Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4 » Interweb

How Google Works

Ezra S F — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 02:44:59 +0000

A few basics of Search Engine Optimization came up at brunch a couple weekends ago. A few of the key points were that its not just important to have good information, but one has to have good metadata, good incoming links to raise authority, and no nefarious techniques.

When I saw this, I immediate thought of that conversation. (This is more or less a test to see if those people read my blog.)

(click image for larger)

Infographic by PPC Blog

Upgraded to WP3.0

Big Eazy — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 21:02:02 +0000

The upgrade to WordPress 3.0 doesn’t appear to have broken anything? Good.

It pointed out my Tarski theme was a point revision behind. That has also been upgraded. No apparent problems.

No need to go mess with code. That makes me verrrry happy.

Identifiable Browsers

Ezra S F — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 03:06:26 +0000

It’s like the Electronic Frontier Foundation is Captain Obvious? It says web-sites fingerprint browsers to identify the users.

The website anonymously logged the configuration and version information from each participant’s operating system, browser, and browser plug-ins — information that websites routinely access each time you visit — and compared that information to a database of configurations collected from almost a million other visitors. EFF found that 84% of the configuration combinations were unique and identifiable, creating unique and identifiable browser “fingerprints.” Browsers with Adobe Flash or Java plug-ins installed were 94% unique and trackable.

A login is supposed to belong to an individual. Web technologies wanting to honor transactions sent by web browsers which have sent a successful login typically do so by granting that browser a token. Don’t want to enable cookies? Fine. Go somewhere else. As long as you want to use my application, you’ll have a cookie I’ll associate with a username.

All this other stuff is for fingerprinting browsers without using a login. Or maybe to identify who is using the same login? I’ve got different browsers for different logins on the same sites.

Too Much

Ezra S F — Mon, 31 May 2010 14:57:00 +0000

One of the out of session discussions at the Georgia Baha’i School yesterday morning was on how bad online media are for us. (I’ve boiled down what was described to neurotransmitters.)

Dopamine: Anticipation with each click will lead to a reward leads to addiction-like behaviors.
Oxytocin: Lack of touch leads to feeling lonely.

For those of us seeking to feel connected, online media provides a false sense of connectedness. We feel more connected, but this is an illusion. We need the oxytocin for a true connectedness which we don’t get enough through online media. The best use of online social media is to discover the connections necessary for quality face-to-face time with people so we can get what we need. I’d say most of my current face-to-face arose from being active online.

The problem is when our interactions devolve to only being through this. Lately I’ve been thinking I consume too much media which distracts me from trying to be around people. With 592 people on my Facebook friends list, I’m probably reading too many Facebook status updates, apps, etc. Between my RSS readers (yeah, plural), I have 277 subscriptions with at the moment around 1,600 items marked for me to read. With 76 TiVo subscriptions, I’m probably watching too much television. I feel so constantly behind with these technologies I feel like I need to work through them which means I’m spending less time with people.

This isn’t really new for me. My bad habit is to invest myself too much in media by not culling enough of the subscriptions. I’m also hesitant to assert myself in other people’s lives. Some call it reticent: “reluctant to draw attention to yourself”. I’m the person who is likely found hanging around the periphery of a party. This recipe for disaster is why my resolutions usually have something about participating more in social activities. Without such goals, my only social interactions would be through work.

Sorry for the Outage

Ezra S F — Mon, 10 May 2010 22:43:28 +0000

My hosting service, Dreamhost, announced they would be upgrading every one off PHP4. Only people using old software would get bitten. I’ve kept my software current, so I wasn’t worried.

Only this of all eight domains started showing an HTTP 500 error (Internal Server Error). I dreaded having to go through and determine why. Turns out it was easier than I thought…. In Dreamhost’s panel, the domain was still configured to use PHP4. When I changed it to use PHP5, the WordPress started working again.

I would have thought part of an upgrade would be to change this configuration. At least it was just a simple change and not digging through code and logs.

Comment Phishing

Ezra S F — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:19:54 +0000

I noticed today comment spammers are getting craftier. Some of the comments I approved I now believe to be comment spam. Perhaps they are probing to later deliver the real deal?

They use the name of people who legitimately commented. Because the scammer cannot see the real email commenter’s address, they use a different one but nothing drastically obvious as spam.

The IPs are 74.63.104.125 and 74.63.104.121. The legitimate comments have different IPs. These IPs belong to FDCServers, who provide colocation and dedicated servers. I’m tempted to send a message to the abuse email address for the company.

For now I’ve renamed the spam comments as ” (Fake)” and removed the web site. I’ll have to be more vigilant.

Impersonal

Ezra S F — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 13:16:56 +0000

Michelle remarked my blog posts over the years have become technical. I wanted to say “too technical”, but I don’t think she actually wrote that. Instead of writing about the personal aspects of my work I only write about the mechanics.

Over the years I’ve read quite a bit about the trouble people get into by blogging. Rumors have spread based on reading way too much into ambiguously written posts. Friends writing about rumors or even frustrations regarding work resulted in huge dramatic, scary events where jobs could have been lost. A Microsoft employee posted pictures of Macintosh computers at his work which resulted in his termination. An airline employee posed for photographs in uniform was terminated for the photos and maybe statements about work. Blogging about work is like placing mines in a field while blindfolded. One really doesn’t know what will set one off.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an article called How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else) which has a section called “Blog Without Getting Fired” which says,

The First Amendment protects speech from being censored by the government; it does not regulate what private parties (such as most employers) do. In states with “at will” employment laws like California, employers can fire you at any time, for any reason. And no state has laws that specifically protect bloggers from discrimination, on the job or otherwise.

Being the test case of a law which may or not protect me doesn’t strike me as the smartest move.

I have thought about abandoning the blogs. Blogging anonymously would require more subterfuge than I could muster. So my final recourse to keep blogging involves treading lightly and avoiding sensitive topics like anything which could possibly be construed as criticism of a coworker or the organization. That means pretty much not talking about people or organization. My posts focus on tools and processes. Things without feelings.

Workbook

Ezra S F — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:19:04 +0000

Hanging out with some friends earlier, got me thinking about this. I forget the circumstances of the discussion to start this post germinating in my head.

One of the tools people have for seeking a new job is their social networks and increasingly the online ones. LinkedIn seems to be the popular social network for this. (BTW, I’m glad to give recommendations for anyone I’ve worked with and seeking a job there.)

I can’t say that I would know what everyone in my Facebook “friends” list does. A possible solution is for Facebook to provide a filter displaying current employer and position similar to its phone book filter for the friends page. Users can only see phone numbers both entered and selected to be available, so similar permission-based exposing work information ought to apply.

Until then, it appears one can click on position and employer to search who else lists them. One can also edit the cp= variable in the URL. Change “System” in the example below to “Photographer”.

Example URL: http://www.facebook.com/search/?cp=System&o=2048

The o= appears to be the kind of page, so that should remain 2048 for “People”.

If your search term uses spaces, then use a plus sign (“+”) or ascii code (“%20″) to represent the space.

Example: System+Support+Specialist

I’m sure there are better ideas out there.

Dunbar on Facebook

Ezra S F — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:17:11 +0000

You’ve read my previous posts on Dunbar‘s Number, right?

Go on…. I’ll wait.

Remember the one on Scoble and Facebook? Good. For a while, I fastidiously ensured my number of friends stayed below 150 because I took the idea of Dunbar’s number as a life strategy. Then I let it slip to 200 which I pared back down to 150. My laziness let it hit 500.

It appears Robin Dunbar is now studying Facebook users to see ‘if the “Facebook effect” has stretched the size of social groupings.’ He says despite the large number of friends people only interact with about 150 of them. Maybe like most of psychology, the subjects are college students who supposedly are almost all on Facebook. In the real world, most of the people with which I have regular interaction, exactly those Dunbar’s number covers, are not my Facebook friends.

My Facebook friends instead are my information buffet. Social networks are how we keep in touch with what is happening in the world. My information technology friends provide me what is happening in my career field. My photography friends provide me with useful tips for a big hobby. Also, the bigger our social network, the more opportunities for help from or being consequential strangers. Social networks are a strategy not a replication of the brain.

The term “friends” used by Facebook, I think, is a brilliant marketing ploy. People would much rather show up as my friend than my contact.

Facebook Link RSS

Ezra S F — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 03:07:21 +0000

The people I know on Facebook post fascinating things. [1] The people I count as my “Facebook friends” have something interesting to say. I enjoy reading the partisan politics, science, recipes, web comics, and even the celebrity gossip my contacts post. The status updates are one way. Links are another way.

Since Facebook copied the Twitter Retweet feature, I was looking for something worthy of letting all the others I know see. Somehow I was surprised to find my News Feed was missing about half the Links my contacts posted? My first reaction was to put My Friends’ Links in Thunderbird’s RSS Reader (where I put my feeds I don’t want strangers subscribing in Google Reader). Then it dawned on me.

At the bottom of the News Feed is an Edit Options link. A while back there were Facebook chain-statuses about editing the settings here because it controls which of my friends I see. On the first page, one can put how many of my friends I can see vs which I don’t. Also, there is an option for explicitly naming which I will see.

It seems I set specific names which at one time was everyone. However, as I added new people, I never went back and added the new people. All these new people were the ones posting the missing links. Doh! So, I’ve set Facebook to show me the top 9999 people. (The highest it will go.) I’m hoping this will fix it.

[1] Please don’t be offended I consider some of you acquaintances, colleagues, or other social context other than friend. I’ve overly specified in my head what constitutes a friend while recognizing the definition is much more liberal for others.

Google Conspiracy?

Ezra S F — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 05:01:40 +0000

Found this gem called The Great Google Coverup about Google changing their minds about continuing to filter searches following a Chinese supported cyber-attack. Whether the attack origin was by Chinese government employees, corporate thieves, or kids living in their parent’s basement, accounts were compromised. Personal data fell into the hands of people who didn’t own it.

This led to this gem:

For the first time, many of us Google converts feel like the cloud, where Google wants us to organize our personal and professional digital lives, is less secure than that encrypted hard drive under the desk.

Sounds like Douglas Rushkoff didn’t understand the Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, or even GeorgiaVIEW for which I work didn’t invent impenetrable computer systems for developing the cloud systems. There are best practices which may or may not be followed. There are code improvements to counter known security holes which may or may not be applied. Personally, I think the public is doing well just to be informed there was a security breach.

Security isn’t about absolutely preventing someone from getting the data. It is about placing stumbling blocks in the way to make attempting to get the data so difficult the perpetrator moves on to an easier target. An extremely determined person or group could unwind the layers of the best security.

Gmail does encourage encryption of POP3 and SMTP. I wonder though how much communication between email servers operates through encrypted SMTP? In general, I figured email to be sent via plain text. Which is why if something is sensitive or super important, email might not be the best medium through which to transmit it.

Protected Post Password

Big Eazy — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 13:15:30 +0000

I imported all my LiveJournal posts here. Other than posting pictures to there from Flickr, I don’t really use LJ anymore. I rarely even read my friends’ blogs there. Too bad. I still have the teeshirt.

Most of my LJ posts are protected. For this site, I’d rather have them set to private. So the section of WordPress (Tools > Import > LiveJournal) saying this seemed relevant:

If you have any entries on LiveJournal which are marked as private, they will be password-protected when they are imported so that only people who know the password can see them.

If you don’t enter a password, ALL ENTRIES from your LiveJournal will be imported as public posts in WordPress.

Password protected seemed better than not, so I set a 30 character long password, and the form accepted all 30. When the password didn’t work, I logged in as the administrator user and looked at Publish > Visibility > Password protected Password. Turns out WordPress only accepted the first 20 characters. The box here also takes 30 characters until it is saved which only takes the first 20.

In my opinion, web forms in general should prevent the user from entering more characters than the application or database will take. Passwords are very exact, so forms for creating them definitely should not allow extraneous characters.

Making Simple Tags Work in WordPress 2.9

Big Eazy — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 05:38:14 +0000

Followed Andy Fore’s instructions on adding WP 2.9 to the whitelist.

The only problem I have so far discovered is Tag the Net doesn’t appear to work. The error:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class services_json in /home/path/wplog/wp-includes/class-json.php on line 115

Looks like WordPress distributed a new class-json.php. Back in Simple Tags 1.6.5, this specific error was supposedly fixed. My guess is something about WordPress 2.9 re-broke it.

Google Chrome on Linux

Ezra S F — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 04:48:02 +0000

I was excited to read today a Google Chrome Beta is now available on Linux. Gmail and Google Reader have weird font issues for me on both Linux and Window Firefox. So I tend split my browser load based on where the sites work best for me.

Making the Linux switch meant leaving Chrome behind unless I went for the unstable version. I was willing to wait for a beta. I just expected to wait a few more months. Whew.

So far so good!

Disclaimer

Big Eazy — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:50:58 +0000

At the request of my boss, I added this disclaimer. Positive things I say here about Blackboard are okay. Negative things require distancing my employer from me so the defamation lawsuit comes to me not them.

This is a personal weblog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer.

Integrating With Facebook

Ezra S F — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:52:30 +0000

At least a couple years ago, I set up the Facebook Notes app to import this blog’s posts as notes. By setting this up, a number of friends have taking to commenting on my posts. I get far more comments on Facebook than I do here.

However, this was a horrible way to get traffic to this blog.

All of the text and images go into Fb Notes. Nevermind the terms of service. People looking at my blog posts think I wrote it in Facebook. Unless they are observant enough to see “View Original Post” links in tiny text, they have no idea about the blog which was originally the point. When I cross post stuff to multiple blogs I make it obvious the other places it exists.
Embedded videos get stripped from Fb Notes. Lately, I have been posting embedded TED Talks videos here. So I have to think about how to change my posts to accommodate Facebook.

So, I discovered some friends who are also photographers on Facebook use an app called NetworkedBlogs. (They are Flip!Photography, Invisible Green Photography, and Stylized Portraiture.) Once configured, this app will post to my and friends’ (on my behalf) Facebook Walls a link to my wall. The format of the posts look similar to when a link is posted, such as a thumbnail.

The setup is also fairly easy. Enter the location, description, category, and email for your blog. Prove it is yours whether by having others verify it belongs to you or placing code on the site. Finally, go to “Feed Settings” link and click “Auto-publish to personal profile”.

I am hopeful this solves my problem. If so, then I have another blog to setup. (Someone asked to buy that domain. I guess I asked too much for it?)

Why Read Books?

Ezra S F — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 04:10:44 +0000

That I read books probably lowers my highly coveted geek cred. Instead, e-books read on the computer screen, phone screen, or e-book reader should have long ago replaced reading on dead wood. Unfortunately, I am intentionally avoiding reading books much on computers, phone, or readers.

No purse to carry more stuff. I have big fingers, so I need stuff with big buttons. Things like iPhones are maddening to use because I cannot seem to hit the buttons correctly. Things with lots of big buttons tend to be big which makes them a pain to carry.
Never underestimate my ability to break toys. Only the most resilient of electronic toys survive me. It isn’t uncommon for my laptops, phones, or cameras to experience 5 foot falls. Everything I carry with me ends up with marks from the abuse even books. Paper can take the abuse. I have no faith e-book readers could maintain their screens from being around me.
Computers tend to tempt me to fail at multi-tasking. When I shut down my computer to go home, I typically have at the minimum a dozen windows. (Even the client I use to connect to my servers usually can fill that dozen.) Reading on a computer rarely will result in more than a page of reading every 10 minutes. Because blog posts are usually pretty short, distractions have less chance to interfere with reading them.
Books are common enough people accept them as normal. Cool toys attract attention. I’d expect an expensive phone or e-reader or laptop to attract the kind of attention which results in theft. Books are cheap few would care to go to the effort.
Phone are becoming more like computers. What I don’t want is a phone (or another device) which I treat like my computer, aka failing at multi-tasking. Just today I squared 1024 on paper instead of using the calculator on my phone. Having access to the Internet through my phone could be bad for keeping me on task.
Why faux paper when you could use paper? The e-book readers market how much their technology looks like paper. Paper looks, feels, smells, and tastes like paper.
Spending money on a device to get to read seems counter-intuitive. The devices should be subsidized by the content. But that would mean Amazon $10 books would cost more like $20.

Typically I don’t change until I have a problem with what I am using. Books don’t cause me problems. So I am happy to continue to read books for the foreseeable future.

Site Changes

Big Eazy — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 16:20:35 +0000

Blog

Upgraded to the Tarski 2.5 theme. Previously I was using the Tarski 2.4.

One of the reasons I like Tarski is the opportunity for a custom header image. Something I can use of my own. However, like the moo.com cards, finding a photo whose crop to this narrow 720×180 window isn’t so easy. At the moment I am using the train photo. Through the weekend I might try new photos.

Original Tarski Custom Header

Consideration one from my train photo.

Consideration two from my Queen Anne’s lace photo.

Consideration three from my mushroom photo.

Consideration three from my phlox photo.

Leave a comment if you see something you like.

Splash

I’m thinking of putting the above photo into the splash page as well.

The tacky Facebook profile widget got tackier. So now I have a Flickr widget for a slide show of my Most Interesting 60 photos. So, ya’ll visit the set of the strobist shoot to increase the Interestingness of your favorites into the top 10.

TED Talks:Web as random

Ezra S F — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 08:15:12 +0000

In the first video, The Web as random acts of kindness, the characterization of the founding of the Internet here is a group of high school teenagers working in their garage to altruistically to benefit the world because that is what high functioning nerds do and the world behaves kindly on the Internet because of it. The individuals he means worked as graduate assistants at UCLA on ARPANet. (I was disappointed Jonathan Zittrain failed to say the names of the founders of the Internet. Pretty sure he means Vinton Cerf, Jon Postel, and Steve Crocker.) Sure they were not working for a company. They were working for a university on a grant from the Department of Defense.

They had an amazing freedom which was they didn’t have to make any money on it. The Internet had no business plan, no CEO, no firm responsible singly for building it. Instead it is folks getting together to do something for fun rather than because they were told to or expecting to make money off of it.

The examples certainly seem compelling. However, I fail to see the connection between the architecture of TCP/IP and human small acts of kindness. Instead some examples make the Internet and Wikipedia sound a single step from oblivion. Maybe I am not a pessimist?

The second video, Is the Internet what Orwell feared?, discusses the failure of social media to break down dictatorships. Connectivity * Devices != Democracy. Instead of censoring the bloggers and commenters, give the bloggers the opportunity to see the cleaned up issue. The issue gets dropped because there is no longer a story. The moral is transparency can look nice but not actually result in actual change. Wait… The same thing happens in democracies. Hmmmmm.

Jonathan Zittrain: The Web as random acts of kindness

Evgeny Morozov: Is the Internet what Orwell feared?

Online Intimacy

Ezra S F — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 06:02:54 +0000

All too often I follow the breadcrumbs wherever they lead me online. So I stumble across some pretty random stuff. Thus why my RSS reader contains way too much stuff to reasonably read. (That reminds me, I need to cull a couple hundred subscriptions again.)

Well, I found the anonymous blog of a woman in my extended social network (no, not the Web 2.0 sense). There is enough evidence to know who the owner is a specific person 2 degrees away. The one thing which confused me was her use of a pseudonym for talking about someone who was in the news.

Having read just posts covering the last 18 months, I don’t think I could meet her without bursting into tears. She has had a horrible time with three deaths of family or friends, a wedding which didn’t happen, and verbal abuse at work. Tragic stuff has just bombarded her. These horrible events interlacing insightful commentary about media make me sad. Yet I was only able to make myself stop in order to write this post.

Someone who invests the time and energy to publicly write about the difficult personal details of his or her life really impresses me. Years ago I kept journals which became where I expressed many of the emotions I ought to have instead given to the people around me. Whether positive or negative, people deserved to know how I felt about them. Instead pieces of paper received the intimate details of who I was. My friends got a Vulcan. This blog is rather impersonal because I figured out early on in blogging, people who know me would find an anonymous blog and read it for any mention of themselves.

At this point I no longer even try to hide. Anyone reading it knows in seconds Ezra writes it and whether or not they know Ezra. Then again, these cold emotionless bytes are for public consumption.

Irony would be if she reads this post and mentions it. The above details are obvious enough she would almost certainly know I am talking about her. I am relying on the same tricks of not using names of people and places to avoid making it too obvious. They didn’t work for her. So I have one last thing to possibly break the anonymity: We both use the words “rants” and “raves” in the blog titles/subtitles.

Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4 » Interweb

How Google Works

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Upgraded to WP3.0

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Identifiable Browsers

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Too Much

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Sorry for the Outage

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Comment Phishing

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Impersonal

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Workbook

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Dunbar on Facebook

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Facebook Link RSS

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Google Conspiracy?

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Protected Post Password

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Making Simple Tags Work in WordPress 2.9

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Google Chrome on Linux

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Disclaimer

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Integrating With Facebook

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Why Read Books?

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Site Changes

Blog

Splash

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TED Talks:Web as random

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Online Intimacy

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