I'll be speaking about translucent databases and unstructured text databases at the Open Source Search conference on October 2nd. The main focus will be on extending Lucene and Solr for big projects. Obviously the cloud is a big question these days.

You can now listen to me talk in the Science Friday segment on steganography and the Al Queda files discovered in a movie. It's a basic intro.

How to Hide Online is now available for the iPad. A version for Android tablets is coming soon.



The book explores the secrets of how to hide information where it can't be seen. The five core chapters describe five different techniques for slipping information into the virtual cracks of larger files:

• Digital Photos can carry secret messages embedded in the tiny spots of red, blue and green.
• Sports game transcripts can hide extra words between the virtual lines.
• Secret Texts can be split into many parts like a puzzle so that you need all of them before the secret message can be read.
• Mistyped words could just be a mistake -- or they could hold an elaborate secret.
• Shopping lists can carry another message in the order of the items.

Each chapter comes with a working illustration where you can try all of the ideas.


Please write with suggestions, requests or complaints directly to me through this contact form.

For grins, I monkeyed around with the Kindle tool to build a Kindle version of Free for All .

If you're curious about whether your browser supports some of the current tools for checking your location, click below. (And note that this just triggers an event at the javascript level. The browser will ask you again if you really want to approve this.

If you're curious about whether your browser supports some of the current data objects, this table is a way to experiment with how they behave on your browser. Type in these slots and watch the validity get reported. . It's a companion to my article at InfoWorld about the new standards.

If you're curious about whether your browser supports some of the current data objects, this table reports the results of testing them. It's a companion to my article at InfoWorld about the new standards.

Here's a piece of embedded SVG. If your browser can see this, you see SVG just mixed in with HTML. If you can see colored things, pure embedding is working. After the break comes an iFrame with the same SVG code. It tends to be more reliable in many browsers.

< rect fill="green" stroke="black" x="15" y="15" width="120" height="20" / >
< rect fill="green" stroke="black" x="15" y="65" width="120" height="20" rx="12" ry="18" / >
<circle fill="yellow" stroke="blue" cx="42" cy="110" r="10"/>
<ellipse fill="blue" stroke="red" cx="62" cy="155" rx="50" ry="10"/>

Here's a little Canvas tag tester I built to test whether browsers implement the Canvas tag. Note the floating orange links are active. If you click on them, you'll be taken to that part of InfoWorld. To build this, I used Graham Breach's jQuery TagCloud plugin.

Here's a set of four video tags that I created to test how well video tags work in browsers for an InfoWorld story. If you can see a flying logo, you know the video format works in your browser.