clean design, tabbed browsing, an integrated search box (defaulted to MSN search), a RSS reader, better bookmark/favorites handling, a phishing filter, and improved standards support.

Users of Firefox will recognize most of these features. In fact, if it were not for the efforts of mozilla.com, I doubt we would be seeing this pre-beta release now. Without the pressure from the open-source Firefox crew, Microsoft might have waited to roll out the browser until their new Vista operating system was ready in early 2007.

By most measures IE6 is still the dominant browser on the web with upwards of 80 percent of the market. By 2008 IE7 will enjoy a similar position, so developers are taking a good look at this new tool.

Unfortunately, this version of IE7 still has some unique interpretations of CSS. Key differences seem to be in the rendering of the box model, list items and pseudo classes like hover.

Ajax coders will be pleased to note that IE7 supports XMLHTTPRequest AND ActiveX. Although, there are still questions about how the browser will handle XHTML.

Standards watchdogs will be want to try The Web Standards Project’s Acid2 with Firefox and IE7. Both browsers fail the acid test, but the ways in which they fail is instructive.

In its shuffle toward standards, Microsoft will eliminate some of the common hacks, or filters, that have been used to handle Internet Explorer’s interpretation of CSS. For example: the * HTML filter will no longer be necessary for IE7

/* The following rules used to apply only to
IE but now get ignored by IE7 and higher */
* html{ blah: blahblah; }
* html body{ blah: blahblah; }
* html .foo{ blah: blahblah; }


Overall, IE7 is a big improvement over previous versions of Internet Explorer and it is commendable that Microsoft is using this lengthy beta phase to revise the browser. However, this user is going to stick with Firefox until something demonstrably better comes along.