Anthony Vance

I’ve been looking for a new email address that is portable, permanent, and memorable. Typical email addresses are usually tied to a single provider like Gmail, Comcast, or the organization you work for. If you leave the provider you have to get a new email address. For example, when I finish my Ph.D. at Georgia State I will need a new email address for my professional communication.

Another typical email address problem is that available addresses are often not very memorable (e.g. mrmj412@gmail.com), and may not correspond to your real name or may be too long.

One alternative is to purchase a domain name and use it with Gmail. However, unless you are fortunate, your last name is likely already taken for most top-level domains.

I’ve found a solution that solves the above problems?a third-level .name domain. While the top-level .com domain is for businesses and .org is for organizations, .name is for individuals.

Most .name addresses are only available at the third (subdomain) level because many second-level domains are reserved by the registrar and shared among many people. For example, someone could have the address john@vance.name, but not own the vance.name domain. Another person could have the email address isaac@vance.name.

However, you do control the subdomain which in my case is anthony.vance.name. This domain works like any other?currently it points to my server at http://anthony.vance.name.

A nice service provider for .name domain name registration is FreeYourID.com, which offers email and domain name forwarding for $11 a year. The .name domain is a nice solution?having a memorable and portable email address is definitely worth the money to me.

I’m in Montreal for the International Conference of Information Systems. Montreal is a beautiful city.

Just as beautiful, I successfully defended my dissertation proposal defense today. This means that my research ideas have been approved and I can go forward with work on my dissertation. Conceivably I could finish my dissertation within the year.

One of my favorite applications for Mac is Quicksilver?a great new way to interact with your computer more efficiently. In the below video, Nicholas Jitkoff, developer of Quicksilver and now Google employee, discusses the philosophy behind the application.

I just passed my competency exams (also known as qualifying or preliminary exams). I’m now a Ph.D. candidate and can continue my Ph.D. program.

My next step will be to defend my dissertation proposal at the ICIS conference this year in Montreal. My dissertation involves users’ willingness to trust or rely on information systems.

As part of my IS research I run a lot of online surveys. I’m sometimes asked what survey service I use. I don’t use any commercial service, but instead use Survey3, an excellent open source survey tool.

Survey3 was developed by fellow IS researcher Conan Albrecht and has a lot of nice features.

I’ve ran Survey3 nearly non-stop for two years on my modest Linux server and I’ve never had any trouble or crashes, and have reliably collected hundreds of surveys. I recommend it.

UPDATE 11/24/2007: Survey3 is no longer under active development?in fact, its project page has been removed. I am still hosting it at the above link. It still works great and I use it regularly.

I had heard that Apple’s new operating system, OS X Leopard, will support resolution independence, but I haven’t seen anything recently online about whether this feature is still supported.

However, I found confirmation of resolution independence in Leopard in a description of one of Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference sessions:

If your application uses custom controls or artwork, make this session a top priority. Modern displays vary in size and pixels per inch. Find out how to design a rich, scalable user interface for your application. The session will discuss guidelines for revising icons and artwork, new functions to adopt, testing strategies, performance concerns, as well as common problems and solutions.

There is also a video introducing the topic on iTunes here (Apple Developer Connection account needed).

Quicksilver is a great application that is quickly approaching “killer-app” status for me. In an earlier post I described Quicksilver as an application launcher for Mac OS X. Actually, Quicksilver is much more: it is a new way to interact with your computer. By combining indexed keystrokes with a graphical command language, nearly any file or operation on my computer is a few keystrokes away.

Now that I use Quicksilver extensively, I find myself wishing that Quicksilver could somehow be extended to the various Linux servers I administrate. For example, instead of using an SFTP client or SSH to administrate the server, it would be great if I could use Quicksilver’s keystrokes to quickly navigate to remote directories, edit files, and copy files to and from the server.

Today I found a way to do this using Google’s MacFUSE and SSHFS. Basically, SSHFS simulates the remote server as a locally mounted file system. Now, if I type name of the network mount the files of the remote server come right up. This works surprisingly well considering that both Quicksilver and MacFUSE/SSHFS are in beta.

In the Quicksilver action below I navigate to my web server’s root directory and select one of my web pages to edit. Accessing remote files in this way takes less than three seconds.

In this next Quicksilver action, I select a PDF document to upload to my server. This similarly takes just a few seconds.

I find using Quicksilver in this way is much faster than using an FTP client like CyberDuck or even using SSH/SCP from the command line. Now I can administrate my local machine and several remote Linux servers through Quicksilver’s interface as one seamless system.

Today Debian released it’s first operating system upgrade in nearly two years, codenamed “Etch”. While Debian has received a lot of criticism recently over its long release cycle and internal politics, it remains a very stable, production-quality distribution that is simultaneously simple to maintain.

To upgrade my entire system I simply ran aptitude dist-upgrade and answered a few configuration prompts. Debian is by far the simplest to administrate of all the Linux and Unix systems I’ve maintained.

From time to time students ask me about the various software application icons I have in my dock, Mac OS X’s excellent application launcher. Below are some of my favorite OS X applications that I regularly use. In reviewing the list I was surprised that the majority of these applications are open source.

SSHKeychain is a great open source tool that integrates SSH keys into Apple’s Keychain password management application. SSH private keys are used in lieu of passwords to eliminate weaknesses surrounding password authentication and the inconvenience of typing a password to login to a server. However, SSH keys are usualy protected with a passphrase so that if stolen, a thief would not have automatic access to servers that accept the SSH key.

Unfortunately, a good passphrase is even more cumbersome than a password. Using SSHKeychain, all I have to remember is Keychain’s single-sign-on password and all of my SSH keys are unlocked as needed. And SSHKeychain has just been released as a Universal binary.

Skim is a great open source PDF viewer that amoung other things allows one to highlight and anotate PDF’s in a variety of ways. As a researcher, I’m constantly reading and reviewing scientific papers. Skim can mark up documents much more ably than Apple’s Preview or Adobe Reader, and has a nice range of other features to boot.

Burn is a an open source CD/DVD burning and authoring program. Besides being a versatile disk burner, it can easily convert quicktime, DivX, Xvid, and other media formats into a DVD-compatible MPEG file and then burn the file to DVD.

Cyberduck is a useful open source GUI FTP/SFTP client which allows one to open any remote file using a local application. It also supports SSH keys for password-less sign-on to remote servers.

Firefox is my favorite web browser for any platform and is famously open source. No other browser can match its extensibility. I have plugins to enhance Google’s functionality, block ads and Flash, block javascript (if I want).

Another great Firefox feature is the ability to search using keywords in the address bar. For example, if I want to look up an article in Google Scholar, I simple type “SC” and then the keywords I am searching for in the address bar, and then Firefox takes me directly to Google Scholar’s search results.. Very fast.

Gimp is an open source image editor comparable to PhotoShop. Although not as feature-rich as PhotoShop, I find that it has far more features than I need and is quite powerful.

Google Earth is a great application/service that gets better all the time as Google continues to improve its satelite imaging and more plug-ins are created. A fantastic application.

Handbrake is an open source DVD ripping application that makes converting entire DVD movies into 300 MB files a snap.

iCal is Apple’s great calendaring program. Much nicer than MS Outlook.

Kismet (KisMac for OS X) is a passive wireless sniffer that can also detect wireless networks that do not broadcast their SSID. Open source.

Apple Mail is my favorite email client for any platform. It offers very fast searching and nice integration with OS X. Additionally, Hawkwings.net is a neat site with a lot of tips to increase Mail’s functionality.

Nessus is a very powerful vulnerability scanner. Very useful for assessing the security of servers I manage.

Parallels is a great virtualization product that allows me to run Windows XP, Vista, and Linux at near-native speeds. It would be hard to go back to a system that can’t run another operating system on top of it. With Parallels, I have easy access to programs on every major platform.

Quicksilver is an open source application launcher that makes programs, documents, and folders accessible with a quick keystroke.

Textwrangler is a full-featured, free text editor. It is not as feature-rich as BBEdit or TextMate, but it does have a surprising range of capabilities for a free product.

VirtureDesktops is a great open source tool that gives me quick access to virtual desktops, allowing me to virtually increase my screen real estate. I use it in combination with Parallels to dedicate one desktop to Windows or Linux and another to OS X.

Transmission is my favorite BitTorrent client for OS X. It’s not as powerful as Azureus, but does 95% of what I need very simply. Open source.

VLC is an open source media player. It can play almost any media files.

Cisco VPN is a pretty generic VPN client, but it is an indispensable security tool for a mobile user. With a VPN I can securely access the Internet from whatever public Wi-Fi network I may be connected to.

Terminal is a Unix shell that is closely integrated with OS X. UNIX is my favorite aspect of OS X and I use the command line all the time. I use DarwinPorts (and to a lesser extent Fink) to install a lot of great GNU/Linux, BSD, and otherwise open source command-line tools.

X11 allows graphical UNIX programs to run within OS X.

Google Book Search is one of Google’s relatively unheralded services, but it is second only to the Google search engine in accomplishing Google’s mission to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. The amount of information available via Google Book Search is considerable.

Google Book Search has been updated and I am very impressed. It now uses AJAX technology to seamlessly scroll through pages of digitized books. Scrolling seemed just as smooth as using Adobe Reader to view a PDF file. You can also view books in “full screen” mode.

Below is a screenshot of me using URLSnarf to display all of my web browser’s HTTP GET requests. As I scroll through a book in Google Book Search, Google automatically downloads small PNG images in the background (one of the PNG file names shown below is “HyJBeI0ePM0tvlJxRIsaqROQ4WY” with a variable name of “sig”).