Dispatches

Yahoo! has divested itself of Blo.gs and is shuttering GeoCities. Would this have happened in a good economy? No. Did it need to happen anyway? Yes. Yes. Yes. And for the love of god, yes.

It turns out that there are a lot of differences between Google’s regular web crawler and the Google News crawler. And though very few of us will find our content included in Google News, it still seems like a good idea to make our content conform to their technical requirements. Here are a few of them:

• In order for our crawler to correctly gather your content, each article needs to link to a page dedicated solely to that article. We’re unable to index articles from news sections which consist of one long page rather than a series of links that lead to articles on individual pages.
• If your articles are located in a drop down box, we won’t be able to crawl them. Google News is unable to crawl articles only accessible through a drop down menu.
• Google News does not recognize or follow Flash, graphic/image or JavaScript links which link to articles. Our automated crawler is best able to crawl plain text HTML links.
• Google News doesn’t crawl articles in PDF format, although this content is included on Google Web Search. Our automated crawler is currently best able to crawl plain text HTML sites.

I spent some time looking for panorama-related apps for the iPhone and came up with the following:

• Panorama by Airshed
• Panoramas by Helix Interactive
• TripStitch by Byteslice Software
• Pano by Debacle Software
• Panoramascope by Phil Endicott
• PanoLab and PanoLab Pro by Originate Lab

I’ve actually played with PanoLab a bit (landscape, portrait) after seeing p0ps Harlow using it.

VoIP Now offers a few tips, Hackszine discusses VoIPong, and Mac VoIP mentions Cain & Abel and describes ARP poisoning to make a man-in-the-middle intercept.

The BuddyPress forums have a number of threads about handling invitations (two worth looking at: one, two), but no real solution has emerged. At the same time, there’s also a need for some means of confirming other actions such as password resets, email changes (both of those are already handled by WPMU, I know), cell phone numbers to receive SMS messages, and other actions that need to be confirmed later.

So I’m proposing a generic API to handle things like this. The built-in WordPress cron and ajax functions seem to offer a clear pattern for creating such an API: Simply, plugins and core code could register an action and a function to be called when that action is executed. The API could also store data to be sent to that function when it is executed.

Among the things I’d do with this?

• Confirm email addresses
• Confirm cell phone numbers via text message
• Confirm IM accounts
• Confirm Twitter accounts
• Confirm password reset requests
• Confirm invitations in BuddyPress

Anybody else interested?

There’s a WordPress has-patch marathon going on now and I’m hoping one of my recent patches gets some attention. I’m hoping to fix the user meta functions to allow them to accept multiple values per key, per user.

It’s listed there among the other has-patch tickets in Trac, and there’s been some discussion in WP-Hackers. Why not take a look?

A study sponsored by the WiFi alliance reveals the following:

WiFi and college choice

• 90% of college students say Wi-Fi access is as essential to education as classrooms and computers
• 57% say they wouldn’t go to a college that doesn’t have free Wi-Fi
• 79% say that without Wi-Fi access, college would be a lot harder
• 60% agree that widely available Wi-Fi on campus is an indication that a school cares about its students

WiFi and where they use it

• 55% have connected from coffee shops and restaurants
• 47% from parks
• 24% from in their cars

WiFi in the classroom

• 55% have checked Facebook™ or MySpace™ and sent or received e-mail while using their laptop in class
• 47% have sent instant messages to a friend during class
• 44% used Wi-Fi to get a head start on an assignment before a class was finished

WiFi and linkbaiting statistics

• If forced to choose, 48% would give up beer before giving up Wi-Fi

Survey methodology: “In conjunction with the Wi-Fi Alliance, Wakefield Research surveyed 501 U.S. college students in September 2008. The sampling variation in this survey is plus or minus 4.3 percentage points.”

Adam had to remind me of this:

sudo tcpdump -i en0 -s 0 port 80

Of course tcpdump can only tell us what other machines the computer is talking to, not what the conversation is. That requires a sniffer like Wireshark.

For some reason two CDNs, BitGravity and Castfire, are being blocked on campus. You might think firewall, but the problem even seems to appear outside the firewall.

Yes, they did a survey, and the results show the French have plenty of sex, but are among the least satisfied for all that activity. Russians (80%), Brazilians (82%), and Greeks (86%) appear to be the most likely to get it at least once a week, while in Japan it appears both infrequent and unsatisfying. New Zealand distinguished itself for being the only country where women averaged more partners than men.

The U.S. stats were middling at best, though 37% of Americans reported their “sex lives have been negatively impacted by daily stress.”

Even if you don’t like the results, you do have to respect the company for doing the research. Or, you could just laugh at their ads.

A 2004 commentary by Doug Bandow of The Future of Freedom Foundation points out how much we love war, well at least politicians love war:

War has become a centerpiece of American politics. The war on terrorism is the focus of U.S. foreign policy. A real war is being fought in Iraq. Jimmy Carter proclaimed the “moral equivalent of war” over energy. Some analysts are advocating a war on obesity.

But, says Bandow, “the longest-running ongoing ‘war’ is the war on drugs.” And since then, our attitudes have changed a bit. A 2008 Washington Post story by Alfonso Cuéllar reminds us:

Two decades ago, illicit imports of cocaine, heroin and marijuana and their use by Americans topped the list of public concerns in nationwide surveys at 22 percent. In January, a Pew Research Center poll found that only 1 percent of the population considered drugs and alcohol the most important problem facing the country.

Nixon Declared the war in June 1971, but the content of the Wikipedia article probably reflects public sentiment in its outsized section on criticisms.

The international nightclub and bar show ran in Las Vegas last week, bringing a bunch of nightclub, bar, tavern, pub, restaurant, and hotel professionals to the city, including my friends at Biba.

Dave must be faking his shock at the free shots, music, and dancing girls filling the hall “all at noon on a Tuesday!” I’m not at all involved in the business, but I think I need to go next year.

Richard Wallace’s Juice project (Javascript User Interface Componentised Extensions) is a “simple componentised framework constructed in Javascript to enable the sharing of Ajax Stye extensions to a web interface.”

WordPress or Scriblio users might do well to think about it as a way to put widgets on systems that don’t support widgets, though as Richard points out, “the framework is applicable to any environment which, via identifiers contained within a html page, needs to link to or embed external resources.”

This article comparing the usability of Joomla vs. WordPress has already been linked by everybody’s uncle, but it’s still worth a look.

I find it amusing, however, that none of the comments so far on that blog post mention the commitment that the core WordPress team appears to have on making blogging fun. If you start with the goal of making something fun, then add sophistication to make it flexible without being complex, you’ll get a very different result than you would if you started with different goals.

Flickr Video Flickr Video

I should have done screencasts like the above long ago. It’s not that they’re great, but they are a wonderful excuse to use the canned lounge music I’ve got. Those videos are now on the front page of the official Scriblio site, and I did five more to demo the installation and configuration. Big thanks go to Collingswood NJ Public Library Director Brett Bonfield who let me use his library like this.

You’d think the top search results on the matter would be newer than 1999, but that’s where you’ll find this NYT article and PubLaw item story, both from precambrian times. Worse, both of those articles suggest that my links to them may not be entirely kosher.

The problem is probably that US courts have not spoken clearly on such a case. A Danish court in 2006 did, but I think that no case in the US has gone far enough to actually set a precedent. Another chance at settling this issue was lost earlier this month when BlockShopper settled, rather than continue a costly defense of such a case. The EFF is confident BlockShopper could have won, but that means little when the legal bills come in.

Related at EFF: Kelly v. Arriba Soft and Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act.

Anybody who claims magenta isn’t a color is stupid, lying, or link-baiting. Take it from a color-blind person: all colors are a matter of perception, and claiming Magenta isn’t a color because it doesn’t fit neatly in the linear spectrum of visible electromagnetic radiation is like saying this isn’t music because the vibrations that tickle our ear aren’t the result of a monotone sinusoidal wave.

We have no equivalent of polyphony for light, but just as it took a whole orchestra to make Jaws scary, the colors we perceive are most commonly a mixture of different frequencies of light. Magenta is simply what we see when when we see light from both ends of the spectrum at once.

Here’s a better question: where is brown in the rainbow?