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Me Social Media

December 18, 2009 in Photography, Social by Ezra S F | No comments

Dan Schultz doesn’t like Facebook or Twitter because they are too focussed on individual expression rather than the community.

That may be because he is using them wrong. I liked photography as a kid, but I didn’t know any photographers. Flickr happened to come into my life just after I bought my first digital camera. My participation in photography exploded. Not because I had a way to post my photos but because I had a way to find other local photographers for mutual encouragement. Even better was forming local groups to encourage people to meet. The value of Flickr is developing the community.

Worldwide Photowalk Panorama

Similarly, I got into Twitter because my community, peers at other universities running the same software as myself, were seeking help there. Any place with answers to the problems we face, which is where people with the answers are watching, is where we go. Twitter was the place to get the attention of the right people not a forum like phpBB. (There are already lots of email lists.) My other community, people using the software I run are also on Twitter. I’ve resolved issues for many clients by finding their public complaints and offering solutions. When my focus changed away from using Twitter for the community is when I stopped liking Twitter.

Personally, I have yet to find much sense of community in the phpBB, Google Wave, and Ning. So I find it strange these are the exemplars of community applications. They seem fractured so one finds dozens of groups to covering the same interest. Sometimes this is because some moderator upset a portion of the community with draconian behavior causing people to form an alternative community. Bad blood exists for a while. Other times people set up a new community unaware others exist.

Useful User Agents

October 21, 2009 in Blackboard Vista by Ezra S F | 1 comment

Rather than depend on end users to accurately report the browser used, I look for the user-agent in the web server logs. (Yes, I know it can be spoofed. Power users would be trying different things to resolve their own issues not coming to us.)

Followers of this blog may recall I changed the Weblogic config.xml to record user agents to the webserver.log.

One trick I use is the double quotes in awk to identify just the user agent. This information is then sorting by name to count (uniq -c) how many of each is present. Finally, I sort again by number with the largest at the top to see which are the most common.

grep <term> webserver.log | awk -F\” ‘{print $2}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r

This is what I will use looking for a specific user. If I am looking at a wider range, such as the user age for hits on a page, then I probably will use the head command to look at the top 20.

A “feature” of this is getting the build (Firefox 3.011) rather than just the version (Firefox 3). For getting the version, I tend to use something more like this to count the found version out of the log.

grep <term> webserver.log | awk -F\” ‘{print $2}’ | grep -c ‘<version>’

I have yet to see many CE/Vista URIs with the names of web browsers. So these are the most common versions one would likely find (what to grep – name – notes):

  1. MSIE # – Microsoft Internet Explorer – I’ve seen 5 through 8 in the last few months.
  2. Firefox # – Mozilla Firefox – I’ve seen 2 through 3.5. There is enough difference between 3 and 3.5 (also 2 and 2.5) I would count them separately.
  3. Safari – Apple/WebKit – In searching for this one, I would add to the search a ‘grep -v Chrome’ or to eliminate Google Chrome user agents.
  4. Chrome # – Google Chrome – Only versions 1 and 2.

Naturally there many, many others. It surprised me to see iPhone and Android on the list.

Trusting Social Networks

July 14, 2009 in Interweb, Privacy by Ezra S F | No comments

Sunday at brunch we had an interesting conversation about Facebook.

Establishing the appropriate privacy levels to the various constituents see appropriate material is hard. So hard it takes a long pages of text and screenshots to just paint a picture of what to review for the top 10 Facebook privacy settings.

We were discussing how to make the Facebook world we touched more private. How to keep those we supervise or those who supervise us at bay once accepted into our social circle. Few of us only post things our grandmothers would find acceptable, so how do we ensure grandma will never see that picture? This meant banning grandma from seeing the Wall or photo albums or tagged photos.

I had heard we would soon be able to change the privacy levels of individual posts.  This privacy granularity comes at a price according to the New York Times:

By default, all your messages on Facebook will soon be naked visible to the world. The company is starting by rolling out the feature to people who had already set their profiles as public, but it will come to everyone soon.

People like walled gardens. Taking a term from Seth Godin, interacting with just the handpicked few forms a tribe.

If sunlight is the best disinfectant, then social networking on Facebook will die should it be exposed to the world (or too hard to remain private). The most common criticism of blogging is the whole world is in your business. People like the faux-protection of participating online where Google cannot archive it for posterity. This is why Facebook experienced such explosive growth.

Hopefully users will be able to deal with keeping everything as private as they like. Otherwise, we’ll be looking for another walled garden. Maybe I’ll even end up back on my private Twitter account?

BBworld From Afar

July 14, 2009 in Blackboard Vista, Interweb by Ezra S F | No comments

Staying true to tradition, Blackboard found a great speaker, Seth Godin, with a positive message. Notes people took…

Scott found the best point, I think.

Compliance doesn’t work to create value. Compliant work will always go to the lowest bidder. We can always find someone cheaper to follow the manual. Value is created by doing something different.

See! This is a mind numbingly positive message.

I liked some people on Twitter pointed to Jeff Longland’s role with VistaSWAT as a leader in the vacuum Blackboard has left open in the community.

Created a Yahoo Pipe for Bbworld09.

UPDATED 2009-07-15:

This TED video has much of the same substance as Godin’s Bbworld keynote.

Georgia Theatre

June 19, 2009 in Athens GA by Ezra S F | 7 comments

All over Athens, people have been mourning over the Georgia Theatre fire today.

When I got home, I found a weird voice mail: “Hi, Mr. Greene. My name is <removed name>. I would like to discuss with you the property at 215 North Lumpkin. Call me at <removed number>.” I listened to it a second time. It hit me. Isn’t the Georgia Theatre on Lumpkin? I put the address in Google and found it is indeed the address. Wilmont Greene is the owner.

How weird?

Facebook Usernames

June 13, 2009 in Interweb by Ezra S F | No comments

If you cannot find me, then you are not looking. If you search on Facebook for Ezra Freelove, then I am the only result at the moment. Maybe all you knew was Ezra and the city where I lived? Facebook search is not so great you could find me through my first name plus something else you knew about me (other than email or city). Probably this is for the best. We don’t want to make it too easy to stalk people, right?

Allowing users to make a username is a promotion. The blogosphere making a fuss over all this is a Chicken Little-esque. Sure Myspace, Twitter, and a number of other sites have addresses with usernames in them. No one is forcing people opposed to having one to make one. Only in the past month could one choose a username for one’s Google profile. Prior to that it was a hefty large number of numbers.

I think the reason some people prefer usernames comes down to elaborative encoding. To retain something in memory, we associate that something with existing items in memory. Short-term memory has only about 7 slots and digits are each a single item. Assuming a single incrementation per account created and over 200 million users, using a numbers means there ought to be 9 digits worth of numbers to memorize. Words occupy a single slot in short term memory, by far simplifying remembering. Which would you rather try to remember 46202460 or ezrasf?

An argument against usernames comes down to using the memory of the Facebook database or other computer memory. Computer memory is better than human memory for stuff like this.

All of these work and go to the same place:

  1. http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=46202460
  2. http://www.facebook.com/ezrasf
  3. http://www.ezrasf.com/fb

Pick your poison. Enjoy.

Open Letter to Anyone Who Asks Me a Question

May 14, 2009 in About Me by Ezra S F | 1 comment

When I preface statements with something like “Used Google to look up <search term>”, it means:

The following is my interpretation of what you are asking. You should do your own research on the search term to better understand the issue. I’m telling you the search term I used to nudge you in what I think is the right direction.

Probably I spent < 10 minutes doing my research. So the quality isn’t of the highest standard. I’m not speaking with authority… Just trying to be helpful.

Update: I don’t generally mean it to be condescending… As in, you should have checked Google before asking anyone about it.

Software Inventory

April 5, 2009 in Computers by Big Eazy | 1 comment

A list of the software I have been using lately. This is a mental reminder for what to install on the new laptop.

Must Haves

  1. Mozilla Firefox (placemark for pre-installed)
    1. Better Flickr
    2. Diigo Bookmarks and Web Annotations – Use it to cross-seed bookmarks
    3. Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer – keep consistent across computers (need one for every browser)
    4. Live HTTP headers – helpful for identifying URLs for log mining
    5. NoScript – stay safe ono the net
    6. Password Exporter – only use for switching computers
    7. Search Engines -
      1. Creative Commons -
      2. Wikipedia -
  2. Mozilla Thunderbird  (placemark for pre-installed)
    1. Headers Toggle – Hit “h” to see full headers
    2. Message Filter Import/Export – easily move filters between machines
  3. Notepad++ – text editor
  4. Java JVM – Bb CE/Vista Java applets
  5. Silicon Circus PenguiNet – SSH / SCP
  6. Pidgin – IM client
  7. Tweedeck – Twitter client
  8. WinMerge - GUI diff
  9. Xming – local X for Oracle installs

Probably will get re-installed eventually

  1. Google Chrome – faster browser
    1. Manual bookmark export / import?
  2. Picasa – for editing photos for boss
    1. picasa2flickr + Flickr Uploadr – upload quickly and easily to Flickr
    2. Picasa Uploader for Facebook -
  3. Adobe Reader
  4. Apple iTunes + Quicktime
    1. Last.fm Scrobbler
  5. Free PDF to Word Doc Converter – make a PDF editable

Probably coming with install

  1. Helpdesk software
  2. Office Software
  3. Meeting software
  4. Zip software

Mail From Address

January 29, 2009 in Blackboard Vista by Ezra F | 3 comments

It appears CE/Vista has several locations for defining the email addresses it uses for SMTP.

  1. $WEBCTDOMAIN/config/config.xml:
    mail.from=
    From address for messages sent.
  2. $WEBCTDOMAIN/customconfig/startup.properties:
    WEBCT_ADMIN_EMAIL=
    Some internal errors have a mailto: prompt to contact the server administrator.
  3. $WEBCTDOMAIN/serverconfs/log4j.properties:
    log4j.appender.EMail.To=
    Report fatal errors.
  4. $WEBCTDOMAIN/serverconfs/log4jstartup.properties:
    log4j.appender.EMail.To=
    Report fatal errors.
  5. $WEBCTDOMAIN/webctInstalledServer.properties:
    WEBCT_ADMIN_EMAIL=
    Installer picks up this value for populating #2 and possibly #3 and #4.
  6. $WEBCTDOMAIN/webctInstalledServer.properties:
    MAIL_ORIGIN=
    Installer picks up this value for populating #1.

What really disturbs me is the Vista 8 installer created log4j properties files with the  SMTP server set up for miles.webct.com and sending from vista.monitor@webct.com? I cannot seem to find anything in the Vista 8 documentation or wiki or Google index about the “Vista Trap Notification” subject line, from address, or SMTP address which the log4j appender appears to be designed to send.

This Vista Trap Notification appears designed to send an email to the address any time a fatal error is encountered. That’s fine. Just use the smtp host and From address requested in the installer.

Don’t get me started about giving end users a mailto: prompt to report errors.

reCAPTCHA and Chrome

November 28, 2008 in Interweb by Ezra S F | No comments

Was using this RSVP form with Google Chrome and found the reCAPTCHA was telling me I repeatedly failed the Turing test. After the sixth time, I decided it might be my browser, so I tried it in Firefox which worked fine.

Curious, I went looking for a possible problem between reCAPTCHA and Chrome. According to a post there, the Transitional XHTML DOCTYPE is the cause. Changing that DOCTYPE to Strict ought to fix the issue. Given the audience, I doubt there is anyone else using Chrome to fill it. So fixing it probably isn’t worth it to them.

Interesting. I’ll have to look into issues with Chrome and the XHTML Transitional DOCTYPE.

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