Instant.fm Tech Stack

I’ve received a lot of emails asking about the technology stack of Instant.fm, so I thought I’d share this publicly.

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Web Security and Privacy

This is a research paper I wrote about Web Security and Privacy. It’s quite an interesting read, if you’ve got 20 minutes to spare.

(Interesting fact: I wrote the entire final draft of this 25-page paper in less than 24 hours. Coding up the proof-of-concept attack page demo took two days, and gathering information took several weeks, but I finished the actual writing in less than one full day.)

Richard Stallman Comes to Stanford

Richard Stallman at Stanford University

A few weeks ago, I had the amazing opportunity to meet Richard Stallman — founder of the GNU Project and Free Software Foundation, and developer of the amazingly popular GNU Emacs, GNU compiler (gcc), and GNU debugger (gdb).

RMS, as he likes to be called, is a living legend in the computing field. He’s widely considered to be the father of the free software movement. There is no question that the free software philosophy has brought enormous amounts of good to the world. I firmly believe this. I think most programmers and computer scientists would agree, too.

GNU/Linux render farm at Dreamworks

Free software is everywhere today. The popular operating system GNU/Linux (which Stallman wrote large parts of) powers so much of our computing today, nearly everyone has used it, whether they’ve heard of it or not.

The majority of servers on the Internet are powered by Apache and GNU/Linux, major parts of the Internet and most networks in large corporations are powered by GNU/Linux, and even 95% of the desktops and servers at major Hollywood movie studios like Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, and Sony run GNU/Linux.

Many people are confused about what the phrase “free software” means. Before I continue, let’s be clear about the definition of free software. Read the rest of this entry »

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More about the Stanford Association for Computing Machinery.

Stanford iPhone App Final Project – iBoard

This is the iPhone app that I’m working on with my friend John Hiesey. iBoard is a networked drawing app that allows multiple users from around the world to draw together on the same drawing canvas in real-time. Use it to share your ideas — diagram, brainstorm, sketch, or doodle with your friends from around the world in real-time.

The video is from the final project presentations for the Stanford course CS193P: iPhone Programming. Before our demo, our iPod touch was accidentally disconnected from the server, so it caused a hiccup in our demo — but we still proved that it works using the iPhone simulators on our Macbook Pros.

Also, the name iBoard is likely to change before we put it on the App Store. Please share your comments and feedback!