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Monday, March 5, 2012
Daily Alert: Investing, Markets
Corruption, Lies, and Death Threats: The Crazy Story of the Man Who Pretended to Invent Email
March 5th, 2012Top StoryCorruption, Lies, and Death Threats: The Crazy Story of the Man Who Pretended to Invent EmailBy Sam Biddle
In 1978, a precocious 14-year-old from New Jersey invented email. You can see him doing it in the photo at the top right of your screen—the kid glued to his monitor. In that picture, he's busy showing off his creation—a way for office staff to message each other via computer. As he's happy to gab to the Washington Post, which recently ran a profile of him, Ayyadurai was a teen wonder who invented the electronic messaging system with which we all communicate, back in 1978. Ayyadurai's collection of "historical documents" is now to be interred at the Smithsonian, the Post reported, laid gloriously on the pillar of American history alongside artifacts of Occidental Civilzation such as Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet, Thomas Jefferson's Bible, and a 1903 Winton, "the first car driven across the United States." Ayyadurai is about to become more than just a gifted programmer and Professional Smart Man, but a historical figure. All of this leading up to a plum book deal with Norton, proclaiming his place in history as the upstart inventor of email itself. But why have you never heard of him? Probably because there's precious little evidence that Ayyadurai came remotely close to inventing email, beyond a few misleading childhood documents and a US Copyright form of dubious weight. This was enough to convince the Washington Post and Smithsonian? Before you could even finish the Post's ode, Emi Kolawole, the reporter behind the piece, issued a stumbling correction:
In 2009, Ayyadurai worked for the Indian government, helping to run CSIR, a national R&D incubator tasked with finding homegrown patents and turning them into national high tech moneymakers. According to Ayyadurai, the center, with its billions of dollars to spend, was as corrupt as you'd imagine an R&D incubator in a developing country would be. Dissent was verboten, patents were plagiarized, and the few ideas of worth were rounded up laid fallow. When someone tried to speak up, they were canned. Meanwhile, plush villas, fat salaries, and state-provided cars were doled out to scientists within the organization on the dime of the Indian people. Ayyadurai couldn't sit idly by while this happened. He admonished his management in a letter he circulated within CSIR, calling for freedom of speech among colleagues. The Indian government clamped down immediately: He was banned from further communiques, promptly fired, evicted from his government housing, and urged to flee the country, lest his life and family be harmed. Phone calls of warning and threat were persistent, he says. So Ayyadurai did flee, returning to MIT, where he's generally described by his colleagues as a nut and fraud—the terms "asshole," and "loon" were tossed around freely by professors who were happy to talk about their coworker but prefer to remain anonymous. "Don't know him, but [he] didn't invent email. If he claims to have done so he's a dick," said one MIT brain. Ayyadurai is convinced the Indian government isn't through with him. He claims that it hired a team of "bloggers" and PR hatchet men to smear him across the internet. Target number one? His claim to be the father of email.
But press Ayyadurai, and he gets desperate, as his entire faux-fame rests upon semantic tricks, falsehoods, and a misinformation campaign. Shiva Ayyadurai didn't invent email—he created "EMAIL," an electronic mail system implemented at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, New Jersey. It's doubtful he realized it as a little teen, but laying claim to the name of a product that's the generic term for a universal technology gives you acres of weasel room. But creating a type of airplane named AIRPLANE doesn't make you Wilbur Wright. The actual pioneers of email were breaking new ground more than a decade before Ayyadurai concocted his dental memo system. Electronic mail predates Ayyadurai's ability to spell, let alone code. Ray Tomlinson is best known for having sent the first text letter between two computers on ARPANET in '71—y'know, an email. He also picked out the @ sign. A modest career. And despite Ayyadurai's insistence that, at the very least, he was the first to make use of the To/From/CC/BCC/etc fields we still use in Gmail today, this too is a personal fantasy. Tomlinson, who began working on early inter-computer messaging when Ayyadurai was a year old, explained to us how he became well-versed with these linchpins of modern email years before Ayyadurai drew them up on his own:
These email underpinnings were further cemented in 1977's RFC 733, a foundational document of what became the internet itself—a full year before Ayyadurai's EMAIL project. It was rough around the edges, but it was email. The work of Tomlinson and his peers was limited, but so too was the internet—and both exploded together. But ask Ayyadurai, and he dismisses it all—these messages weren't email, but "messages" and nothing more, relegated to some inferior class of communications that he compares to everyday "text messaging and morse code." It was all just sloppy streams of letters until he made EMAIL—and only then did the system behind Gmail, BlackBerry, and every computer on the planet see light. But Ayyadurai's claim that he revolutionized how those messages are sent isn't uncontested either. Dave Crocker, another eminent figure in the history of actual email, calls Ayyadurai's posturing "theatrical," rattling off a fat list of email clients—MSG, SNDMSG, HERMES, MS—that did pretty much what EMAIL did, years and years before Ayyadurai started coding. "For a 14 year old his work was impressive," Crocker told us over the phone. "What he's saying about it now as a much older adult is also impressive—but in a very different way." It's possible Ayyadurai was the first to come up with the term "EMAIL." That alone would be a feat. "In 1971, we called them 'messages,'" explains Tomlinson, a man so accomplished he can casually mention such things. But even that claim is tenuous, as Crocker points to a scholarly journal titled "EMMS; Electronic Mail and Message Systems." It was published a year before Ayyadurai did anything. "Newsletters for a topic don't usually start before the topic has been invented," says Crocker. It's also possible the idea of copying decades-old paper standbys like "blind carbon copy" occurred to Ayyadurai independently of ARPA's work, and that he put it together in a friendly software package. But that's about as much as Ayyadurai has on his side, PR team and media credulity notwithstanding. The fact is that the labors of people like Tomlinson and Crocker are the monkey to your Gmail's homo sapiens, explains Tomlinson: "Email has evolved — FTP is no longer used to transport email. Additional media may be used instead of plain text. Messages are stored in a myriad of ways — Gmail stores messages in databases on huge server farms, messages on my end are stored in files on an IMAP server, etc., but the essence, even the at-sign, remains the same." That explanation? The words of an "elite group of people who think they own innovation," according to Ayyadurai. Except they have history on their side. They need no aggrandizement, no TIME article, no need to take the Washington Post on a ride, no baseless Smithsonian tribute (the museum declined to comment on Ayyadurai's false apotheosis). They've done their work. But anyone who cares about the history of the astoundingly clever and complex things we use daily might suffer from Ayyadurai's ego campaign. Ayyadurai is free to self-promote—and he's doing a hell of a job—but when he delves into revisionism, it's a rare ego trip we shouldn't let slide.  |
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How to Create a Custom Theme for Your WordPress Blog with Minimal Coding Required
March 5th, 2012Top StoryHow to Create a Custom Theme for Your WordPress Blog with Minimal Coding RequiredBy Adam Dachis
Once you've got everything, you're ready to start making your theme! Get to Know and Install Your Theme Files
Alternatively, if you prefer installing via FTP or just moving the files to the correct directory on your local machine, unzip the lh_wordpress_blank_theme.zip and rename it "blank" (or whatever you want). Now find the wp-content folder in your WordPress installation directory and open it. You'll see a directory called "themes" inside. Copy blank into it, then follow the last step in the steps above to activate it on your WordPress site. Style Your WordPress Theme
Now that everything is in place, we need to start editing the styles.css file. You can either open it up in your favorite programming-friendly text editor, or you can go to the Appearance tab in the WordPress Admin section, choose Editor, and then choose styles.css from the right-hand menu (if it isn't already selected by default). Either way, you should now see the skeletal CSS structure you're going to use. It does not include every single style you may want to edit, but the main ones you'll need to get most of your style together. (Later on we'll discuss how you can discover other elements and how to style them as well, so if you want to take things further than the template we've provided you'll be able to do so easily.) Since everyone's design is going to vary a little bit, we're going to discuss what most of the styles do rather than offering up specific code you can use. You're going to need to bring your own design and CSS knowledge to the table, so if you're feeling a little shaky you can brush up your skills with our CSS night school lesson. So, without further ado, here's a rundown of the styles.css file. Each item we cover will demonstrate what it looks like now and what it could look like once you add some style. Global: General Style DefaultsThe General Style Defaults are pretty much laid out for you already and should be pretty familiar even if you don't know very much CSS. For the most part these styles are just setting the margins of the document (which are currently at 0 pixels), the default font to use on the page, what colors the background and text are, how links look in their various states, and more. You can leave this information as-is, or go in and make general changes as desired. For the most part, the look and feel of your WordPress site won't be too heavily influenced by these styles and, if anything, the changes you make will mostly relate to the fonts and colors. Page Layout
float: left; Chances are you'll also want to define it's width, any margins or padding, and anything else you want to be different in that specific area of your site. Here's what my site's content DIV style looks like: div#content { width: 640px; float: left; margin: 0 0 0 51px; padding: 0 18px 0 0px; } As you can see, it has a width of 640px. It also floats to the left, just like we talked about earlier. Additionally, I've added a 51px margin on the left side and 18px of padding on the right side. How do I know which numbers correspond to which sides? In CSS margins and padding code, it goes like this: top, right, bottom, left. This is easy to remember because, abbreviated, it looks like TRBL. That sounds like trouble or terrible when you sound it out. Either way, that's a quick and easy way to remember it. Header
The dots wouldn't be green, but you'd basically end up with a list. You don't want that, and presumably you want the menu running along the top of the page. We handled that problem for you and styled the menu so it appears as one straight line of options rather than an unordered list. There are two pieces of CSS that make this happen. The first belongs to the .menu class' ul (unordered list) element: .menu ul { list-style: none; margin: 0; } This code takes away the dots and any margin adjustments you'd get with an unordered list by default. The second relevant code block looks like this: .menu li { display: inline; float: left; padding: 0 8px 0 4px; } This code tells the list to display inline, which means it'll display in a line rather than in a traditional list. Additionally, each list item (li) is told to float left (which will give us a little more freedom to move each item around) and have 8px of padding on the right and 4px of padding on the left (so the text isn't so scrunched together. All of that's enough to get you a basic menu, but we also want to style the a element (a as in a href, the link tag) to make all the links in the menu look the way we want. For that, we need this CSS: .menu-item a { font-size: 30px; text-decoration: none; color: #3eaf00; } .menu-item a:hover { color: #5d8a05; } All this code does is set the font size (to 30px), the color of the font to green (specifically #3eaf00), and remove the underline that appears under links by default (text-decoration: none). The hover state just specifies a slightly darker green (#5d8a05) to display when the user rolls over any menu link. This is all pretty straightforward, basic CSS but it allows you to make your menu look different from the other text on your page without resorting to images. If you want to change the text even more, you can consider a different font or converting everything to upper or lowercase text. If you need some good web font options, you can find hundreds in the Google Web Font Directory. Once you've made these style choices you're pretty much done styling the menu and your header. There are definitely other styles you can find and play around with, but we'll discuss how to locate those at the end of the post. Content: Posts and PagesRemember the div#content style we defined earlier? Pretty much everything in this and the following two content sections of this post relate to styles that exist just inside that DIV. Most of the
.navigation Content: Comments
.comments
.children div#respond Content: Sidebar
Additional Styles
If you're using Chrome, that development tool is built right in. Just preview your theme as you're developing it and open up the Developer Tools. You can do that by going to the View menu and choosing Developer -> Developer Tools. In Firefox (and many other browsers), just download and install Firebug, then click on the Firebug extension to activate it. Whichever tool you use, it'll cause the screen to split into top and bottom halves. The top half will contain the page and the bottom half will contain the pages code. If you mouse over any element on the page you'll see it highlighted in the code so you can inspect further. This will quickly tell you what the element is called and show you any styles already applied to it. You can then use this knowledge to add a new style for that element (or the class applied to it). Just continue doing that until you've found all the styles you want to add to your styles.css file. When you're finished, you'll have a completed theme! If you've made a WordPress theme before and have additional tips for making it easier, please share them in the comments. Additionally, if you use this process to make a WordPress theme yourself, be sure to post a screenshot in the comments as well. Happy theming!  |
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